The history of Switzerland

Switzerland grew out of a defensive alliance of Alpine valleys inside the Holy Roman Empire, sworn in the late thirteenth century and enlarged over the next two hundred years by city-states such as Zürich and Bern. The Confederates won fame as soldiers by defeating the Habsburgs and Burgundy, but the Reformation split them between Catholic and Protestant cantons, and for centuries they held together as a loose league. Revolutionary France broke the old order in 1798, and after a short civil war in 1847 the Swiss founded a federal state with a constitution that still shapes the country. Neutral since 1815 and spared both world wars, Switzerland became a centre of banking, industry and international diplomacy, governed by a distinctive system of direct democracy.

Hunter-gatherers lived north of the Alps during warm phases of the Ice Age, and after the glaciers melted people moved into the valleys and lowlands. Farming reached the region around 5500 BCE. From the fifth millennium BCE villages of houses raised on piles were built on the shores of lakes such as Zürich, Neuchâtel and Constance, and the waterlogged remains have preserved tools, textiles and food in remarkable detail; they are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

In the Iron Age the land was home to the Celts. The site of La Tène on Lake Neuchâtel gave its name to the art style of the later Celtic Iron Age across Europe. The largest Celtic people of the plateau were the Helvetii, while the Raetians lived in the eastern Alps. In 58 BCE, under pressure from Germanic neighbours, the Helvetii set out to migrate into Gaul, but Julius Caesar defeated them near Bibracte and forced the survivors home.

In 15 BCE the Romans conquered the Alpine tribes and brought the whole region under the Roman Empire. The western plateau became part of the province of Germania Superior, the east part of Raetia, which stretched into what is now Austria. Aventicum, today's Avenches, was the main town of the Helvetii, and Augusta Raurica near Basel and the legionary camp of Vindonissa guarded the Rhine frontier. Roads crossed the Great St Bernard and other passes, and Latin, villas and towns spread across the lowlands.

From the third century Germanic raids grew more frequent; the Alamanni broke through the frontier in 259. The first Christian bishoprics appeared in the fourth century, and Rome withdrew its troops in the early fifth century as the Western Roman Empire collapsed.

Two peoples divided the land after Rome. The Burgundians settled in the west in the 440s and adopted the Latin speech of the population, which is one origin of the French-speaking west. The Alamanni moved into the north and centre and kept their Germanic language, the ancestor of Swiss German. In the south the people of Ticino and the Alpine valleys kept Latin dialects that became Italian and Romansh.

Both regions were absorbed by the Frankish Kingdom in the 530s. Irish monks brought a new wave of Christianity in the seventh century, and the abbey of St Gallen, founded on the site of the hermit Gallus's cell, became one of the great centres of learning in Charlemagne's Europe. When the Frankish realm was divided in 843 the land split again, the west going to Burgundy and the east to the kingdom that became the Holy Roman Empire. Magyar raiders sacked Basel and St Gallen in the early tenth century, and by 1033 Burgundy too had passed to the emperors.

In the high Middle Ages noble families competed for the region. The Zähringen dukes founded towns including Fribourg in 1157 and Bern in 1191; when their line died out in 1218, these cities answered directly to the emperor. The Habsburgs, whose ancestral castle stood in Aargau and who later ruled the Habsburg Monarchy from Vienna, became the most powerful house in the north and in 1273 Rudolf of Habsburg was elected king of Germany.

The opening of the St Gotthard pass in the early thirteenth century turned the remote valleys of Uri and Schwyz into guardians of a major route between Germany and Italy. Emperors granted them the status of imperial freedom, owing allegiance only to the emperor, which the Habsburgs threatened to undo.

In early August 1291, shortly after Rudolf's death, the communities of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden renewed an alliance of mutual defence in the Federal Charter, the document later treated as Switzerland's founding act. The legends of William Tell and the oath on the Rütli meadow come from chronicles written much later. In 1315 the forest cantons ambushed and routed a Habsburg army at Morgarten, and they renewed their league at Brunnen.

Between 1332 and 1353 Lucerne, Zürich, Glarus, Zug and Bern joined, forming the eight-member confederacy. Further victories over the Habsburgs at Sempach in 1386 and Näfels in 1388 secured its survival. It was never a state in the modern sense but a network of treaties among sovereign members, whose delegates met in a Diet. The Confederates also conquered lands they ruled jointly as subject territories, including Aargau in 1415, Thurgau in 1460 and, south of the Alps, much of Ticino. Rivalry between members could turn violent, as in the Old Zürich War of the 1440s.

In the Burgundian Wars the Confederates destroyed the armies of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, at Grandson and Murten in 1476 and at Nancy in 1477, where he was killed. Their pikemen became the most feared infantry in Europe, and Swiss soldiers fought for hire under kings and popes; the Pontifical Swiss Guard, founded in 1506, survives in Rome today. Fribourg and Solothurn were admitted in 1481 after a compromise mediated by the hermit Nicholas of Flüe, and Basel, Schaffhausen and Appenzell followed, completing the Thirteen Cantons by 1513.

The Swabian War of 1499 against the emperor Maximilian I ended with the Confederacy free of imperial courts and taxes in practice. Swiss armies then fought for control of Milan and northern Italy, until the French crushed them at Marignano in 1515. A perpetual peace with France followed in 1516, and the Confederates stopped trying to expand, though the mercenary trade continued for three centuries.

The Swiss Reformation began in Zürich, where Huldrych Zwingli started preaching in 1519 and the city council adopted his reforms from 1523. Bern, Basel and Schaffhausen followed, while the central cantons stayed Catholic, part of the wider Protestant Reformation. The two camps fought the Kappel Wars, and in 1531 Zwingli was killed in battle, after which a settlement let each canton choose its own faith. In Geneva, then an ally rather than a member of the Confederacy, the French reformer John Calvin led the church from 1541 until his death in 1564, making the city a refuge for Protestants and a centre from which Calvinism spread to France, Scotland, the Netherlands and beyond.

Religious division paralysed the Diet for long periods, but the Confederacy held together. It kept out of the Thirty Years' War, although the Grisons, an allied league in the east, were drawn into fighting over the Valtellina. At the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 the Confederacy's independence from the Holy Roman Empire was formally recognised. Patrician families came to dominate the cities and governed their rural subjects tightly; a peasant revolt in 1653 was suppressed, and Catholic and Protestant cantons fought again at Villmergen in 1656 and 1712. In the eighteenth century Geneva produced Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Voltaire settled on its edge, as Swiss scholars took part in the Enlightenment.

The French Revolution shook the old order. In 1798 French armies invaded, the patricians of Bern fell, and the old confederacy was replaced by the Helvetic Republic, a centralised state on the French model that abolished the subject territories and gave equal rights to citizens. Revolts in central Switzerland were put down by force, and Austrian and Russian armies fought the French on Swiss soil in 1799.

The republic proved unworkable, and in 1803 Napoleon imposed the Act of Mediation, which restored the cantons and created six new ones, among them Vaud, Aargau, Ticino and St Gallen, from former subject lands and allies. After his fall, the Congress of Vienna in 1815 added Geneva, Valais and Neuchâtel, bringing the number of cantons to twenty-two, and the great powers recognised Switzerland's permanent neutrality. The Federal Treaty of 1815 returned most power to the cantons.

From the 1830s liberal and radical movements won control of many cantons and pressed for a stronger central government, while conservative Catholic cantons resisted. When Aargau closed its monasteries in 1841 and Lucerne invited the Jesuits to run its schools in 1844, seven Catholic cantons formed a separate defensive league, the Sonderbund. In November 1847 federal troops under General Guillaume-Henri Dufour defeated it in a campaign of less than a month that cost about 130 lives, the last war fought on Swiss soil.

The constitution of 1848 created a federal state with a two-chamber parliament, partly modelled on the United States, and a seven-member Federal Council as a collective government, with Bern as the federal city. It created a single currency, market and postal service, while leaving the cantons wide powers. Revisions in 1874 and 1891 added the optional referendum and the popular initiative, giving citizens the power to challenge laws and propose constitutional changes. Jews won freedom of settlement in 1866 and freedom of worship in 1874.

Switzerland industrialised early, building on textiles, watchmaking and later machinery, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, as part of the Industrial Revolution. Railways spread from the 1850s, and the Gotthard rail tunnel opened in 1882. British climbers and tourists made the Alps famous, and hotels, mountain railways and banks brought new wealth, though poverty also drove many Swiss to emigrate in the nineteenth century.

In 1863 Henry Dunant, a Geneva businessman who had seen the wounded left untended after the battle of Solferino, helped found the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the first Geneva Convention followed in 1864. Switzerland began a long role as host to international bodies, which grew after World War I when the League of Nations settled in Geneva. During that war Switzerland was neutral but divided, with German-speakers leaning to Germany and French-speakers to France, and Vladimir Lenin lived in Zürich until he returned to Russia in 1917. Social tensions led to a general strike in 1918, and proportional representation was introduced the following year. Earlier, in 1905, Albert Einstein had published his theory of special relativity while working at the patent office in Bern.

Surrounded from 1940 by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, Switzerland mobilised its army under General Henri Guisan, who planned to withdraw into a fortified Alpine "Réduit" if invaded. Germany drew up invasion plans but never attacked. Switzerland traded heavily with the Axis, and its banks bought large amounts of gold from Germany, some of it looted. It sheltered around 300,000 refugees and interned soldiers over the course of World War II, but it also turned away many thousands of Jews at its borders, and in 1938 the Swiss authorities had asked Germany to mark Jewish passports with a "J". After lawsuits in the 1990s, Swiss banks agreed in 1998 to pay 1.25 billion dollars over dormant accounts of victims of the Holocaust, and the Bergier Commission's report of 2002 concluded that refugee policy had been far harsher than necessary.

Postwar Switzerland prospered as one of the world's richest countries. From 1959 the four largest parties shared the seven seats of the Federal Council according to the "magic formula", a model of consensus government. Neutral during the Cold War, Switzerland joined the Council of Europe in 1963 and the European Free Trade Association at its founding, but stayed out of the European Community. Women won the vote in federal elections only in a referendum of 7 February 1971, and the last canton, Appenzell Innerrhoden, was forced by the Federal Supreme Court to allow women to vote in 1990. The French-speaking canton of Jura separated from Bern in 1979 after a long and sometimes violent struggle.

Voters rejected the European Economic Area in 1992, so relations with the European Union, which surrounds the country, were built through bilateral treaties, including free movement of people and, from 2008, the Schengen area. Switzerland joined the United Nations only in 2002, after a popular vote. In 2014 a narrow majority backed limits on immigration, straining ties with the EU. In 2022 Switzerland adopted EU sanctions against Russia after its invasion of Ukraine, while insisting it remained neutral. In March 2023 the government used emergency powers to arrange the takeover of Credit Suisse, one of its two largest banks, by UBS. A new package of agreements with the EU, known as the Bilaterals III, was signed in Brussels on 2 March 2026 and sent to parliament on 13 March; it is expected to face a referendum. Its small neighbour Liechtenstein has shared a customs union with it since 1923. Switzerland today has about nine million inhabitants and four national languages: German, French, Italian and Romansh.