Broadly speaking, the settled Protestant period was one of relapse alike from freedom and from union. Class division deepened and worsened throughout the seventeenth century;[905] the people of the subject lands were less than ever recognised as having rights,[906] Puritanism taking to oppression as spontaneously in Switzerland as in England; the stimulus given to culture and art in the controversial period died away, leaving retrogression;[907] and in the personal and the intellectual life alike clerical tyranny was universal.[908] The municipalities became more and more close corporations, as the gilds had become long before;[909] and at Berne in 1640 the city treasurer was put to death for exposing abuses.[910] After the Peasants' War of 1653 the aristocratic development was still further strengthened, till in Berne, Soleure, and Fribourg—Catholic and Protestant cities alike—the roll of burghers was closed (1680-90), Soleure stipulating that it should remain so till the number of reigning families was reduced to twenty-five.[911] The practice of taking pensions from France revived, for the old service of supplying mercenary troops; so that "the Swiss were never more shamelessly sold to the highest bidder" than in the seventeenth century.[912] As of old, the municipalities amassed and invested capital, Catholic Soleure lending great sums to France, while the still wealthier city of Berne lent money in all directions;[913] but though they raised handsome public buildings, it was the small ruling class and not the workers that were enriched. In the rural Cantons even the small economic advance made at the outset of the Reformation was lost.[914] It seems difficult to dispute that as a force for social progress the Reformation was naught.
One factor there was to its credit: the establishment of secondary schools, which had not previously existed in Switzerland, and the provision of better common schools;[915] and though the ecclesiastical and religious forces, as in Scotland, prevented the common schools being turned to any higher account at home than that of qualifying to read and write and learn catechisms, even that small tuition gave the Swiss some advantages in the neighbouring countries. All the while the higher political evolution went backwards. In 1586 the Catholic Cantons of Schwytz, Uri, Unterwalden, Lucerne, Zug, Fribourg, and Soleure ejected from the League the Protestant State of Mülhausen; and, ignoring the laws of the Confederation, proceeded to make a separate offensive and defensive alliance among themselves, and with Spain and the Pope. As late as 1656 war broke out between Berne and Schwytz, Lucerne intervening, over a dispute about Protestant refugees; whereafter the principle of cantonal sovereignty reigned supreme for a hundred and forty years. It would seem difficult to maintain, in the face of all the facts, that Protestantism had made for peace, freedom, or civilisation.
On the other hand, the distribution of Protestantism in the Swiss Cantons disposes once for all of the theory that the "Teutonic conscience" or anything else of an ethnic order was the determining force at the Reformation. A rough conspectus of the language and religion of the Cantons as at the year 1900 will present the proof to the contrary:—
| Name. | Language. | Religion. |
|---|---|---|
| Berne | Five-sixths German-speaking | Seven-eighths Protestant |
| Zurich | Nearly all German | " " |
| Lucerne | " " " | Nearly all Catholic |
| Vaud | Mostly French dialects | Nine-tenths Protestant |
| Aargau | Mostly German | Four C. to five P. |
| St. Gall | " " | Three-fifths Catholic |
| Ticino | Italian dialects | Nearly all Catholic |
| Fribourg | Half French, half German | Four-fifths Catholic |
| Grisons | Half Romansch, three-eighths German, one-eighth Italian | Five-ninths Protestant |
| Valais | (?) Half German, half French | Nearly all Catholic |
| Thurgau | Nearly all German | Two-sevenths Catholic |
| Basle | " " " | One-third Catholic |
| Soleure | Nearly all German | Three-fourths Catholic |
| Geneva | Predominantly French | Half-and-half |
| Neuchâtel | " " | Seven-eighths Protestant |
| Schaffhausen | " German | " " |
| Appenzell (Rh. Ext) | " " | Nine-tenths Protestant |
| " (Rh. Int) | " " | Nearly all Catholic |
| Glarus | Nearly all German | One-fourth Catholic |
| Zug | " " " | Nearly all Catholic |
| Schwytz | " " " | " " " |
| Unterwalden | " " " | " " " |
| Uri | " " " | " " " |
Here we have nearly every species of variation in terms of speech and creed. The one generalisation which appears to hold good to any extent in the matter is that Catholicism usually goes with an agricultural economy and Protestantism with manufactures; but here, too, there are exceptions, as Vaud, which, though Protestant, is predominantly agricultural or vine-rearing; Glarus, which is mainly pastoral and Protestant; the Grisons, agricultural and more than half Protestant; and Geneva, where there is a large minority of Catholics in industrial conditions. On the whole, we are warranted in assuming that in Switzerland, as in most other countries, the town workers were the readiest to innovate in religion; while race, so far as inferrible from language, had nothing to do with the choice made. What differences of life accrue to the creeds, as we shall see, depend on their one important social divergence, that of bias for and against illiteracy.
In the earlier part of the eighteenth century the Swiss Confederation figured as "a weather-beaten ruin, ready to fall."[916] It would be hard to point out, in the domestic conditions, any that made for beneficent change, and there were many that rigidly precluded it; but some elements of variability there were, and from other countries there came the principle of fertilisation. Theological hatreds and disputations had in a manner destroyed their own standing-ground by the very stress of their barren activity; and even while press laws were banning new works of thought and science, the better minds were secretly yearning towards them. In cities like Geneva and Basle (the latter then the seat of the only Swiss university), reason must to some extent have played beneath the surface while all its open manifestations were struck at. At Basle, in the old days, Erasmus spent the main part of his life; and he must have had some congenial intercourse. But it is on the side of the physical sciences that new intellectual life is first seen to germinate in post-Reformation Switzerland. There, as elsewhere, inquiring men felt that nature was kindlier to question than the self-appointed oracles of Deity, and that the unending search for real knowledge brought more peace than ever came of the insistence that the ultimate truth was known. Refugee immigrants, chiefly French, seem to have begun the ferment; and it is at the hands of their descendants that Swiss science has grown.[917] Having reason to avoid alike politics and theology in their new home, and living in many cases on incomes from investments, they turned to the sciences as occupation and solace.
With this inner movement concurred the new influences from French and English science and literature, and from the reviving culture of Germany.[918] With the rest of Europe, too, Switzerland turned in an increasing degree to industry, and in the latter half of the eighteenth century had developed many new trades, involving considerable use of machinery.[919] Agriculture, too, improved,[920] and mercenary soldiering began to fall into disrepute[921] under the influence of the new pacific thought. Still the rural economic conditions were bad, and the country seemed to grow poorer while the towns grew richer.[922] The population, in fact, constantly tended to exceed the not easily widened limits of rural subsistence; and in place of foreign soldiering, the old remedy, there began a peaceful industrial emigration into the neighbouring countries, Swiss beginning to figure there in increasing numbers as waiters and servants.[923] All the while the tyranny of the city aristocracies was unmitigated, and the subject lands were steadily ill-treated.[924] In Berne, in 1776, only eighteen families were represented in the Council of Two Hundred; and there and in Zurich and Lucerne the civic regulations were as flagrantly partial to the ruling class as in France itself.[925] The new industrial conditions, however, were gradually preparing a political change; and the intellectual climate steadily altered. Voltaire tells in many amusing letters of the spread of Socinian heresy in the city of Calvin. In Geneva arose the abnormal figure of Jean Jacques Rousseau, descendant of a French refugee immigrant of Calvin's day; and though his city in 1762 formally burned his epoch-marking book on the Contrat Social, a popular reaction followed six years later. Democratic disturbances had repeatedly occurred before; but this time there was a growing force at work. An insurrection in 1770 was suppressed; another, in 1782, though at first successful, ended in the overthrow of the popular party by means of troops from France, Berne, and Zurich; but in the fateful year of 1789 yet another broke out, and this time the tide turned.
With the interference of the French Republic in Switzerland in 1797 on behalf of the Pays de Vaud, then subject to Berne, began the long convulsion which broke up the old Confederation and framed a new. In 1798 began the wildly premature attempt of the more visionary republicans to create a unitary republic out of Cantons which had retrograded even from the measure of union attained before the Reformation. It could not succeed; and the rapine inseparable from the French revolutionary methods could not but arouse an intense resistance, paralysing the aims of the progressive party. Out of years of miserable ferocious warfare, ended by Napoleon's withdrawal of the French troops in 1801, came the new Confederation of 1803, which, however, it needed the friendly but authoritative mediation of the First Consul to get the conservative Cantons to accept. For once the despot had secured, in a really disinterested fashion,[926] what the Revolution ought to have brought about. The old aristocratic tyrannies were subverted; the subject lands were freed; to the thirteen Cantons of the old union were added Aargau, Thurgau, St. Gall, Vaud, and Ticino; through all was set up a representative system, modified in the towns by a measure of the old aristocratic element; and the whole possessed what Switzerland never had before, and could hardly otherwise have attained—a central parliamentary system. In 1814 Berne would fain have resumed its tyranny over the Vaud and Aargau, a step which would have initiated a general return to the old régime. The Allies, however, brought about the completion of the Confederation on the new principles; and by the addition to its roll of Geneva, Neuchâtel, and the Valais, and the cession to Berne of the Basle territory formerly annexed by France, created a compact and complete Switzerland, bounded in natural fashion by the Alps, the Jura, and the Rhine. And at this period, after so many vicissitudes, the culture life of Switzerland is found fully abreast of that of Europe in general. Sismondi, standing apart from France and Italy, and writing impartially the history of both, is the greatest historian of his day.
The later history of the Confederation, however, is one of the great illustrations of the perpetual possibility of strife and sunderance in communities. Sismondi lived to ban the democracy which would not be content to be ruled by the middle class. At 1820 the old spirit of class subsisted under the new institutions; the press was nearly everywhere under strict censorship; and the ideals which ruled elsewhere on the Continent seemed even more potent in Switzerland than elsewhere. There, as elsewhere, the system inevitably bred discontent; and in 1830, on the revolutionary initiative of Ticino, the most corruptly governed of all the Cantons, there ensued almost bloodless revolutions in the local governments, Radicals taking the place of Conservatives, and proceeding to reform alike administration and education. Then came the due reaction, the Catholic Cantons forming the League of Sarnen, while the extremists again pressed the ideal of a military State. Though morally strong enough to enforce peace in more than one embroilment of Cantons and parties, the Federal Diet was dangerously weak in the face of the new forces of religio-political reaction typified by the activity of the Jesuits, as well as the old trouble of cantonal selfishness, which affected even the tolls.[927] The resistance to Radicalism became a movement of clerical fanaticism, led by the cry of "religion in danger"; Catholics using it to foment local insurrections; Protestants, ecclesiastically led, using it to make a municipal revolution by violence at Zurich on the occasion of the proposal to give Strauss a university chair in 1839.[928] But the Jesuits—expelled from nearly every Catholic State in the eighteenth century, yet latterly cherished by the Swiss Catholics for their anti-Protestant services—were the chief mischief-makers; and at length the violences promoted from the headquarters at Lucerne led to Protestant reprisals which took the shape of a beginning of civil war. The collapse, however, of the Catholic "Sonderbund" or Secession-League in 1847, before the resolute military action of the Diet, marked the turning-point in modern Swiss politics. In 1848 was framed a new constitution, wholly Swiss-made, creating an effective Federal government, on a new basis of a Parliament of two Chambers. Now were definitely nationalised the systems of coinage, weights and measures, posts and telegraphs; and the Customs system was made one of complete internal free trade.