Forging the New Nation: How Switzerland Built Itself After 1848
So Switzerland won the Sonderbund War, wrote a constitution, and became a proper federal state. Now what? Now the hard part. Building an actual nation from a bunch of cantons that speak different languages, follow different religions, and mostly just want to be left alone.
Chapter 6 covers 1848 to 1914. Sixty-six years of figuring things out. Honestly, it reads like a really long infrastructure project. Starts with arguments about architecture, moves to budget fights, somebody builds a tunnel, and by the end everyone is tired but the thing works.
The early years: don’t scare the neighbors
The Radicals won the war, so they ran the show. Seven Radicals on the Federal Council. Huge majority in parliament. They were smart enough not to go full revolutionary though. Europe’s conservative monarchies were watching Switzerland closely. The government kept things calm. No purges. No revenge tours against Catholics. They let the opposition use the new democratic processes to push back.
They issued a unified currency (replacing coins from eighty different authorities), took over the postal system, set up a militia army, and standardized weights and measures. Basic stuff, but necessary. Shared infrastructure for a distributed system.
Railways were the big fight. Left-wing Radicals wanted state railways. The right wing, led by Alfred Escher of Zurich, said that was socialism. Private railways won. Slowed things down and caused financial problems, but also gave birth to Credit Suisse in 1856. Zurich became the financial capital instead of Basel.
Direct democracy: the killer feature
In the 1860s, people got fed up with the Radical establishment. The “Federal Barons” as they were called. Citizens wanted more say. So canton by canton, they started building direct democracy tools. Legislative initiatives. Obligatory referendums on spending. Direct election of executives.
Basel Country led the way. Zurich followed in 1869. The movement spread. By 1874, they rewrote the federal constitution. Now 30,000 citizens could challenge any law. Later, in 1891, they added the popular initiative for partial constitutional revision. 50,000 signatures could put a specific change to a national vote.
This was the real innovation. Not just electing representatives, but giving citizens actual veto power and proposal power. Catholics used it to block laws they did not like. Workers used it to push for labor rights. It forced political movements to actually organize into proper parties. The Radical Democratic Party, the Social Democrats (founded 1888), and eventually the Catholic Conservative Party (1912) all formed partly because you need organized structures to run initiative campaigns.
The Gotthard and industrialization
The economy transformed. First condensed milk factory opened in 1866. Nestle’s predecessor started in 1867. Brown Boveri (engineering) in 1884. Sandoz (chemicals) in 1886. Hoffman La Roche in 1896. Hydroelectric power spread after 1879. Phone lines went up in 1881.
Then there was the Gotthard tunnel. The project that connected Ticino to the rest of Switzerland by rail. It linked Lucerne to Chiasso and became the centerpiece of the Swiss rail network. Railway mileage doubled between 1880 and 1910. Eventually the financial mess of private railways got so bad that the Swiss nationalized them. Swiss Federal Railways was born in 1902.
By 1900, 45 percent of the workforce was in manufacturing. Only 31 percent stayed in agriculture. Switzerland was one of just six European countries where farming was not the biggest sector. Per capita GDP almost matched Britain. Exports and foreign investment per capita actually exceeded the UK. For a small landlocked country, remarkable.
The cracks underneath
Not everything was smooth. The depression of 1873 to early 1890s hit hard. Cheap grain from America crushed Swiss farmers. Mountain areas like Ticino lost most of their people to emigration. The watch industry fell behind American automation (they caught up). Textiles lost a third of their workers.
Immigration flipped. Switzerland went from sending people out to pulling people in. By 1900, there were 380,000 foreigners in the country. 14.7 percent of the workforce. In Zurich, 21 percent. This created a backlash called “Uberfremdung” (over-foreignization). Anti-foreigner sentiment grew, sometimes mixed with antisemitism. Sounds familiar.
The language divide also sharpened. German-speakers and French-speakers started pulling in different directions. When the Gotthard Convention with Germany and Italy came out in 1909, French-speaking Switzerland exploded with anger. They saw it as German domination. The linguistic fault line that would cause real trouble during the World Wars was already forming.
Workers struck more and more. Over 1,800 strikes between 1900 and 1914. General strikes hit Geneva, Lausanne, and Zurich. The army got called in. A bourgeois bloc formed against the left, uniting Radicals, Catholics, employers, and peasants. Social insurance proposals kept getting voted down or gutted. Women’s suffrage? Completely ignored. The 1907 Civil Code was actively hostile to women’s rights.
What they built
By 1913, Switzerland had a working federal state, a real national identity built on political will rather than ethnic unity, innovative democratic tools that no other country had, and an industrial economy punching way above its weight. They called it a “Willensnation,” a nation of will. Not blood and soil, but shared rules and shared history.
It was also increasingly conservative, increasingly nervous about foreigners, and completely unprepared for what was coming next.
This post is part of a series retelling A Concise History of Switzerland by Clive H. Church and Randolph C. Head, Cambridge University Press, 2013, ISBN 978-0-521-14382-0.