Chapter 2 - Comparative Republicanisms: The Swiss Myth in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Summary

Chapter 2 examines the place of the Swiss myth in British Whig ideology, looking at its dual function as residual republican signifier on one hand, and as a form of oppositional discourse on the other. I first survey seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century texts to see the role that Switzerland played in the English republican tradition, then analyze the dialectic between virtue and commerce in a series of progress poems and historical sketches that compare the Swiss republics with France, Italy, and Britain. While earlier Whig writers such as Addison drew on classical republican language to legitimize a more modern, liberal idea of liberty, writers later in the century began to romanticize the democracies of central Switzerland in order to defend popular sovereignty, preparing the way for the century’s most elaborate but also politically radical interpretation of the Swiss myth, Wordsworth’s Descriptive Sketches. Written in the context of the ‘second’ French Revolution of 1792, the poem’s representation of the Swiss myth necessarily falls short of France’s modern democracy, pointing to the growing ideological rift between Freiheit and liberté.