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federal strength, indeed, seemed undeniably the Austro-Prussian program.

But a spirit of democratic reconstruction was in the air, heralding the downfall of reaction, however firmly entrenched. Rising amid the Swiss cantonal governments under the impelling force of the movements of 1830 in France and elsewhere, this spirit soon reached the Diet in the tangible shape of a memorial presented on the part of canton Thurgau, supported by Zurich, August 19, 1831, proposing the appointment by a committee to revise the constitution. A year later, July 17, 1832, a preliminary outline was laid before the Diet, drawn up by the celebrated and gifted Pellegrino Rossi, who, as a political exile from his native country, had settled in Geneva, where he taught Roman law at the Academy, later the University. The remaining thirteen members of the committee comprised men of political and scholarly eminence fully representative of the Swiss nation. The new constitutional plan (projet) frankly acknowledged an indebtedness to Napoleon's Mediation Constitution which, in its theory at least, admirably struck a balance between the canton states and the federal body sought to be instituted. After all, said Rossi, the cardinal point for determination is the location of sovereignty-is it cantonal or federal?—

C'est là une question de fait, Messieurs. L'examen des faits nous a conduit à penser que l'idée dominante en Suisse est celle de la souveraineté cantonale. Grâce au progrès des lumières, au besoin fortement senti d'énergie et de dignité nationale, à une connaissance plus approfondie des circonstances générales où la Suisse se trouve placée, les exigences de cette souveraineté sont moins âpres, les susceptibilités moins acerbes, et si elle n'a pas cessé d'être ombrageuse, elle consent peu à peu à regarder les objets de près, elle se roidit moins et cède plus facilement à la voix de la commune partie.

No lesser recognition of the ancient spirit of cantonal independence could have hoped for success at that time, although the present-day Swiss organization is, in its essence, but a development of Rossi's outline finally realized in the constitution of 1848, now revised and amended in the construction of a highly-centralized federal state, rather than a federal aggregation of cantons, in which local sovereignty must ever be a weakening and reactionary influence.

The new constitution in its eleventh article, as completed by the statute of 1859, abolished foreign mercenary service of cantonal contingents, unified, in Article 19, the structure of the Swiss army, and, in Article 74, concentrated the employ of all means looking to the maintenance of independence and neutrality in the hands of the Federal Assembly, whose executive arm is the Federal Council chosen by it every three years. There is thus instituted a self-sustaining government directly responsible to the Swiss people and exercising, if need arise, every energy within Swiss borders.

The constitution, also, expressly raises neutrality to the high level of a fundamental and integral principle of governmental action, elimination in 1857 of the Prussian King's dangerous claim to Switzerland's western borders as Prince of Neuchâtel and Count of Valangin, the shadows of autocratic interference with Swiss democratic progress and development vanished utterly away.

Two years later, however, in 1859, and again in 1870, the new Swiss Government was obliged to face the inevitable problems arising from war between its neighbors. Here, nevertheless, it showed itself equal to every emergency and possessed of resources enabling it to successfully meet all threatened danger to neutral obligations or privileges.

Thus it was that when in the opening spring days of 1859 northern Italy prepared to break loose from intolerable Austrian oppression, the Federal Council addressed, on March 14th, a note to the several signatory Powers of the Vienna and Paris treaties, declaring a determination on the part of the Swiss Government to maintain the territorial integrity and neutrality as theretofore recognized and guaranteed:-"the right," said the Council, "to remain neutral belongs to us in any event, since no state is obliged, apart from express treaty, to engage in the conflicts of others. A recognition by the Powers did not therefore confer neutrality, but rather compels the signatories of 1815 to defend any violation should such occur." The treaties, also, added the Council, grant Switzerland the right, though not imposing the duty, to occupy neutralized Sardinian (Savoyard) territory should need arise to safeguard Swiss interests by such action; in any event the Council would not move without

consulting Sardinia and the Powers. From all these latter suitable replies were received, save from Austria, which Court, with a cynical contempt for its clear treaty obligations so solemnly incurred in 1815, vaguely announced that it would respect Swiss neutrality in so far as respected by others:

Qu'il respectera religieusement la neutralité Suisse tant que la Conférération elle-même l'observera et la fera observer par tous les moyens en son pouvoir.

Here the burden of compelling respect is laid on the Swiss, whereas the Vienna-Paris treaties imposed this on the signatory Powers.

Thus summoned to defensive measures, the Swiss Government prepared to repel any wilful violation of its frontiers, although, so brief was the contest along the plain of the Pô between the Italo-French forces and the Austrians, that this task proved to be of an essentially formal nature merely. A brief notice of the chief incidents will not be devoid of interest; the geographical features involved are also important.

In the spring of 1859, when France prepared to assist Sardinia against Austria, the plains of Lombardy were accessible from France by three practically desirable ways: the sea route via Genoa and the Alpine passes of Mont Genèvre and Mont Cenis. The sea was selected by Napoleon for the transport of three army corps commanded by him in person, Bourbaki's command being sent over Mont Genèvre, while the remaining troops, led by Trochu after Bonat's sudden death, went by Mont Cenis. The railroad facilities existing at that time were meagre enough, communication by this means stopping far short of the main Alpine chain.

From the standpoint of military permissibility, regard being had to the claims of Swiss neutralization, the way by rail to Grenoble and thence by road past the great fortress of Briançon over Mont Genèvre via Oulx to Susa at the head of the Pô valley, offered no violation of neutrality, the entire route lying far to the south of either Switzerland or neutralized Savoy. With the Mont Cenis route, however, the case was otherwise. This latter highway, then as now an example of Napoleon's road construction at its very best, started from Lyon on

the Rhone and ran thence by the ancient Savoyard frontier town of Pont de Beauvoisin through the wonderful rock galleries at les Échelles to Chambéry; here it met a rail line leading eastwardly from Culoz junction, a station on the Lyon-Geneva railway, and from which junction passengers and troops coming by rail from Lyon could be carried to Chambéry, and thence as far as St. Jean de Maurienne in the Valley of the Arc, the railroad being built along the stream parallel to the great Mont Cenis roadway, which continues northeasterly up the deep-lying Arc valley past Modane (where the present Mont Cenis tunnel under the Col de Fréjus begins) to Lanslebourg, and thence turning abruptly south across the main chain of the Alps on the northerly slopes of Mont Cenis and joins the Mont Genèvre highway at Susa.

In transporting his division by rail from Lyon to St. Jean de Maurienne, whence it was to reach Italy by the road over the Mont Cenis pass, Trochu was probably aware that for a few miles eastwardly from Culoz junction and along a part of the north shore of the Lac de Bourget, the rail line lay just within the southerly frontier of neutralized Savoy, although inasmuch as this neutrality frontier, stretching from Mont Blanc to the Rhone, has never been accurately surveyed, it was not, nor is it now, possible to determine whether the French here committed a technical violation of Savoyard-Swiss neutrality. In any event, the troops were traversing not merely allied territory, but territory already promised by Sardinia to France in the secret treaty signed at Plombières in July, 1858. Even Austria was content with a general announcement at the time, and a note in the following year to the Swiss Government stating the probable fact of violation, an announcement, however, which went no further; while in the following November, 1859, the Swiss Federal Council proposed to thereafter consider the few miles of rail affected as lying outside neutral borders. It is, moreover, not to be overlooked that France might easily have elected to raise far more serious questions by marching troops across the wild stretches of northerly Savoy to the pass of the Little St. Bernard, or even across Swiss territory proper to the Simplon by the great highway leading from below Geneva along the Savoyard side of the lake.

The problems confronting the Swiss Government eleven years later in the Franco-Prussian War were, however, of a far more onerous nature. Keenly alive from the outset of that struggle to the responsibilities imposed upon it, the Federal Assembly on July 18, 1870, issued a general declaration of neutrality and at once took all needful measures to place the country in a condition of military preparedness. In accordance with constitutional provisions, a general was elected to command the citizen-army, the choice falling on Herzog, chief artillery instructor, whose ability was to prove itself equal to every emergency. Immediate mobilization provided adequate forces along the German and French frontiers, and when in January, 1871, Bourbaki's Army of the East determined to retire from Besançon towards Pontarlier in the Jura, with Lyon as its objective, Herzog was able to place his troops in readiness for a possible move on the part of the French over the Swiss border. To this latter step Clinchant, Bourbaki's successor in command, was at least compelled, since Manteuffel had blocked the planned retreat southward, and Clinchant must now either face battle under disadvantageous circumstances or cross the Swiss border. But here an apparently serious difficulty arose, since the armistice concluded on January 28th would, in the opinion of the Federal Council, render internment out of the question. But upon learning that the northeasterly sections of France (Côte-d'Or, Jura, Doubs, Belfort) were not comprised in the armistice, Herzog was allowed to conclude, at the mountain village of Les Vervières, at five o'clock in the morning of February 1st, a brief agreement with Clinchant, the exhausted French forces, 90,314 in number, streaming through the town during the actual signing of the document and amid the trying environment of midwinter dawn in a climate of extraordinary severity. The disarmed troops were mustered in part easterly through the Val de Travers, through Neuchâtel to northern Switzerland, and in part to the southward through Vallorbes, a station on the present railway line between Paris and Lausanne, to the districts about Lake Geneva. They were all repatriated at the close of March, the French Government refunding the cost of their maintenance, some twelve million francs. Switzerland suffered no invasion or violation of its neutrality, nor was this happy immu

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