He was the fourth and the most recent person to be appointed to the rarely used Swiss rank of general, and was possibly Switzerland's most famous soldier.

He is best remembered for effectively mobilizing the Swiss military and population in order to prepare resistance against a possible invasion by Nazi Germany in 1940.

[1] Henri Guisan was born on 21 October 1874 in Mézières, in the canton of Vaud, a Protestant part of French-speaking Switzerland.

[2] In 1911, Guisan was promoted to major and was transferred to the infantry on the order of the Chief of the General Staff, Theophil Sprecher von Bernegg.

During the Interwar period, Guisan had belonged to the conservative, federalist and anti-socialist political tendency,[2] and was a member of the right-wing Swiss Patriotic Federation.

[11] Whereas the government preferred an understated and politically riskless neutrality, Guisan, charged with actually preventing invasion, opted to call for determined resistance.

[11] Nonetheless, this was politically very risky, and represented a very typical example to be seized upon by Germany to justify aggression, such as occurred prior to the German invasion of the Netherlands in World War II.

[citation needed] On 25 July 1940, Guisan delivered a historic address to the entire Swiss Officer Corps assembled on the Rütli, a location charged with symbolism in Swiss Romantic nationalism by virtue of being identified as the site of the legendary Rütli Oath.

[12] At a time when military commanders remained distant, he rejected formalities and maintained contact with civilians and soldiers.

[2] In summer 1940, after the Battle of France, Guisan developed his famous National Redoubt concept, according to which the Swiss Army would have retreated into the Alps relatively soon if attacked, but would have kept up resistance based on some sort of guerrilla and stay-behind tactics from there.

Unlike General Ulrich Wille during the First World War,[2] Guisan was an extremely popular figure in Switzerland.