10 - Village quarrels and national controversies: Switzerland

Summary

It is among the peculiarities of Swiss history in the nineteenth century that the struggle to establish a national state that was progressive and democratic by contemporary standards was bound up with various conflicts over religious policy. Within the protracted history of these conflicts, in which elements of a culture war can be discerned throughout, there is a period which is known more specifically as the Kulturkampf. It began with the First Vatican Council and was officially brought to an end around the middle of the 1880s. This Kulturkampf is the central concern of this chapter. Running parallel to the German Kulturkampf, it was an integral part of that fundamental confrontation between liberalism and ultramontane Catholicism that was waged in the second half of the nineteenth century in numerous European states. However, this was at the same time a conflict with genuinely Swiss roots, which was marked by the specific historic, political and confessional circumstances of the Swiss Confederation. Before we chart the course of the conflict, it therefore seems appropriate to point out those factors that lent the Kulturkampf in this part of Europe its specifically Swiss character.

TYPICALLY SWISS

We begin with the federal structure of Switzerland. The twenty-two cantons enjoyed a considerable degree of autonomy. Religious and cultural policy in particular remained within the responsibility of the cantons, even after the transition from a confederacy of states to a constitutionally unified federal state in 1848.