August 1 has been a public holiday for less than 30 years and only became a national holiday at the end of the 19th century. However, it commemorates a date more than seven hundred years old.
Historical return on this particular day in a Switzerland where the 1st of March in Neuchâtel or the 23rd of June in the Jura are often as important.
When modern Switzerland was founded in 1848, the country had no official national holiday. The 8th of November was generally regarded as the founding day of the Old Confederation, because according to tradition the compatriots of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden would have met on the Rütli to take the oath on the “Wednesday before the Saint-Martin” in 1307.
Liberals and conservatives reconciled
The first federal August 1 holiday therefore took place only in 1891. Already in the 80s of the 19th century, August 1 slowly established itself as a new “birthday”, wrote historian Urs Altermatt in a article on the federal holiday. The date refers to the Federal Pact, dated “early August 1291”.
According to specialists, this development had political reasons: the modern federal state needed, for its internal stability, a patriotic ideology which reconciled liberal and conservative Switzerland for almost half a century, explains Urs Altermatt.
The historian Georg Kreis argues in the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland that it was preferred to assume that the birth of the Confederation was due to a legally accomplished state creation rather than a revolutionary plot.
The reconciliation corresponded to the political trend of the time: that same year 1891, a representative of the Catholic-Conservatives, Josef Zemp, was elected for the first time to the Federal Council.
Annual bell ringing from 1899
Thus, 1891 marked the 600th anniversary of the signing of the Federal Pact. The Bernese, who were planning a celebration of the 700th anniversary of the city of Bern in the same year anyway and were organizing the Federal Festival of Singers, launched the idea of a national celebration of the jubilee in the capital.
At first, however, the federal holiday of 1891 remained an isolated event: an annual rehearsal was not fixed until seven years later. From 1899, the Federal Council asked the cantons to ring the bells on the evening of August 1st.
Initially, August 1 remained a normal business day. It was not until a popular vote in 1993 that August 1st was declared a non-working day throughout Switzerland. The initiative of the Swiss Democrats (DS) was accepted by 83.8% of voters.
This article has been published automatically. Source: ats
