Friedrich Engels

The New Authorities – Progress in Switzerland

** Bern, 9 November.

Since the day before yesterday, the new legislative federal bodies, the Swiss National Council and the Council of States, have been assembled here. The city of Bern has done everything in its power to receive them as splendidly and dazzlingly as possible. Music, processions, cannon thunder and bell-ringing, illumination – nothing was lacking. The sessions opened the day before yesterday. The National Council, elected on the basis of universal suffrage and in proportion to population (Bern has sent twenty deputies, Zurich twelve, the smallest cantons two or three each), is composed in its overwhelming majority of liberals with a radical tinge. The decisively radical party is very strongly represented; the conservative has only six to seven votes out of more than a hundred. The Council of States, consisting of two deputies for each whole canton and one for each half-canton, is pretty similar in composition and character to the last Diet. The Urkantönli have again sent a few genuine Sonderbund men into it, and as a consequence of indirect election the reactionary element, though in a decided minority, is already represented more strongly in the Council of States than in the National Council. The Council of States is, in general, the Diet rejuvenated by the abolition of binding mandates and the invalidity of half-votes, and relegated to the background by the creation of the National Council. It plays the thankless role of the Senate or the Chamber of Peers, the brake on the supposed excessive innovatory ardour of the National Council, the inheritor of the ripe wisdom and careful deliberation of the fathers. This worthy and staid authority already shares the fate of its sisters in England and America and formerly in France; even before it has given a sign of life, it is looked at over the shoulder by the press and forgotten in favour of the National Council. Almost no one speaks of it, and when it makes itself talked about, it will be all the worse for it.

The National Council, although it is supposed to represent the whole Swiss “nation”, gave a sample right in the first session, not exactly of cantonal spirit, but of genuine Swiss disunity and pettifogging dreams. To elect a president, three ballots had to be held, although only three candidates, all three from Bern to boot, were seriously considered. They were Messrs. Ochsenbein, Funk and Neuhaus; the first two representatives of the old Bernese radicals, the third the representative of the old-liberal, half-conservative party. Finally, Mr. Ochsenbein was elected with 50 out of 93 votes, hence a very narrow majority. It is understandable that the Zurich people and other Moderados set up the wise and experienced Neuhaus against Mr. Ochsenbein; but that Mr. Funk, who belongs to exactly the same shade as Ochsenbein, was brought into competition with him and was sustained over two ballots – that proves how little the parties have yet organised and disciplined themselves. In any case, the radicals carried off the victory at the first tournament of the parties through Ochsenbein’s election. – In the election of the vice-president that followed, an absolute majority emerged only on the fifth ballot! The staid and experienced Council of States, on the other hand, elected the Zurich Moderado Furrer its president on the first ballot, almost unanimously. These two elections already sufficiently indicate how different the spirit of the two chambers is and how soon they will fall out and come into conflict.

The next interesting subject of debate will be the choice of the federal city. Interesting, for the Swiss because very many of them are materially interested in it, for foreign countries because this very debate will show most clearly how far the old local patriotism, the cantonal narrow-mindedness, has worn thin. Bern, Zurich, Lucerne are competing most vehemently. Bern would like to fob off Zurich with the federal university and Lucerne with the federal court, but in vain. Bern is in any case the only suitable city, as the transition point from German to French Switzerland, as the capital of the largest canton, as the emerging central point for the whole Swiss movement. Now, in order to become something, Bern must also have the university and the federal court. But try and make that clear to the Swiss, who are fanatical about their cantonal capitals! It is quite possible that the more radical National Council votes for radical Bern, and the staid Council of States for staid, high-and-well-wise Zurich. Then good counsel will be dear indeed.

Things have been looking very unsettled in Geneva for the past three weeks. In the elections for the National Council, the reactionary patricians and bourgeois, who from their villas keep the villages around Geneva in an almost feudal dependence with their peasants, put through all three candidates. But the bureau annulled the elections because more ballot papers had come in than had been issued. This annulment alone calmed the revolutionary workers of Saint-Gervais, who were already marching in crowds through the streets shouting: aux armes! The attitude of the workers during the next eight days was so threatening that the bourgeois preferred not to vote at all rather than provoke a revolution with obligatory, already threatened scenes of terror. All the more so as the government threatened to hand in its resignation if the reactionary candidates got through again. In the meantime, the radicals changed their list of candidates, put less abrupt names on it, made up for the neglected agitation, and in the new election obtained 5,000–5,500 votes, almost a thousand more than the reactionaries had in the previous one. The three reactionary candidates received almost no votes; the highest was General Dufour, who brought it to 1,500. Eight days later came the elections for the Grand Council. The city elected 44 radicals, the countryside, which has to elect 46 deputies to the Grand Council, almost nothing but reactionaries. The Revue de Genève is still wrangling with the bourgeois papers over whether these 46 are all reactionary or whether half a dozen will vote with the radical government. It will soon be seen. The confusion in Geneva may become great; for if the government, which is directly elected here by the people, has to resign, then the new election could easily turn out like the second National Council election, and a radical government could be confronted with a reactionary majority in the Grand Council. It is, moreover, certain that the Geneva workers are only waiting for an opportunity to secure the threatened conquests of 1847 by a new revolution.

All in all, Switzerland has made significant advances compared with the early 1840s. In no class, however, is this progress as striking as among the workers. While among the bourgeoisie, and especially in the old patrician families, the old locally narrow-minded, old-fogeyish spirit still reigns fairly generally and has at most taken on more modern forms, the Swiss workers have developed remarkably. Formerly they kept themselves aloof from the Germans and strutted about in the most absurd “free Swiss” national arrogance, prating about the “foreign scoundrels,” and remained indifferent to the entire movement of the time. Now that has changed. Since work is going worse, since Switzerland has been democratised; particularly, however, since European revolutions and battles like the Paris June battle and the Vienna October battle have taken the place of little putsches, the Swiss workers have increasingly taken part in the political and socialist movement, have fraternised with the foreign workers, especially the Germans, and have hung up their “free Swissness” on a nail. In French Switzerland and in many parts of German Switzerland, Germans and German Swiss are together in the same workers’ association without any distinction, and associations whose majority consists of Swiss have decided to join the projected, and partly already implemented, organisation of the German democratic associations. While the most radical of the radicals in official Switzerland dream at most of the one and indivisible Helvetic Republic, it is not uncommon to hear Swiss workers express the view that the whole independence of little Switzerland will probably soon go to the devil in the European storm that is preparing. And they say this quite cold-bloodedly and indifferently, without a word of regret – these proletarian traitors to their country! The sympathy for the Viennese was great among all the Swiss I have seen, but among the workers it rose to real fanaticism. One heard not a word about the National Council, the Council of States, about the Fribourg priest-putsch; but Vienna, Vienna was on everyone’s lips from morning till night. It was as if the Swiss once again, as in the time before Tell, had Vienna for their capital, as if they were Austrian once more. Hundreds of rumours were spread, discussed, doubted, believed, then overthrown again; all possible contingencies were talked through; and when finally the news of the defeat of the heroic Viennese workers and students by the superior force and barbarism of Windischgrätz was definitively confirmed, it made an impression on these Swiss workers as if their own fate had been decided in Vienna, as if the cause of their own country had gone down there. This mood is certainly not yet general, but it gains ground daily among the Swiss proletariat, and the fact that it already exists in many places – that is an enormous advance for a country like Switzerland.