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A REPUBLIC OF CUCKOO CLOCKS: SWITZERLAND AND THE HISTORY OF LIBERTY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 July 2014

ISAAC NAKHIMOVSKY
ISAAC NAKHIMOVSKY*
Affiliation:
Department of History and Humanities Program, Yale University E-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

The history of Swiss republicanism was memorably summed up by Orson Welles in the classic film The Third Man (1949): whereas the tumultuous and tyrannical politics of the Italian Renaissance produced a great cultural flourishing, Welles observed, “In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” Suggestive as it may be, Welles's contrast is as misleading as it is memorable. The Swiss were a fearsome military power at the beginning of the sixteenth century, admired by no less a Florentine than Niccolò Machiavelli, but by the eighteenth century they were no longer capable of defending themselves, and they were summarily occupied by the armies of revolutionary France in 1798. The nature of Swiss democracy was long contested, and in 1847 the Swiss fought a civil war over it. Finally, it must be said, cuckoo clocks were invented in the Black Forest region, on the other side of the Alps. As we shall see, the success of the Swiss watchmaking industry does in fact deserve a place in the history of liberty, but Jean-Jacques Rousseau turns out to be a more helpful guide for understanding its significance.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , April 2015 , pp. 219 - 233
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

1 Greene, Graham, The Third Man: A Film (London, 1969), 114Google Scholar.

2 On Machiavelli's praise for the Swiss and its reception see Maissen, Thomas, “Frühneuzeitlicher Republikanismus und Machiavellismus: Zur Rezeption von Machiavelli in der Eidgenossenschaft,” in Zwierlein, Cornel and Meyer, Annette, eds., Machiavellismus in Deutschland: Chiffre von Kontingenz, Herrschaft und Empirismus in der Neuzeit (Munich, 2010), 109–30Google Scholar. For a helpful overview of Swiss history see Steinberg, Jonathan, Why Switzerland?, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 See Venturi, Franco, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1970)Google Scholar. Whatmore has reflected on Venturi's approach in “Venturi and Republicanism in Eighteenth-Century Geneva,” in Albertone, Manuela, ed., Il repubblicanesimo moderno: l’idea di repubblica nella riflessione storica di Franco Venturi (Naples, 2006), 431–48Google Scholar.

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5 Ibid., 71, 95.

6 Ibid., 198.

7 Ibid., 3.

8 Ibid., 318–20.

9 Ibid., 315.

10 Ibid., 322, 2.

11 Ibid., 291.

12 Ibid., 307, 317.

13 Ibid., 85, 223. At the same time, Lerner observes at 171, “the old order's attempt to regain most of its political rights was inextricably intertwined with the protection of its former social, economic and religious privileges as well.”

14 Steinberg, Why Switzerland?, 46; Lerner, Laboratory of Liberty, 313.

15 Whatmore, Richard, Against War and Empire: Geneva, Britain, and France in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, 2012), 13, 179–81Google Scholar.

16 By contrast, Helena Rosenblatt's important study of Rousseau's Genevan context is centered on the 1750s: Rosenblatt, Helena, Rousseau and Geneva: From the First Discourse to The Social Contract, 1749–1762 (Cambridge, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Whatmore, Against War and Empire, 71–2.

18 Ibid., 69.

19 Ibid., 71.

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23 Ibid., 110.

24 Ibid., 242.

25 Ibid., 260–75. As d’Ivernois's subsequent diplomatic activities in Russia suggest, this position also shows the links between eighteenth-century thinking about stabilizing Europe through an Anglo-French alliance, as exemplified by the Shelburne circle in the 1780s, and the Austro-Russian directed Holy Alliance that later emerged after the restoration.

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27 Whatmore, Against War and Empire, 282–3.

28 Ibid., 282.

29 Ibid., 16.

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31 Whatmore, Against War and Empire, 279.

32 Ibid., 280.

33 Ibid., 278.

34 Ibid., 280.

35 Ibid., 285.

36 Ibid., 289.

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39 Bowring, Report, 34.

40 Ibid., 37.

41 Ibid., 6.

42 Ibid., 8.

43 Ibid., 6–7.

44 Ibid., 97, 37.

45 Ibid., 37.

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48 Sabel and Zeitlin, “Historical Alternatives to Mass Production,” 142.

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51 Ibid., 124.

52 For a searching account of Rousseau's discussion in this context of needs, emotions, passions, and opinions, and their social, economic, cultural, and political implications, see Sonenscher, Sans-Culottes, chap. 3.

53 Rousseau, Letter to d’Alembert, 81.

54 On “democratic luxury” see Hont, Istvan, “The Luxury Debate in the Early Enlightenment,” in Goldie, Mark and Wokler, Robert, eds., The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge, 2006), 379–418Google Scholar. A system of production that aimed to exploit fashion-driven product cycles was described by some eighteenth-century writers as diffusing luxury by continually exporting yesterday's metropolitan fashions to more provincial markets. See Sonenscher, Sans-Culottes, 77–101.

55 Kapossy, “Republicanism to Welfare Liberalism,” 299.

56 Ibid., 303.

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59 Landes, Revolution in Time, chap. 17.

60 Sabel and Zeitlin, “Historical Alternatives to Mass Production,” 169. One example Sabel and Zeitlin cite at 156–7 is the survival of “flexible specialization” in the famed Lyonese silk-weaving industry until the French state imposed a “campaign of mergers and restructuring” in the 1960s.