The Evolution of States

by J. M. Robertson

The outstanding feature of the Swiss social evolution up to the end of the fifteenth century is the acquisition of municipal estates by the chief cities, after the manner of those of Italy. The lead given by Berne was zealously followed by Zurich[887] and Lucerne, till nearly all the old feudal lordships around them had fallen into their hands by purchase, mortgage, or conquest; and by 1477 the Hapsburgs had not a rood of land left in all Helvetia, even the family castle being lost. It was impossible that the revenues thus acquired by the cities should fail in that age to enrich the patrician or ruling class, no matter how revolutions might alter its membership. Herein lay one of the effective checks to the growth of the Confederation from 1513 onwards. The rural Cantons and the aristocratic governments of the cities were alike disinclined to enfranchise the rural populations they held in feudal subjection; and the status of the mass of the townspeople and subject peasantry, though probably better than in France and Germany, was that of men without political rights,[888] save those secured by feudal or civic custom.

Nor can it be said that in the pre-Reformation period the flourishing Swiss cities did much for culture; a main part of the explanation doubtless being (1) the chronic stress of war, which in such communities tended to be borne by all classes alike.[889] When the Italian cities had produced Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio; when England had produced Chaucer; and France the Roman de la Rose, Villon, Joinville, Froissart, and Comines, Switzerland had a literature only of average German lyrics and a few average medieval chronicles. But the comparison will be quite misleading if it be not kept in mind (2) that the whole Swiss population up till 1500 never amounted to a million, and that the surplus males were being constantly drained off in the fifteenth century in military service outside of Switzerland. The conditions which made for military strength and independence were entirely unfavourable to culture. There remains, however, to be noted in the case of German Switzerland (3) the fundamental drawback of relative homogeneity of race. The one important aspect of "race" in sociology is as a statement of relative lack of intellectual variability; and this condition in modern Europe can be seen to exist only at certain periods, in the case of one or two peoples, chiefly the Germanic.

If the whole process of the renascence of civilisation be considered seriatim, it will be found that the growth took place primarily in virtue of degree of access to (a) the remains of Græco-Roman culture and (b) to Saracen lore; and, secondarily, in virtue of degree of admixture of physical type in the different communities. Thus (1) the first great new-birth (before the age of the Renaissance so-called) took place in Italy, in a population already highly mixed at the end of the Roman period and repeatedly invaded thereafter by northern stocks, from Odoaker down to the Normans. The reviving Italian culture, being communicated northwards through the Church and otherwise, is next developed by (2) the highly-mixed population of France and (3) that of England after the Norman Conquest—the Welsh element being here prominent. At the same time the literary germination set up in (4) ancient Ireland, under stormy conditions, by the early missionaries of the Græco-Roman Church, reaches after some centuries the Scandinavian peoples by way of the Hebrides and (5) Iceland, where, however, after a brilliant start, the evolution is arrested by the restrictive environment, the main body of Scandinavian life being too homogeneous (though constantly at strife) for any complex evolution. In the south, again, the populations of (6) Spain and Portugal, mixed to begin with in the Roman period and later crossed by Teutonic invasion, became specially capable of variation after the subdual of the Moors, whose reaction on their conquerors was extensive and important.

All this while the Teutonic stocks in their old homes are noticeably backward, save where, as in (7) the Netherlands, they are in constant contact with other peoples on land and by sea. Culture begins to be at once original and brilliant in the Netherlands only in the period after (a) special contact with Spain and (b) the large immigration of Protestant refugees from other countries. At first strongly influenced by classical scholarship, it is later affected by the influence of France and England. All the more strictly Teutonic cultures were either unprogressive or similarly vitalised from without; and Germany, after the Thirty Years' War, begins almost afresh with an academic literature in Latin, to be followed by new native developments only on French and English stimuli.[890] But it is specially significant that (8) the German renascence of the eighteenth century takes place after (a) the large influx of French Protestant refugees at the end of the seventeenth, and after (b) a fresh influx of French taste, French teachers, and French literature under Frederick the Great, in whose armies, it should be remembered, there fought no fewer than nine generals of French Protestant descent, as well as others of alien heredity.

The case of Switzerland is thus on this side tolerably clear. Swiss intellectual life, long primitively Teutonic, begins to become notable only at the period of the Reformation, when for the merely diplomatic and military and commercial contacts of the past there is substituted a fresh differentiation and interaction from Italian, French, and German Protestantism—a new intellectual impulse—and from the influx of refugees, as in Holland. And the French-speaking city of Geneva, not yet a member of the Confederation, at once takes the lead. The Teutonic population, from the fifteenth century onwards, had in large numbers sought subsistence in mercenary soldiership. It was the medieval analogue to the emigration of to-day, the opening even serving to curtail the agricultural and pastoral life;[891] but the result, by the common consent of historians,[892] was disastrous to the higher life at home, the returning mercenaries being in many cases spoilt for steady industry, rural or civic. Their military success and prestige in fact tended to demoralise the Swiss as the success of Hellas against Persia tended to demoralise Athens, making them, in the words of Aristotle, unfitted to rest. Dwelling on past patriotic glories is never the way to discipline the mental life; and the Swiss militia of the end of the fifteenth century, wont to sell their services as fighters to French and Italians, often thus opposing each other, and otherwise wont to interpose arrogantly in other people's concerns,[893] were not on the line of social or intellectual progress. Pensions to leading men from the French and Italian courts wrought a further and even more sinister corruption. But after their defeat by Francis I in 1516 at the desperate battle of Marignano, becoming allies of France, the Swiss ceased to play the part of holders of the balances between contending neighbours; and after their heavy share in the loss of Francis at the battle of Pavia they grew for a time loth even to play the part of auxiliaries on a national footing, though individual enlistment continued. It is at this stage that the Reformation supervenes, creating a new source of strife between Canton and Canton, and so paralysing the Confederation for centuries.

Nowhere is the study of the process of the Reformation more instructive, more subversive of the conventional Protestant view, than in the case of Switzerland. In the first place, it is not the old Forest Cantons, with their ingrained independence and "Teutonic conscience," that do the work. They remained obstinately Catholic. Swiss Protestantism, under the independent lead of Zwingli, began indeed in Glarus and Schwytz, but became an effective movement only in the city of Zurich, and it is notable that in the primitive and poor Canton of Uri[894] there was as little buying of indulgences as there was heresy. The two phenomena went together in the richer Cantons, where the common desire to buy pardons evoked the protest against them. Indeed, the special traffic in indulgences in Germany and Switzerland, and the special laxity of life of their priesthoods, were concomitants of the special grossness of German life;[895] for in no other country did the Reformation proceed nakedly on the basis of protest against indulgence-selling. There the pardoners shamefully overrode all the official and accepted teaching of the Church as to indulgences; and the protests of Luther and Zwingli were properly demands for a reform on strictly orthodox grounds, as against an abuse which was locally excessive. But it lay in the economic and political conditions that when a movement of protest began it should succeed in view rather of the economic and social impulses to break with Rome than of the spontaneous desire for reform. In Germany in particular the movement among the upper and educated classes was nakedly financial as regarded the nobles, and to a large extent the reverse of ascetic among the scholars, many of whom, however, were much more spontaneously alive to the doctrinal crudities of the orthodox system than was Luther himself. It was the facile combination, on socio-political grounds, of the five forces of (1) moral indignation among the more conscientious leaders, (2) gain-seeking on the part of nobles and ruling burghers, (3) racial aversion to Italian priests and Italian revenue-drawing among the people in general, (4) critical revolt against primitive superstitions among the more learned, and (5) anti-clerical freethinking and licence among many who had served in the Italian wars,[896] that made the revolt proceed so rapidly in Germany and Switzerland. If the mass of the people, in all save the most primitive Swiss Cantons, were grossly eager to buy the indulgences so grossly offered by Samson and Tetzel, the people clearly were not zealous reformers to start with. Of those who most resented the traffic, many remained steady Catholics.

When, however, it became known that Samson carried away with him from Switzerland to Italy 800,000 crowns, besides other bullion and jewels, even the buyers of indulgences could share the general inclination to stop the enrichment of Italy at Swiss expense. The intellectual revolt of the educated supplied the basis of the revolution in church management; but without the accruing financial gains the former could have availed little; and while there was the usual violence on the part of the mob, the city authorities were judicious in their procedure. To the clergy they offered on the one hand freedom to marry, and on the other hand a provision for life. Thus in Zurich, under the skilful guidance of Zwingli, the whole chapter of twenty-four canons gave up their rights and property to the State, becoming preachers, teachers, or professors with life-allowances: a plan generally followed elsewhere, save where the parties fell to blows.[897] In Zurich the further steps were: 1523, ecclesiastical marriages; 1524, pictures abolished and monasteries dissolved; 1525, mass discontinued.

In French-speaking Geneva, destined to become the leading Swiss city, the process was more stormy. Having grown to importance under its bishops, it had been made an imperial city in 1420, thereby finding a foothold in its resistance to the constant claims of the House of Savoy, which in 1519 forced it into a defensive alliance with Fribourg. There were now two Genevan parties, the Savoyards and the republicans, which latter, imitating Swiss usage, called themselves Eidgenossen, whence the French corruption Huguenots, ultimately applied to the Calvinistic Protestants of France. Out of the faction strife came the religious, under the fanning of Farel; and in this case the anti-democratic leaning of the Savoyards kept the rich pro-Catholic, while the common people declared for Protestantism. In the end the latter took violent possession of the churches, destroying the altars and images, whereupon most of the Catholics fled, the city retaining the clerical lands; and there immigrated many French, Italian, and Savoyard Protestants. To the community thus made for him came Calvin in 1537.

Meanwhile, Berne, conquering the Pays de Vaud from the Duke of Savoy, made it Protestant. Elsewhere, some communes and districts passed and repassed between Catholicism and Protestantism as neighbouring influences prevailed; in some districts the peasants, hoping for release from tithes and taxes, welcomed the revolution, but renounced it when they found it made no difference to their lot.[898] The magistrates of Berne were prompt to make it clear that their Protestantism made no difference as to their tithe-drawing from their rural subjects.[899] When the period of transformation was over—with its bitter wars, which cost the life of Zwingli, its manifold exasperations, its Anabaptist convulsions, its forlorn and foredoomed peasant risings, its severance of old ties, and its profound impairment of the half-grown spirit of confederation—it was found that the old Cantons of Lucerne, Uri, Unterwalden, Schwytz, and Zug stood fast for Catholicism; that Soleure, after being for a time predominantly Protestant, had joined them, with Fribourg, making seven Catholic States; that the city Cantons of Berne, Zurich, Basle, and Schaffhausen were Protestant, as were Geneva and the Vaud, not yet in the union; and that Glarus and Appenzell were mixed. The achievement of the landamman Œbly of Glarus, in securing a peaceful and lasting compromise in his own Canton—the two bodies in some parishes actually agreeing to use the same church—was beyond the moral capacity of the mass of the Swiss people, for Appenzell bitterly divided into two parts, on religious lines. Each of the other Cantons imposed its ruling men's creed on its subjects. They were still as far from toleration in religion as from real democracy in politics.

While Protestantism, by dividing the realm of religion, doubtless wrought indirectly and ultimately for the intellectual freedom of Europe, it is clear that it had no such result for many generations in Switzerland. Calvin's rule in Geneva, while associated with a new activity in printing, chiefly of theological works,[900] became a byword for moral tyranny and cruelty. To say nothing of the executions of Servetus and Gruet for heresy, and the expulsions of other men, the records show that in that small population there were between 800 and 900 persons imprisoned between the years 1542 and 1546, and 58 put to death; no fewer than 34 being beheaded, hanged, or burned on charges of sedition in three months of 1545. Torture was freely applied, and any personal criticism of Calvin was more or less fiercely punished.[901] The conditions were much the same in Zurich and Berne, where a press censorship was set up (in Zurich as early as 1523), and zealously maintained for centuries. It prohibited, under heavy penalties, the sale of the works of Descartes, and in both places Cartesians were prosecuted;[902] while in Protestant Switzerland generally the Copernican theory was denounced as heresy, and the reformed Calendar, as a work of the Pope, was furiously rejected. So high did passion run that in Berne and Zurich any who married Catholics were severely punished.[903] The Zurich criminal calendar of the sixteenth century gives a sample of the Protestant city life of the period. There were 572 executions in all, 347 persons being beheaded, 61 burned, 55 hanged, 53 drowned. Only 33 were cases of murder; 2 were executed for abuse of Zwingli, who thus appears to have given a lead to Calvin; 73 for blasphemy, 56 for bestiality, and 338 for theft[904]—a clear economic clue.