Even though Shelley’s time in Switzerland in 1814 and 1816 adds up to just four months, during which he wrote surprisingly little, the alpine nation played an outsized role in his cultural canonisation. This article bases itself on a variety of published and manuscript texts by members of the Shelley circle and their contemporaries in order to review both tours, arguing that the poet was eager to find in Switzerland the living signs of a republican paradise and to view that country as romance rather than reality. The Alps provided the poet with powerful images of the natural sublime, which he associated with intellectual beauty and revolutionary necessity. On the other hand, despite his deepened appreciation of Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the poet remained far more sceptical of Switzerland’s mythic liberty and virtue.

After addressing Germaine de Stäel’s ‘invention’ of European Romanticism in On Literature and On Germany, the introductory chapter explains the editorial choices behind the collection, including its expansive time frame, European focus, and comparative method. It then surveys Lord Byron’s continental reception to demonstrate the utility of a pan-European approach. Although extremely familiar, the case of Byron and of Byronism is of central importance to the history of European Romanticism because of the European role that it gave to British literature, but also because it brings to the fore some common problems raised when using Romanticism as a critical category. The next section looks at how literary historians have addressed these problems, then discusses some of the period’s most salient features. The final part provides a chapter by chapter synopsis in order to help readers navigate the volume.

The Alpine sublime contributed to the Romantic vogue for mountains, but also to the development of Romantic aesthetics and modern subjectivity. This chapter examines a variety of representations of the Alps, including scientific and aesthetic treatises, poems, prose fiction, and painting, as well as more ephemeral documents such as travel journals and visitors’ books. Authors addressed include Rousseau, Ramond, the Duchess of Devonshire, Wordsworth, the Shelleys, Byron, and Ruskin. It argues that the Alpine sublime served as an expression of divine power, human autonomy, and social distinction. Proceeding chronologically, the chapter begins with the Grand Tour, with its scientific, aesthetic, and mythical representations of the Alps, then looks at how the French Revolution appropriated the Alpine sublime, at ways in which Romantic writers responded by making it a private experience, and finally at how tourism helped generalize this modern attitude to mountains.

In Chapter 1, I read the first two acts of Byron’s Swiss lyrical drama, Manfred, as an allegory of the above passage from “ancient” to “modern” liberty, showing how Romantic-period writers could represent the Swiss myth both sympathetically and skeptically in order to maintain a link between classical republicanism and liberalism. Byron’s sympathetic portrait of the chamois hunter, in particular, offers one of the last radical interpretations of Swiss-style republicanism. I then review the historical and ideological origins of the Swiss myth in Switzerland itself, going back to the Renaissance but focusing on eighteenth-century writers whose ideal of a free and happy alpine republic I contrast with the Old Confederacy’s historical realities. While the Swiss myth could express a range of ideological positions before the French Revolution, I show how post-revolutionary authors such as Staël and Karl Ludwig von Haller helped crystallize it as an expression of customary Freiheit rather than of rational liberté.