Historiography of Switzerland
[1] The first comprehensive historiography was Gottlieb Emanuel Haller's six-volume Bibliothek der Schweizergeschichte (1785–88), published still before the collapse of the Old Swiss Confederacy in the wake of the French Revolution.
This development came to a close with Josias Simler's 1576 De Helvetiorum republica libri duo, a sober account of the Confederacy's constitutional status and historical background.
[3] As the Swiss city-states grew more stratified and oligarchical, and as confessional, social and political barriers became more pronounced, the 17th century saw a shift of focus in historical writing from the affairs of the Confederacy to that of the individual state.
[3] The continuation of the last great work of Swiss humanist historiography, Franz Guilliman's De rebus Helvetiorum sive antiquitatum, was thwarted by partisan politics.
[3] Historical research bloomed again in the time of the Enlightenment, when as early as with Johann Jakob Wagner's 1680 Historia naturalis Helvetiae curiosa, the spirit of critical inquiry took hold in Swiss scholarship.
[4] The century's most significant work of historiography was the country's first historical dictionary, the 20-volume Allgemeines helvetisches eidgenössisches Lexikon in 20 volumes (1743–63), written by scholars from all cantons and edited by Johann Jakob Leu.
[5] When Bernese historians Gottlieb Emanuel Haller and Uriel Freudenberger first publicly questioned the historicity of William Tell, they triggered a political scandal and caused tensions between Bern and Tell's traditional home state, Uri.
Robert Glutz von Blotzheim and Johann Jakob Hottinger in the German-speaking part of Switzerland as well as Louis Vuillemin and Charles Monnard in the Romandie translated and extended Müller's work, providing the new federal state founded in 1848 with a reasonably coherent common national history.
[6] As the rationalist Enlightenment gave way to the more emotional period of Romanticism, the questioning of popular heroes grew more unpopular still,[5] and the traditional account of Tell was reestablished for generations by Friedrich Schiller's play William Tell of 1804.
Von Müller's work was eventually supplanted by Johannes Dierauer's seminal Geschichte der Schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft (1887–1917, with extensions up until 1974), which remains indispensable to modern research thanks to its thorough critical apparatus.
[9] Some academic attention also shifted to the economic and social history of Switzerland, which began to be treated in substantial monographs by William Rappard and Eduard Fueter in the 1910s.
[9] On the other hand, apologists of the Ancien Régime such as Gonzague de Reynold, who praised the perceived enlighted authoritarianism of the Old Confederacy, left an imprint on the generally conservative historiography of the post-World War II generation.
