The Alpine sublime contributed to the Romantic vogue for mountains, but also to the development of Romantic aesthetics and modern subjectivity. This chapter examines a variety of representations of the Alps, including scientific and aesthetic treatises, poems, prose fiction, and painting, as well as more ephemeral documents such as travel journals and visitors’ books. Authors addressed include Rousseau, Ramond, the Duchess of Devonshire, Wordsworth, the Shelleys, Byron, and Ruskin. It argues that the Alpine sublime served as an expression of divine power, human autonomy, and social distinction. Proceeding chronologically, the chapter begins with the Grand Tour, with its scientific, aesthetic, and mythical representations of the Alps, then looks at how the French Revolution appropriated the Alpine sublime, at ways in which Romantic writers responded by making it a private experience, and finally at how tourism helped generalize this modern attitude to mountains.

In Chapter 1, I read the first two acts of Byron’s Swiss lyrical drama, Manfred, as an allegory of the above passage from “ancient” to “modern” liberty, showing how Romantic-period writers could represent the Swiss myth both sympathetically and skeptically in order to maintain a link between classical republicanism and liberalism. Byron’s sympathetic portrait of the chamois hunter, in particular, offers one of the last radical interpretations of Swiss-style republicanism. I then review the historical and ideological origins of the Swiss myth in Switzerland itself, going back to the Renaissance but focusing on eighteenth-century writers whose ideal of a free and happy alpine republic I contrast with the Old Confederacy’s historical realities. While the Swiss myth could express a range of ideological positions before the French Revolution, I show how post-revolutionary authors such as Staël and Karl Ludwig von Haller helped crystallize it as an expression of customary Freiheit rather than of rational liberté.

The poet’s conservative revisioning of the Swiss myth is developed in Chapter Six, which looks at Restoration-period representations of Switzerland, unearthing what Paul Hamilton calls the ‘political imaginary’ of the Restoration. After discussing the country’s socio-political situation as well as changes between the Grand Tour and modern tourism, I explore how Whig and Tory travelers alike, including Byron, the Wordsworths, the Shelleys, Mackintosh, Southey, Samuel Rogers, and Francis Jeffrey tried to revive their liberal hopes in Switzerland after 1814 by revisiting Whiggish topoi, but also by meditating over the ruins of revolution. I then look at Hemans’s and Scott’s late Romantic representations of the Swiss myth as a model of Christian patriotism and domestic attachment, yet one which never completely sheds its residual significance as a democratic trope. Drawing on Switzerland’s medieval past, and notably on the story of William Tell and on the wars of liberation, their texts offer a paradoxical mix of conservative and progressive values, or what I call Restoration republicanism.

In place of a conclusion, I provide a Coda on John Ruskin, the last major British writer to devote so much attention to the Swiss myth. The myth’s belated iteration in many of his works is the culmination of a long cultural movement that idealized and ideologized the Alps. But Ruskin’s writings on Switzerland are also a reaction to modern transformations brought upon by organized tourism, industrialized capitalism, and liberalism, which made it Europe’s only modern democratic republic in 1848. Focusing on Ruskin’s earlier texts, I suggest that his reactionary vision of Switzerland marks the end of a century-and-half republican tradition in which the various, sometimes conflicting figurations of the Swiss myth contributed to a modern liberal discourse and helped imagine a republic for the moderns. Yet by showing how Europe’s elites romanticized the country as a simulacrum of happiness and freedom while at the same time ruining its proverbial virtue through tourism, Ruskin also brings to the fore the contradictions between liberalism and free-market capitalism, providing us with the most conservative, but perhaps also the most radical of all Romantic representations of Switzerland.

Chapter 2 examines the place of the Swiss myth in British Whig ideology, looking at its dual function as residual republican signifier on one hand, and as a form of oppositional discourse on the other. I first survey seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century texts to see the role that Switzerland played in the English republican tradition, then analyze the dialectic between virtue and commerce in a series of progress poems and historical sketches that compare the Swiss republics with France, Italy, and Britain. While earlier Whig writers such as Addison drew on classical republican language to legitimize a more modern, liberal idea of liberty, writers later in the century began to romanticize the democracies of central Switzerland in order to defend popular sovereignty, preparing the way for the century’s most elaborate but also politically radical interpretation of the Swiss myth, Wordsworth’s Descriptive Sketches. Written in the context of the ‘second’ French Revolution of 1792, the poem’s representation of the Swiss myth necessarily falls short of France’s modern democracy, pointing to the growing ideological rift between Freiheit and liberté.

The introduction argues for a relation between the Swiss myth, Romanticism, and the development of modern liberalism. I notably explain and define the terms used in the book, including negative versus positive liberty, republicanism versus liberalism, and Ancient versus Modern liberty. This brings me to a more detailed discussion of the concepts of liberty, popular sovereignty, and representation in the writings of liberal Swiss intellectuals Benjamin Constant, Germaine de Stäel, and, more briefly, Rousseau. His Letters Written from the Mountain, published half-a-century before Constant’s famous speech, already accepts the passing away of Ancient Liberty, and embraces a modern, representative system in which private virtues supersede public ones and not everyone can participate in the res publica. The Genevan Citizen’s demystification of his own native republic and of Swiss republicanism in general attests to the constructed, ideologically-marked nature of the representations that I explore in the rest of this book. The fact that readers and writers wanted to continue believing in Rousseau’s community of equals in the Alps long after he had stopped doing so speaks to the strength of this Romantic desire, and to the lasting power of the Swiss myth.

Chapter 5 focuses on Britain, arguing that Wordsworth represents his native Lake District as a miniature Switzerland in order to appropriate the Swiss myth’s republican energies and to create the simulacrum of an autonomous community in Grasmere. Various texts in verse and prose that Wordsworth composed between 1800 and 1820 respond to the post-revolutionary problem of political sovereignty and the growing demands in Britain for popular rights by developing the comparison between Switzerland and the Lake District, using picturesque conventions to transpose the Alps onto the Lake District. By palimpsestically inscribing his ‘visionary mountain republic’ over his earlier representations of the Alps, and by casting himself as the true representative of the people, Wordsworth can claim a continuity between his past and present self, while at the same time arguing that demands for political reform are a dangerous misrepresentation of the sovereign will.

Chapter 4 also looks at how the French Revolution, and in particular events in Switzerland and the French invasion, transformed the manner in which the Swiss myth was understood and deployed back in Britain. After examining contemporary reports of the 1798 invasion in periodicals and contemporary histories, I argue for a conjunction between invasion fears, apocalyptic discourse, and insinuations of guilt and treachery in various texts, including sermons and prophecies, as well as Coleridge’s “France: an Ode,” then show how the small Forest cantons, or Waldstätten, which had stubbornly fought against the French, were made into the sole custodians of the Swiss myth. I then discuss Wordsworth’s own delayed response in various poems, including The Prelude and the “Subjugation” sonnet. The primitive democracies’ heroic resistance was meant to regenerate Switzerland’s national spirit and the poet’s own disenchanted belief in republicanism, itself crucial to his creativity. The last section looks at a number of other poems and novels written in response to the invasion. As I claim, these often represent the Swiss as complicit in their fate in order to empty the country’s moral landscape and to displace it back home.

Chapter 3 explores the genre of travel writing to illustrate the transformation of the Swiss myth from a progressive to a more conservative narrative. After briefly reviewing the Whig ideology of the Grand Tour, I look at how William Coxe’s various editions of his Sketches of Swisserland responded to two French translations by the republican writers Louis Ramond de Carbonnières and Théophile Mandar, and to a competing travelogue by the radical British expatriate Helen Maria Williams, all of whom struggled to redefine the meaning of republicanism. I argue that these three works exploited the contradictions in Coxe’s text in order to modernize his Whiggish ideal of liberty, and in Williams’s travelogue at least, to make the case for revolution in Switzerland. Centering my analysis on the aristocratic republic of Bern and on the rural democracies of central Switzerland, I look at the various textual strategies that enabled these writers to make Swiss liberty a Whig, then radical, and finally Tory political trope.