The Swiss cantons, remote local fiefs which managed to adopt self-rule against their Habsburg overlords, gained de facto independence in the 14th-16th centuries thanks to the inaccessibility of their Alpine landscape and their effective use of civil militias. Swiss mercenaries became an important feature of early modern warfare (surviving in the Vatican’s Swiss Guards), in the process also leading, around 1650, to the diagnosis of extreme homesickness as a debilitating condition among them. “Nostalgia” or the “Swiss disease”, curable only by a return to the native air of one’s home region, became not only a determining element in the Swiss ethnotype (still activated in Johanna Spyri’s Heidi books, 1880-81), but also an anticipation of the Romantic doctrine that homesickness, as a fundamental and universal human affect, expressed the innate bond between the individual and his/her homeland.

The Alpine scenery became another central element in Swiss self-identification. The emerging aesthetics of the Sublime altered the appreciation of craggy mountains (until then seen as threatening, inhospitable and barren landscapes) towards a celebration of their awe-inspiring grandeur and majesty. Starting with the poem Die Alpen (1729) by the physician/poet Albrecht von Haller (1708–1777), medical thought stressed the morally and medically invigorating value of the mountains’ clear air, frugal but wholesome lifestyle and restorative herbs. Over the following century, this prepared a new prosperity for the Swiss lands as a destination for alpinists, Romantic tourists and valetudinarians.

At the same time, the spirit of Enlightenment Patriotism was firmly established in the sociability of the Swiss cities and evinced by men like Johann Georg Zimmermann (1728–1795; Von dem Nationalstolze, 1758), Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1801, the physiognomist) and the pedagogue Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. In these circles, the Swiss self-image acquired the additional value of a stalwart dedication to liberty and a determined rejection of any foreign-imposed tyranny, demonstrated time and again from the days of the ancient Helveti to the present. The cult of William Tell took hold and was hugely amplified by his treatment as a paradigmatic “hero of his nation’s freedom” by Schiller’s play of 1804. Other Swiss forerunners of Romantic historicism were the painter Johann Heinrich Füssli (Zürich 1741 – London 1825; known and celebrated in England as “Fuseli”), and the eminent philologists and critics Johann Jacob Bodmer and Johann Jacob Breitinger  (Thesaurus Historicae Helveticae, 1735). Bodmer and Breitinger were among the first to develop an antiquarian interest in medieval German literary texts such as the Nibelungenlied and the chivalric courtly-love poetry of the Minnesänger (Proben der alten schwäbischen Poesie des 13. Jahrhunderts aus der Manessischen Sammlung, 1748; Fabeln aus den Zeiten der Minnesinger, 1757).

The ancient oath-bound confederacy of the Swiss cantons (Eidgenossenschaft) had by the late 18th century grown from the three original cantons (Urkantone) of 1291 to an area roughly corresponding to the modern-day country. Dedicated to a “perpetual armed neutrality”, its sovereignty had been recognized in 1648. In its expansion, Romance/Italian-speaking populations near the Alpine passes had joined, and French-speaking ones in the west (between Fribourg and Lac Leman, but as yet not fully including Geneva); there was also a complex division between the power of the main city-republics and their hinterlands and the rural cantons. All this was swept away in the upheavals of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic period. A French conquest took place in 1798 and a “Helvetian Republic” was set up. The restoration of 1815 saw Geneva definitively included in what was now a formal confederacy bound by a mutual treaty.

The general European tensions of the mid-19th century between liberal nationalists and confessional conservatives did not leave Switzerland unaffected. The conservative cantons declared a “separate federation” (Sonderbund), whose resistance against Liberal militias escalated into a brief war (1847). At its conclusion, the liberal cantons carried the day, and in 1848 a constitution came into effect which in some measure strengthened the power of the Confederation against the traditional and still-strong sovereignty of the constituent cantons. The Confederation expressed its collective identity powerfully in introducing a Swiss currency in 1850, in fostering the “armed neutrality” doctrine through the common Swiss army, and in its furtherance of the railways. Although these originally developed locally, there was also a policy to connect with longer-distance European locations. The line from Zürich and Baden was opened in 1847, establishing a connection with Paris; the Gotthard railway, celebrated for its complex tunnelling and height negotiations, in 1882. A state-wide railway society was formed in 1909, consolidating the image of Switzerland as a well-ordered and easily-accessible tourist destination in sublime scenery.

Geneva was a port of call for Philhellenes and Risorgimento exiles, and home to the likes of Sismondi and Madame de Staël, and, after Napoleon III’s coup d’état, many French left-wing intellectuals like Edgar Quinet and Eugène Sue took refuge in French-speaking Switzerland. But Romantic Nationalism in Switzerland was mainly developed by the ethnically German portions of the population; it was expressed mainly in the historicist cult of William Tell and in associational life (choral societies, sports festivals) both in the cities and in the rural cantons. Nationality-affirming Festspiele were developed by Gottfried Keller; his rustic-realistic literature has a strongly Swiss anchoring, like that of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer’s historical novel Jürg Jenatsch (1876). But Swiss-German literature fits within the regionalist bandwidth of German-language literature as a whole, as do the associational and cultural frames of rustic-sentimental painting, choral societies, sports and commemorations. Similarly, the French-language work of Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz (1878–1947) is a Swiss inflection of, rather than a national counterpart to, French petite patrie regionalism in a modernist vein. The Swiss cultivation of culture, stressing historical antecedents, landscape and emerging state institutions rather than ethnolinguistic factors, was largely a cultural affirmation of state-building policies; in combination with the long-standing policy of armed neutrality (strongly argued by Carl Spitteler in 1914), it contributed above all to a self-image of Swiss exceptionalism as being a “case apart” (Sonderfall).