At last the ceaseless bombast about the “cradle of freedom”, about 
the “grandsons of William Tell and Winkelried”, about the heroic 
victors of Sempach and Murten’” is being brought to an end. At last 
it has been revealed that the cradle of freedom is nothing but the 
centre of barbarism and the nursery of Jesuits, that the grand- 
sons of Tell and Winkelried can only be brought to reason by 
cannon-balls, and that the heroism at Sempach and Murten was 
nothing but the desperation of brutal and bigoted mountain tribes, 
obstinately resisting civilisation and progress. 

It is really very fortunate that European democracy is finally 
getting rid of this Ur-Swiss, puritan and reactionary ballast. As long 
as the democrats concentrated on the virtue, the happiness and the 
patriarchal simplicity of these Alpine shepherds, they themselves still 
appeared in a reactionary light. Now that they are supporting the 
struggle of civilised, industrial, modern-democratic Switzerland 
against the crude, Christian-Germanic democracy of the primitive, 
cattle-breeding cantons, they represent progress everywhere, now 
the last reactionary glimmer disappears, now they show that they are 
learning to understand the meaning of democracy in the 19th 
century. 

There are two regions in Europe where old Christian-Germanic 
barbarism has retained its most primitive form, almost down to 
acorn-eating—Norway and the High Alps, especially Ur- 
Switzerland.!”* Both Norway and Ur-Switzerland still provide us with 
genuine examples of that breed of men who once beat the Romans to 
death in good Westphalian style with clubs and flails in the 
Teutoburg Forest.!75 Both Norway and Ur-Switzerland are demo- 
cratically organised. But there are many varieties of democracy and 

it is very necessary that the democrats of the civilised countries should 
at last decline responsibility for the Norwegian and Ur-Swiss forms of 
democracy. 

The democratic movement in all civilised countries is, in the last 
analysis, striving for the political domination of the proletariat. It 
therefore presupposes that a proletariat exists, that a ruling 
bourgeoisie exists, that an industry exists which gives birth to the 
proletariat and which has brought the bourgeoisie to power. 

There is nothing of all this either in Norway or in Ur-Switzerland. 
In Norway, we have the very famous peasant regiment (bonde- 
regimente); in Ur-Switzerland a number of rough shepherds who, 
despite their democratic constitution, are ruled by a few big 
landowners, Abyberg, etc., in patriarchal fashion. A bourgeoisie only 
exists in exceptional cases in Norway, and not at all in Ur 
Switzerland. The proletariat is practically non-existent. 

The democracy prevailing in civilised countries, modern democra- 
cy, has thus nothing whatever in common with Norwegian or 
Ur-Swiss democracy. It does not wish to bring about the Norwegian 
and Ur-Swiss state of affairs but something absolutely different. Let 
us nevertheless look a little closer at this primitive-Germanic 
democracy and deal first with Ur-Switzerland, which is what above all 
concerns us here. 

Is there a German philistine who does not rave about William Tell, 
the liberator of his Fatherland; a schoolmaster who does not 
celebrate Morgarten, Sempach and Murten along with Marathon, 
Plataea and Salamis'”; a hysterical old maid who does not go into 
raptures over the strong leg calves and sturdy thighs of the chaste 
Alpine youths? The glory of Ur-Swiss valour, freedom, skill and 
strength has been endlessly praised in verse and prose from Aegidius 
Tschudi to Johannes von Miller, from Florian to Schiller. The 
carbines and cannons of the twelve cantons now provide a 
commentary on these enthusiastic panegyrics. 

The Ur-Swiss have drawn attention to themselves twice during the 
course of history. The first time, when they freed themselves 
gloriously from Austrian tyranny; the second at the present time, 
when they march off to fight in God’s name for the Jesuits and the 
Fatherland. 

On closer examination, the glorious liberation from the talons of 
the Austrian eagle does not look at all good. The House of Austria 
was progressive just once in the whole of its career; this was at the 
beginning of its existence when it allied itself with the urban petty 
bourgeoisie against the nobility, and sought to found a German 
monarchy. It was progressive in the most philistine of ways but it was 

progressive nonetheless. And who opposed it most resolutely? The 
Ur-Swiss. The struggle of the Ur-Swiss against Austria, the glorious 
oath on the Gritli,'” Tell’s heroic shot, the eternally memorable 
victory at Morgarten, all this was the struggle of stubborn shepherds 
against the onward march of historical development, the struggle of 
obstinate, rooted local interests against the interests of the whole 
nation, the struggle of crude ignorance against enlightenment, of 
barbarism against civilisation. They won their victory over the 
civilisation of the time, and as a punishment they were excluded 
from all further civilisation. 

As if this were not enough, these simple, stiff-necked shepherds 
were soon punished in a quite different way. They escaped the 
domination of the Austrian nobility only to come under the yoke of 
the petty bourgeois of Zurich, Lucerne, Berne and Basel. These had 
already noted that the U7-Swiss were just as strong and as stupid as 
their oxen. They agreed to join the Swiss Confederation and stayed 
peacefully at home behind their counters while the thick-headed 
Alpine shepherds fought out all their battles with the nobility and the 
princes for them. This is what happened at Sempach, Granson, 
Murten and Nancy.’ In return, these people were allowed to 
arrange their internal affairs as they wished and so they remained in 
blissful ignorance of how they were being exploited by their dear 
fellow-Confederationists. 

Since then nothing much has been heard of them. They busied 
themselves in all piety and propriety with milking the cows, with 
cheese-making, chastity and yodelling. From time to time they had 
folk assemblies at which they divided into horn-men, claw-men and 
other animal-like groups, and these gatherings never ended without 
a hearty, Christian-Germanic fight. They were poor but pure in 
heart, stupid but pious and well-pleasing to the Lord, brutal but 
broad-shouldered and had little brain but plenty of brawn. From 
time to time there were too many of them and then the young men 
went off on their “travels”’, i.e., enlisted in foreign armies where they 
displayed the most steadfast loyalty to the flag no matter what 
happened. One can only say of the Swiss that they let themselves be 
killed most conscientiously for their pay. 

The greatest boast of these burly U?r-Swiss was that from time 
immemorial they had never deviated by a hair’s breadth from the 
customs of their forefathers, that they had retained the simple, 
chaste, upright and virtuous customs of their fathers unsullied 
throughout the centuries. And this is true. Every attempt at 
civilisation was defeated by the granite walls of their mountains and 
of their heads. From the days when Winkelried’s first ancestor led his 

cow, with the inevitable little pastoral bell round its neck, on to the 
virgin pastures of the Vierwaldstatter Lake, up to the present day, 
when the latest descendant of Winkelried has his gun blessed by the 
priest, all houses have been built in the same way, all cows milked in 
the same way, all pigtails plaited in the same way, all cheeses 
prepared according to the same recipe, all children made in the same 
way. Here, in the mountains, is Paradise, here the Fall of Man has 
not yet come to pass. And should some innocent Alpine lad happen 
to find his way to the great outside world and allow himself to be 
tempted for a moment by the seductions of the big cities, by the 
artificial charms of a decadent civilisation, by the vices of sinful 
countries, which have no mountains and where corn thrives—his 
innocence is so deep-rooted that he can never quite succumb. A 
sound strikes his ear, just two of those notes of the Alpine cowherd’s 
call that sound like a dog’s howling, and he falls on his knees, 
weeping and overwhelmed with remorse, and at once tears himself 
from the arms of seduction and will not rest until he lies at the feet 
of his old father! “Father, I have sinned against my ancient moun- 
tains and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy 
son.””* . 

In recent times two invasions against these artless customs and 
primitive power have been attempted. The first was by the French in 
1798. But these French, who spread a little civilisation everywhere 
else, failed with these Ur-Swiss. No trace of their presence has 
remained, they were unable to eliminate one single jot of the old 
customs and virtues. The second invasion took place about twenty 
years later and did at least bear a little fruit. This was the invasion of 
English travellers, of London lords and squires’ and the hordes of 
chandlers, soap-manufacturers, grocers and bone merchants who — 
followed them. This invasion at least ended the old hospitality and 
transformed the honest inhabitants of the Alpine huts, who 
previously hardly knew what money was, into the most mean and 
rascally swindlers anywhere to be found. But this advance made no 
impact at all on the old simple customs. This not so very virtuous 
chicanery fitted in perfectly with the patriarchal virtues of chastity, 
skill, probity and loyalty. Even their piety suffered no injury; the 
priests were delighted to give them absolution for all the deceptions 
practised on British heretics. 

But it now looks as if all this moral purity is about to be thoroughly 
stirred up. It is to be hoped that the punitive detachments will do 

their best to finish off all the probity, primitive power and simplicity. 
Then moan, you philistines! For there will be no more poor but 
contented shepherds whose carefree peace of mind you might wish 
for yourselves on Sundays after you have made your cut out of 
selling coffee made of chicory and tea made of sloe leaves during the 
other six days of the week. Then weep, you schoolmasters, for there 
will be an end to your hopes for a new Sempach-Marathon and other 
classical feats. Then mourn, you hysterical virgins over thirty, for 
those six-inch leg calves, the thought of which solaced your solitary 
dreams, will soon be gone—gone the Antinous-like beauty of the 
powerful “Swiss peasant lads”, gone the firm thighs and tight 
trousers which attract you so irresistibly to the Alps. Then sigh, 
tender and anaemic boarding-school misses, who when reading 
Schiller’s works delighted in the chaste but oh so powerful love of the 
agile chamois hunters, for all your fond illusions are lost and now 
there is nothing left for you but to read the works of Henrik Steffens 
and fall for the frigid Norwegians. 

But no more of that. The Ur-Swiss must be fought with weapons 
quite different from mere ridicule. Democracy has to settle accounts 
with them about matters quite different from their patriarchal 
virtues. 

Who defended the Bastille on July 14, 1789 against the people 
who were storming it? Who shot down the workers of the Faubourg 
St. Antoine with grape-shot and rifle bullets from behind safe walls? 
—Ur-Swiss from the Sonderbund, grandsons of Tell, Stauffacher 
and Winkelried. 

Who defended the traitor Louis XVI on August 10, 1792 from the 
just wrath of the people, in the Louvre and the Tuileries?— Ur-Swiss 
from the Sonderbund. 

Who suppressed the Neapolitan revolution of 1798 with the help 
of Nelson?— Ur-Swiss from the Sonderbund. 

Who re-established the absolute monarchy in Naples—with the 
help of Austrians—in 1823?— Ur-Swiss from the Sonderbund. 

Who fought to the last on July 29, 1830, again for a treacherous 
king? and again shot Paris workers down from the windows and 
colonnades of the Louvre?— Ur-Swiss from the Sonderbund. 

Who suppressed the insurrections in Romagna in 1830 and 1831, 
again along with the Austrians, with a brutality which achieved world 
notoriety?— Ur-Swiss from the Sonderbund. 

In short, who holds the Italians down, to this day, forcing them to 
bow to the oppressive domination of their aristocrats, princes and 

priests; who was Austria’s right hand in Italy, who enables the 
bloodhound Ferdinand of Naples to keep a tight rein on his 
anguish-stricken people to this very moment, who has been acting as 
his executioners to this day carrying out the mass shootings 
he orders? Always, again and again, Ur-Swiss from the Sonder- 
bund, again and again, the grandsons of Tell, Stauffacher and 
Winkelried! 

In one word, wherever and whenever a revolutionary movement 
broke out in France either directly or indirectly advantageous to 
democracy, it was always Ur-Swiss mercenaries who fought it to the 
last, with the utmost resolution. And especially in Italy these Swiss 
mercenaries were always the most devoted servants and handy men 
of Austria. A just punishment for the glorious liberation of 
Switzerland from the talons of the two-headed eagle! 

One should not think that these mercenaries were the refuse of 
their country, or that they were disavowed by their fellow- 
countrymen. Have not the people of Lucerne had a statue hewn out 
of the rock at their city gates by the pious Icelander Thorvaldsen, 
depicting a huge lion, bleeding from an arrow wound, covering the 
Bourbon fleur-de-lis with his paw, faithful unto death, in memory of 
the Swiss who died at the Louvre on August 10, 1792? This is the way 
Sonderbund honours the venal loyalty of its sons. It lives by the trade 
in human beings and glorifies it. 

Can the English, French and German democrats have had 
anything in common with this kind of democracy? 

Through its industry, its commerce and its political institutions, 
the bourgeoisie is already working everywhere to drag the small, 
self-contained localities which only live for themselves out of their 
isolation, to bring them into contact with one another, to merge their 
interests, to expand their local horizons, to destroy their local habits, 
strivings and ways of thinking, and to build up a great nation with 
common interests, customs and ideas out of the many hitherto 
mutually independent localities and provinces. The bourgeoisie 1s 
already carrying out considerable centralisation. The proletariat, far 
from suffering any disadvantage from this, will as a result rather be 
in a position to unite, to feel itself a class, to acquire a proper political 
point of view within the democracy, and finally to conquer the 
bourgeoisie. The democratic proletariat not only needs the kind of 
centralisation begun by the bourgeoisie but will have to extend it very 
much further. During the short time when the proletariat was at the 
helm of state in the French Revolution, during the rule of the 
Mountain party, it used all means—including grape-shot and the 
guillotine—to effect centralisation. When the democratic proletariat 

again comes to power, it will not only have to centralise every country 
separately but will have to centralise all civilised countries together as 
soon as possible. 

Ur-Switzerland, on the other hand, has never done anything but 
obstruct centralisation; with really brutish obstinacy it has insisted on 
its isolation from the whole outside world, on its local customs, 
habits, prejudices, narrow-mindedness and seclusion. It has stood 
still in the centre of Europe at the level of its original barbarism, 
while all other nations, even the other Swiss, have gone forward. It 
stands pat on cantonal sovereignty with all the obduracy of the crude 
primitive Germans, that is, on the right to be eternally stupid, 
bigoted, brutal, narrow-minded, recalcitrant and venal if it so wishes, 
whether its neighbours like it or not. If their own brutish situation 
comes under discussion, they no longer recognise such things as 
majorities, agreements or obligations. But in the 19th century it is no 
longer possible for two parts of one and the same country to exist 
side by side without any mutual intercourse and influence. The 
radical cantons affect the Sonderbund, the Sonderbund affects the 
radical cantons, where, too, very crude elements still exist here and 
there. The radical cantons are, therefore, interested in getting the 
Sonderbund to abandon its bigotry, narrow-mindedness and obdu- 
racy, and if it won’t, then its self-will must be broken by force; and 
this is what is happening at this moment. 

The civil war which has now broken out can only help the cause of 
democracy. Even though there is still a great deal of primitive 
Germanic crudity to be found in the radical cantons, even though a 
peasant, or a bourgeois regiment, or a mixture of both is concealed 
behind their democracy, even though the most civilised cantons still 
lag behind the development of European civilisation and really 
modern elements only rise to the top slowly here and there, this is no 
great help to the Sonderbund. It is necessary, urgently necessary, 
that this last bastion of brutal, primitive Germanism, of barbarism, 
bigotry, patriarchal simplicity and moral purity, of immobility, of 
loyalty unto death to the highest bidder, should at last be destroyed. 
The more energetically the Swiss Diet sets to work and the 
more violently it shakes up this old nest of priests, the more claim 
it will have on the support of all really resolute democrats and 
the more it will prove that it understands its position. But of course 
the five great powers are there and the radicals themselves are 
afraid. 

As far as the Sonderbund is concerned, it is significant that the 
true sons of William Tell have to beg the House of Austria, 
Switzerland’s hereditary foe, for help just when Austria is baser, 

viler, meaner and more hateful than ever. This is yet another part of 
the punishment for the glorious liberation of Switzerland from the 
talons of the two-headed eagle and the much boasting that went with 
it. And for the cup of punishment to be filled to the brim Austria 
itself has to be in such a pass that it could not give William Tell’s 
sons any help whatever. 

Frederick Engels