II. Cultural, Political, and Theological Milieu

In 1797–1798, armies of the French Revolution pushed eastward to Switzerland. The Old Swiss Confederation collapsed in the turmoil, and from its ashes rose the Helvetic Republic (1798–1803). Basel became the first of the thirteen old cantons to break with the ancien régime when in January 1798 it granted full legal equality to all its citizens, an act welcomed with “indescribable rejoicing by the rural populace.”Footnote ⁹ Inside the city's prominent red sandstone, two-towered Cathedral, a service was held to open the celebratory “Festival of Brotherly Unity between the People of the City and of the Countryside in Basel;” following this, a liberty tree was planted in the square outside.Footnote ¹⁰ But the new realities were short-lived; “certain repositories of nostalgia” resisted for quite some time the forces of modernization, political as well as cultural, social, and theological.Footnote ¹¹ The Act of Mediation in 1803, in which Napoleon dissolved the republic and replaced it with a rather pro-French confederation, and the Restoration of 1814 and Federal Treaty of 1815, a mostly reactionary throwback to the pre-1798 order, effectively did away with the newly won rights while granting recently abolished privileges once more to the elite.Footnote ¹²

Political power in Basel rested with the “gentleman's guilds,” but was controlled in practice by a wealthy merchant elite. The philologist J. J. Bachofen, though a member of that very same wealthy merchant elite, would speak critically of the “boring factory town” and the bourgeois way of life of the local citizenry: “our Basel philistines.”Footnote ¹³ Though small relative to other urban centers in Europe, Basel was still the largest and wealthiest city in German-speaking Switzerland and for some time remained in the eyes of many a bastion of backward political conservatism.

Such was the view of Friedrich Engels, for instance, who expressed relief upon passing through “pious Basel” (the town's popular sobriquet) on his way to Italy in 1841.Footnote ¹⁴ “Such a barren town, full of frock-coats and cocked hats, philistines and patricians and Methodists, where nothing is fresh and vigorous but the trees around the red-brick cathedral . . . . Such a hole-in-the-corner town, with all the ugliness of the middle ages and none of their beauty.” The Rhine itself, Engels reported, is narrow and seems to be afraid of the city, “so slowly does it crawl down dale.” Only after traversing the outermost spur of the Jura Mountains, from which he could at last spot the Alps, did Engels feel that he was really in Switzerland. Once he had put Basel firmly in the distance, the sights and sounds grew more charming to him. “The language sounds more beautiful, more refined than the Basel dialect, to which the portliness of patrician city life has lent a materialistic, uncouth broadness; the countenances become freer, more open, more vivacious, the cocked hat gives way to the round hat, the long, trailing coat-tails to the short velvet jacket.”Footnote ¹⁵

Engels's bleak account of the city, compared with his equally favorable report on the rest of Switzerland, especially the “strikingly beautiful landscape” of Zurich, had more to do with contemporary politics than gloomy merchants and underwhelming scenery. Zurich was a hub of progressive ideas in the German-speaking side; as Lionel Gossman has observed, even Zurich's city walls, symbols of the old regime, came down in the 1830s, signaling the open and forward-thinking character of the town. The majority of Basel's population, by contrast, resided within medieval walls that would encircle the city for another two decades.Footnote ¹⁶ The epithet “Basel the rich” likewise enjoyed considerable popularity in the press, splayed across the pages of not only local but also western and central European newspapers from Geneva to Augsburg, as did phrases such as “Basel, home of the ‘moneyed-aristocracy.’”Footnote ¹⁷

Basel's conservatism was hardly confined to politics. Its geographical position on the crossroads of three countries, cherished traditions of Reformation humanism—it had been a famous epicenter of printing and scholarship—and the rise of pietism lent the “pious, patrician city on the Rhine” a somewhat anti-Enlightenment outlook.Footnote ¹⁸ After witnessing the Swiss victory in the Swabian War back in 1499, Basel had reluctantly joined the Swiss Confederation in 1501 for protection against the Habsburgs and France but continued to foster a distinctive character in relation to the other Swiss cantons, as well as neighboring France and Germany, until late in the nineteenth century. Many Baslers saw their homeland as an essentially autonomous republic operating within the Swiss Confederation, an idealized image of classical antiquity and the harmonious Greek polis.Footnote ¹⁹

But the Restoration, along with the spread of reform movements elsewhere, also provoked streams of liberal dissent, however much these differed in force or precise inclination. Three loosely knit circles warrant mention here. The first was centered to some extent around the city's mayor Johann Heinrich Wieland (1758–1838), who began his tenth term when he assumed office in 1831.Footnote ²⁰ Educational reform became one of Wieland's great accomplishments. Under his aegis, the University of Basel had successfully navigated dire straits brought on by calls for its dissolution; though it had to forfeit its last remaining medieval privileges and subject itself to state control in its reorganization in 1818, ultimate disaster was averted and the doors stayed open.Footnote ²¹ Wieland also threw his weight behind efforts in the countryside, which led to the erection of a secondary school in Liestal, a training institute for teachers in Muttenz, and the passing of school reform laws throughout the 1820s.Footnote ²² His administration accepted the need for change, albeit measured, in the post-Napoleonic world. Wieland himself, Gossman has noted, “had served in various administrative capacities under the Helvetic Republic, had worked for the abolition of the subject status of the inhabitants of the country districts dependent on Basel, [and] was a champion of free trade (one of his brothers was a merchant in Nantes, another in Brussels).” Under his government, leaders of the city-state “tried to steer a cautious, pragmatic course, introducing moderate changes and avoiding counterrevolutionary extremism,” while still retaining in some sense traditionally elite authority structures.Footnote ²³ For these efforts he has been called an exemplar of emergent “humanistic-liberal” attitudes coupled with “authoritative patriarchalism.”Footnote ²⁴

One also discerns another “humanistic-liberal” group, though characterized less by “top-down” enactments of reform. Dating back to the late Enlightenment, concentrated pursuits of public renewal and liberal expansion led to the formation of a series of important reformist institutions in the city: societies, unions, periodicals, and others. These efforts, broadly speaking, struck a moderate oppositional voice against the city's entrenched patrician families. Karl Burckhardt-Paravicini (1795–1850), one generation removed from the city's primary advocates for the growth of commerce rather than “enlightenment,” illustrates this well.Footnote ²⁵ Elected to the head of the civil court in 1821, he attracted around him progressive sons of Basel's elite, many of whom studied in German universities before returning home; detractors mocked them as the “League of Virtue,” alluding to the Prussian nationalist league of the same name, as well as to Ernst Moritz Arndt's “German Society” and various German student fraternities.Footnote ²⁶ Burckhardt-Paravicini would serve as the city's mayor in the late phase of the Troubles, from January to August 1833, and subsequently served eight terms as Basel-Stadt's mayor between 1833 and 1845.Footnote ²⁷

The “League” joined up with Basel's Tuesday Society, which gathered around Christoph Bernoulli (1782–1863), attracting city councilors, judges, professors, secondary school teachers, and clergy, meeting every fortnight for spirited religious, political, and cultural discussions. The tenor of the dialogues found expression in the broader public's nickname for the group as the “Dissenter” or “Disputer Society.” Members called for an overhaul to the cantonal administration, refashioning the government along more “rationalized” lines. Health care, the court system, trade restrictions, and educational improvements remained regular topics of interest.Footnote ²⁸ Since 1826 the Tuesday Society had circulated a newsletter under the title “Communications to Promote the Common Good,” with the aim of “instructing and spreading more and more among us the right views on the most important matters of a civil society,” as the maiden issue proclaimed. Religious criticism also featured prominently.Footnote ²⁹

Throughout the 1820s and early 1830s, related reform societies in Basel sprouted up across fields, such as the various new initiatives of the Society for the Promotion of the Good and the Public Welfare, whose origins can be traced back to the industriousness of the German-speaking Swiss Protestant advocate of modern commercial republicanism, Isaak Iselin (1728–1782), who had also founded the Swiss national Helvetic Society and was Basel's erstwhile secretary of state.Footnote ³⁰ Other Basel associations included the Literary Society and the Congress on Natural Science Research, which gained the attention of scholars across Europe.Footnote ³¹ Similarly, the theologian W. M. L. de Wette (1780–1849) established the important Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift in 1823 and used its pages to help transform the university into a leading center of scholarly activity aligned with the latest critical conversations taking place in Prussia and elsewhere in German-speaking Europe.

A third and much smaller circle pushed further. For the so-called “radical liberals,” the reversals of the Restoration and Federal Treaty functioned as an important source of inspiration. Across a number of the Swiss cantons, outspoken dissidents began to organize and advocate for full-fledged modernization. Full popular sovereignty gradually became a rallying cry—seen, for instance, in the lectures of the revolutionary Wilhelm Snell (1789–1851), law professor at the University of Basel from 1821—eventually hailed in the twentieth century as “the most important theorist of Swiss radicalism”—and his colleague, the popular new chair in philosophy Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler (1780–1866), who moved to the university in the spring of 1830 and was appointed its rector the following year.Footnote ³² Among their students was a young Stephan Gutzwiller (1802–1875); we shall return to these figures momentarily.

Basel's religious environment on the eve of the Troubles also contained various streams, sometimes flowing into one another. Still prominent was the tradition of “moderate orthodoxy” or “rational orthodoxy,” associated in earlier ages with the Basel theologian Samuel Werefenls (1657–1740), which strove simultaneously to relax confessional boundaries and strengthen pan-Protestant unity around key “foundations of the faith.”Footnote ³³ Hieronymus Falkeisen (1758–1838), since 1816 the Antistes or highest ecclesiastical official in the Basel Reformed Church, essentially represented this position. He had long resisted what he considered dangerous Enlightenment trends, particularly the “rationalism” of the German lands. Though he had reached his eighties by the outbreak of the Troubles, he remained active in church life.Footnote ³⁴ A very small minority of pastors, such as the elderly Johann Jakob Fäsch (1752–1832) and Markus Lutz (1772–1835), gave voice, nevertheless, to progressive tenets of “Enlightenment theology” or “neology.”Footnote ³⁵ Characteristic was Fäsch's “Festival of Brotherly Unity” sermon in the Cathedral. “O freedom and equality!” he proclaimed. “You are the most glorious possessions of this earthly world, the most glittering crowns of a people, the strongest pillars of a state; upon you is built the bliss of majestic temples, whose battlements rise in this sanctuary of the deity, in whose halls the nations of the earth rejoice!”Footnote ³⁶

Yet it was pietism and its variants that predominated—with the caveat that the “Falkeisen position” bled over into pietism, as well. Two strands had coalesced in the late eighteenth century. The first sprang from Hieronymous Annoni (1697–1770), a Swiss Reformed preacher on the outskirts in Muttenz. The second owed to the influx of Moravian Brethren from northern Germany. Count Zinzendorf (1700–1760) had made frequent trips to Basel in order to bring the Moravian and Annoni followers into one large community, though certain differences persisted. The founding of the German Christian Society in 1780 consolidated those inroads. Increasingly, the society counted members of Basel's theological faculty among its supporters, including Falkeisen. By 1816, it had spawned the Mission School, an extraordinarily influential training institute that sent missionaries as far as Russia, India, China, and across the New World. Related pietist “revivals” similarly began to gain traction in the neighboring southern German regions, including Moravian settlements in Lutheran Baden and Württemberg and the Bavarian Allgäu. Exchanges between these provinces and Basel, Zurich, the regions around Lake Geneva, Lausanne, and Vevey also led to the establishment of important charitable works. Many, like the Württemberger Christian Friedrich Spittler (1782–1867), operated at the interface. Spittler had founded the Mission School and spearheaded activities as secretary of the German Christian Society in Basel, having previously engaged in missionary work as a tract and Bible distributor up the Rhine.Footnote ³⁷ Basel's rural regions also experienced small separatist and apocalyptic movements, such as the “Nazarenes” who gathered around the silk weaver and self-proclaimed Theosophist prophet Johann Jakob Wirz (1778–1858).Footnote ³⁸

Collectively, the culture of Reformation humanism and the more recent conservative and enthusiast presence meant, according to the liberal leaning Karl Rudolf Hagenbach (1801–1874), that Basel was “hardly disturbed by the great developments in German theology. The Storm and Stress [Sturm und Drang] period of rationalism in its various phases passed by the Basel church and university like a thunderstorm, which was only observed from a distance . . . . History of doctrine remained a completely undeveloped field. Neither Semler's criticism of the biblical canon, nor Kant's Critique of Pure Reason unsettled Basel from the glory of its inheritance from its fathers.”Footnote ³⁹ Jacob Burckhardt the elder (1785–1854), father of the famous historian of the same name and an influential ecclesiastical leader in the city—he succeeded Falkeisen as Antistes in 1838—thus wrote in 1829, “Theology students do not have it easy, because learning [Wissenschaft] and faith [Glaube] are so far apart from one another. In the interior of the student, this must lead eventually to an internal contradiction, which can endanger their spiritual lives.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Depictions of affairs on the ground could lend some additional support to such opinions. E. W. Hengstenberg (1802–1869), who would become a leading conservative figure in theology and politics in Berlin from the 1830s, spent 1823–1824 in Basel; though a young radical at the time, he taught oriental studies at the German Christian Society. “From a theological standpoint, things are not at their best in Basel,” he reported. “The clergy are ultra-orthodox and very intolerant. I have visited several clergy who spoke of nothing but the temptations of the devil and the like . . . . For all these people, de Wette, who is greatly respected by many, is a thorn in the flesh. They claim that he is not a Christian . . . and seek in many ways to malign him.”Footnote ⁴¹

The “thorn in the flesh” was W. M. L. de Wette, the biblical scholar, theologian, and student of the Kantian philosopher J. F. Fries, who had expressed radical views in theology and politics. He had anticipated Strauss's views on biblical criticism, seeing much of the Pentateuch as myth, and Christology, interpreting Christ's resurrection as a symbol rather than a historical event. Christian dogma, for de Wette, effectively pictured the ethical ideas of Fries's critical philosophy, principally freedom and ethical autonomy, which might be realized in a republican state.Footnote ⁴² He was joined by the less radical but still self-consciously “modern” church historian and theologian Hagenbach, who rose to become the dominant exponent of “mediating theology” across the greater part of the nineteenth century, attempting to hold together and mediate between historical Christianity and modern scientific consciousness.Footnote ⁴³ The two had joined Basel's theological faculty in the early 1820s. While the conservative and pietist reactions against de Wette came in spurts, their fevered pitch was present already from the beginning and continued in the early 1830s. But this is to get ahead of the story.

III. The University

In this multifaceted context, one insightful way into the Troubles is through a dinner party. Midway through September 1830, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) sat down to eat in Basel with a small, accomplished circle. Burckhardt père remarked afterward that “the greatest teachers of German theology” sat round the table. Guests included the decorated liberal professors at the University of Basel and the Pädagogium, the distinct Basel institution that served as a two- or three-year post-Gymnasium preparatory college and “finishing school”: the philosopher, Troxler; the doyen of Old Testament studies, de Wette; and the language specialist, Alexandre Vinet (1797–1847).Footnote ⁴⁴

Before his arrival in Basel, Troxler had studied with G. W. F. Hegel and F. W. J. Schelling in Jena, distinguished himself as a physician in Vienna, where he counted Beethoven as a close companion, made significant advances in ophthalmology, and spoke for progressive Swiss interests at the Congress of Vienna in 1815.Footnote ⁴⁵ Vinet, a moralist thinker from Lausanne, ordained in the Basel Reformed Church but never a parish-holder, was an expert in French literature and had earlier in the year begun a series of promising contributions to the Parisian Le Semeur, a journal on modern religion, politics, philosophy, and literature; later publications on religious liberty and the state would earn him the lasting admiration of no less a figure than Lord Acton. He would eventually become known as the “Swiss Pascal” who exercised a strong influence on the religious “Awakening” movement in Basel and helped organize a Reformed “free church” in the Canton of Vaud.Footnote ⁴⁶

De Wette, in turn, had established himself as a leading biblical scholar, though his chief claim to fame rested elsewhere. Once the colleague of Schleiermacher in Berlin, he had been expelled from Prussia for ostensibly defending the actions of Karl Sand, the infamous murderer of the playwright August von Kotzebue, by writing a consoling letter to Sand's mother. Sand's act fostered cooperation between Prussian and Austrian governments and precipitated the Karlsbad Decrees of 1819, which sought to quell nationalist student fraternities for inciting revolution, threatened liberal university professors, and expanded censorship of the press, thereby setting into motion the Austrian Chancellor Klemens von Metternich's far-reaching reactionary policies throughout the German Confederation.Footnote ⁴⁷ Seeking asylum, de Wette received a call from Basel's theological faculty in 1822—extended only after a six-month debate and a narrow vote of eight-to-six in favor—where local pietists promptly decried him as a “precursor of the Antichrist.”Footnote ⁴⁸ His emigration to the Swiss city on the Rhine eventually elicited from the king of Prussia a decree in May 1824, which disallowed the subjects of the monarchy from studying at the “nest of demagogues,” safe-haven of “liberals,” “despots,” and “tyrants,” namely the University of Basel.Footnote ⁴⁹ The city-republic thus came to occupy a significant position in the broader German and Austrian campaign against “revolutionary machinations and demagogic associations” under the legal framework of the Karlsbad Decrees and the Vienna Final Act of 1820.

The prodigious “father of modern theology,” Schleiermacher, at the time of his only visit to Basel, had just completed the second edition of his acclaimed magnum opus in dogmatics, The Christian Faith (1830). He ventured south in order to enjoy a short holiday and make a few new acquaintances but principally to visit with de Wette and Hagenbach, an erstwhile student. While the reunion itself was more or less a happy one, the mood grew increasingly unsettled. As Hagenbach reflected in a local paper, the Neujahrsblatt, “Severe winter's cold, devastating diseases, floods, seismic tremors, wars, revolutions, they are—who will deny it?—the beloved stories of so many chroniclers and their readers . . . . And now, to all these chapters, whether at home or abroad, the year 1830 provides a grave headline.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The winter of 1829–1830 was the city's coldest in one hundred years. Bitter chills gave way to widespread and fatal flooding in the spring and summer, punctuated in the fall with a dramatic outbreak of cholera.Footnote ⁵¹ While coming to grips with catastrophic environmental conditions, Basel received startling reports of the “Three Glorious Days” of July 1830 in Paris and of Charles X's deposing.Footnote ⁵² In Basel and elsewhere in Switzerland, the news caused anxiety and panic among many conservatives, who feared a reprisal of 1789. But for a generation of liberals and radicals determined to bring an end to the policies of reaction in place since the restoration of Swiss independence in 1814 and Federal Treaty of 1815, not to mention the Karlsbad Decrees within the German Confederation, it served as a “lightning rod, igniting passions and inspiring the hope that the new age of progress and reform was dawning.”Footnote ⁵³

At the center of the fracas, in many ways, was Basel's university—and several of the dinner party guests. In the spirit of Wieland's “humanistic-liberal” expansion, the university had begun to fill professorial chairs and other positions with German exile intellectuals, many of whom had taken refuge in Switzerland, long a haven for whose with prior associations with student fraternities or other radical groups denounced as promoters of “demagoguery.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Some had stints at Basel's Pädagogium or Bernoulli's innovative high school, known as the Philotechnisches Institut. In addition to de Wette, the university recruited the likes of classicist Franz Dorotheus Gerlach (1793–1876) and German studies scholar Karl Sartorius (1793–1835) in 1819; historians Friedrich Körtum (1788–1858) and Friedrich Brömmel (1791–1856) in 1820; jurist Karl (Charles) Follen (1796–1840), natural scientist Lorenz Oken (1779–1851), and legal scholar Wilhelm Snell in 1821; anatomist Carl Gustav Jung (1794–1864) in 1822; philosopher Karl Seebold (1794–1867) and anatomist Wilhelm Wesselhoft (1794–1858) in 1823; Snell's younger brother, philosopher Ludwig Snell (1785–1854), in 1827; and indeed still others. The flock of émigrés, many with theology backgrounds and interests, included original members of the Giessen Blacks and the covert Youth League in Germany, participants in the infamous Wartburg Festival of 1817, and other “dangerous” radicals seeking asylum, who fled Germany for political reasons.Footnote ⁵⁵ Körtum, for instance, had once been implicated as a spy. Follen had mentored student radicals in Giessen and Jena—the young theology student Karl Sand among them—and fled Germany in the wake of Kotzebue's murder. He continued to cooperate with German “demagogic” societies, even once in Switzerland. In late 1824, he fled Basel, worried that government officials would turn him over to the authorities of the German Confederation. Ultimately, he settled in America, becoming the first professor of German at Harvard in 1830.Footnote ⁵⁶

Throughout the German Rhineland, government officials unwittingly courted a “culture of rumor” in the months that followed the 1830 July Revolution by prohibiting press reports from mentioning uprisings or public protests.Footnote ⁵⁷ Yet Basel stood somewhat aloof from such conspiracy fears, themselves “born of a mixture of ideology, expediency, and genuine anxiety” toward the threat of violent revolution that plagued Metternich and his allies.Footnote ⁵⁸ As a distinct Swiss city-republic that deemed itself free, sovereign, and autonomous, Basel abstained from activities of its neighbors to the northeast, and avoided the investigative commissions set up across state and federal levels in the German lands, such as the wide-ranging and widely feared Central Investigative Commission established in Mainz.Footnote ⁵⁹ In fact, Basel repeatedly resisted calls to extradite the supposed criminals, instead offering them the right to lecture at the university, where many went on to have lengthy and successful careers. This stance brought “much anguish” to Swiss federal officials frustrated with Basel's obstinacy in the matter.Footnote ⁶⁰ Several of the recruits even received election to the rectorship of the university, as did Jung in 1828, Wilhelm Snell in 1830, Brömmel in 1836, de Wette in 1823, 1829, 1834–1835, and 1849, and others.Footnote ⁶¹ They also swelled the ranks of the associations that had sprung up in the wake of the Helvetic Republic and burgeoned in the 1820s. Efforts of the “demagogues” and the reform-minded societies pushed the city's elite to adopt more flexible attitudes that, it is nevertheless clear, did not always emerge; there were limits.Footnote ⁶²

For advocating liberal or heterodox theological doctrines under the banner of critical scholarship, Basel's pietist leaders denounced foreigners like de Wette and Follen. Hagenbach, who had a reputation for being mild mannered (and was, importantly, a native Basler), attempted to soften some of the grievances, as did Vinet, with varying degrees of success. During his first years in Basel, de Wette's most vocal critic had been Spittler, by then already a titan of the modern Protestant missionary movement. In his leadership roles at Basel's German Christian Society and Mission School, Spittler effectively prevented his students and associates from attending de Wette's theological and biblical studies lectures at the university. He compiled an anthology of “blasphemous” passages from de Wette's theological writings and circulated it throughout the canton. Many passages were German translations from de Wette's Latin texts, primarily concerning Christology.Footnote ⁶³ De Wette pleaded, in response, that he had written for experts, which was why he did not use the German vernacular, and thus in all likelihood had been entirely misunderstood by Spittler's lay audience. Spittler retorted that long ago, Martin Luther had done away with a two-tiered system of Christians.Footnote ⁶⁴ The Spittler–de Wette affair fanned flames of public distrust against the university and the Prussian “heretics” it harbored.Footnote ⁶⁵ But the outbreak of the Troubles further precipitated an apocalyptic mood.Footnote ⁶⁶

IV. The Troubles, Theology, and the Churches

In the weeks and months that followed the impressively attended repast, the winds of change that toppled the Bourbons in Paris swept across Switzerland: Aargau, St. Gallen, Ticino, Zurich, Schaffhausen, Fribourg, Solothurn, Vaud, Bern, and beyond—all experienced calls for new, deep-seated political and cultural regeneration and legal reform. In October 1830 in Thurgau, for example, the Reformed pastor Thomas Bornhauser (1799–1856) led a revolt to overthrow the aristocracy and draft a new liberal constitution.Footnote ⁶⁷ Other revolts took shape similarly.

Around the same time, in the rural village of Bubendorf, Basel, the lawyer and notary Gutzwiller, Troxler's disciple and a member of the Tuesday Society, ventured his own steps in the same direction, intending to move Basel toward reform by invoking the rise of liberal movements in other parts of Europe and liberal moments in Basel's own recent past, such as the Helvetic Republic.Footnote ⁶⁸ At first, things seemed promising. Basel's Senate and Cabinet agreed to appoint a constitutional commission that recommended giving the countryside—with roughly double the inhabitants of the city—a small majority of four representatives; though not reflective of the population's distribution, the decision was in step with changes made elsewhere in Switzerland. Negotiations continued into the new year, when radical liberals in the countryside, based in rural Liestal, led an uprising against cantonal authorities. In response, the city militia soon occupied the town, causing Gutzwiller and associates to flee temporarily. The city then pushed through the revised constitution, which passed by roughly two-thirds of the citizens. But the crisis was far from over. In the spring of 1832, city officials withdrew government administration from the rural communes that had refused to support the new arrangement; they also planned to arrest the rebellious “revolutionaries.” Reacting to these aggressive measures, leaders in the countryside, now headed in part by Emil Remigius Frey (1803–1889), a lecturer in law at the university, proclaimed their independence and the establishment of a new canton, Basel-Landschaft, which was placed under the protection of the Swiss Federal Diet in May 1832. The Diet, involved in complicated federal political debates, worked to mediate among the parties in the emergency situation, but to no avail.Footnote ⁶⁹

In September 1832, the division of the old Canton of Basel and the formation of the new half-cantons, Basel-Stadt and Basel-Landschaft, received official recognition. Basel-Stadt and other conservative cantons in Switzerland then formed the Sarnerbund, a defensive alliance to boycott the Federal Diet and resist liberal change. In the summer of 1833, Inner Schwyz took military action against a liberal uprising among Schwyz's outer districts. Inspired by the direct military intervention, Basel-Stadt's Senate deployed troops to topple the landowners in the Basel countryside and restore unity. But it was not to be. On August 3, 1833, to the surprise of the city, the country forces triumphed overwhelmingly in the Battle of Hülftenschanze near the village of Pratteln. On the 26th, the separation of the cantons was finalized.Footnote ⁷⁰

Where, then, did the Basel churches fit in all of this? Given the various currents of political and religious culture, it is hardly surprising that there was at least some, albeit limited, diversity of opinion. The septuagenarian Fäsch—one of de Wette's staunchest defendants—preached a sermon after Gutzwiller's initial uprising in October 1830 from the pulpit of St. Theodor's Church in Basel with the provocative title: “On the Obligation to Proceed with the Spirit of the Age.” Enlightened progress was God's will, he informed; one must forsake, therefore, both “rigid adherence to everything old” and “stubborn indifference to everything new” in this progressive realization of Christ's kingdom on earth.Footnote ⁷¹ The Nazarene Wirz, keeping with his belief in the imminent arrival of an “age of the Spirit,” likened the “revolution” to a beautiful wine poured out on the people—but they should beware, lest they also consume the “poison” concealed therein.Footnote ⁷² The measured Vinet followed the unfolding events closely: he was, he confessed, simultaneously hopeful for the new “dawn,” insistent that those who defied law proved themselves rebellious, but also cautious, because “laws themselves are sometimes rebellious . . . against the eternal law of the righteous . . . the supreme law of God.”Footnote ⁷³

On January 4, 1831, the day that Gutzwiller and his co-reformers rejected the overtures of the constitutional commission, an assembly gathered in the city's old parish church, St. Martin's, where they listened to an address by Daniel Krauss (1786–1846)—pastor of St. Leonhard's in Basel, who was sympathetic with the theological aims of de Wette and Hagenbach—and debated the goings on. Basel's free-thinking poet Rudolf Kölner (1800–1877), ultimately a supporter of the countryside, used the occasion to warn both “treacherous aristocrat” and “intriguing democrat” against “plunging new daggers into the free Swiss heart.”Footnote ⁷⁴

On January 5, 1831, authorities in the Basel Reformed Church resolved a plan of action. The Antistes Falkeisen made the announcement: at this moment of great need, ministers were to introduce daily spiritual lessons or lectures in both the city and the country that would help unite the people and forestall acts of resistance against the city. This was done at the insistence of Johannes Linder (1790–1853), a pastor in Ziefen, part of the countryside.Footnote ⁷⁵ They were also to refrain, moreover, from otherwise mingling directly with governmental affairs or any other political developments. Instead, they should in both demeanor and action exhibit to all a spirit of sorrow for the destructive divisiveness plaguing the canton. A small handful opposed the plan, but it took effect nonetheless. (Spittler wrote to the Antistes in Zurich that the three pastors who voted against it “make fools of themselves; the city is already decried abroad as pious; may the Lord have mercy on these wretches!”)Footnote ⁷⁶

On behalf of the Church Council, Falkeisen also issued a series of memoranda and short pamphlets during the Troubles, addressed to the “servants of the Church in the City and Country of Basel.” On February 14, 1831, for instance, he urged the clergy to do their utmost to preserve peace. “Our important focus must now be on securing our communities in these peaceful attitudes; and to arrange our [daily] lectures in such a way that the disturbed confidence and injured unity are restored and revived everywhere . . . . For this harmony will never be more necessary than in these days, when a new constitution is put to the people for consideration . . . only if the voice of passion does not oppress that of reason and moderation.” The churches, far from being detached and disinterested parties, remained central in this task, he held.

More or less officially, then, the Basel churches would support the new constitution and the agenda of the elite city authorities.

Actual affairs proved rather more complicated. The countryside pastors found themselves caught between supporting their ecclesiastical officials in the city, on one side, and taking part in (or at least not hindering) activities of their parishioners, on the other side. Critically, the cantonal governmental held authority over the clergy. As an “Ordinance on the Duties of the Pastor in the Countryside” from 1817 had put it, the minister was duty-bound to “see especially that the authorities are to be honored and their laws and ordinances obeyed.”Footnote ⁷⁸ With few exceptions, most of the countryside pastors identified with the cause of the city and worked to encourage restraint among their charges in speeches and sermons, though seemingly with little success. (Evoking the radical Anabaptist impulse in the sixteenth century, Wirz seized on these “failures” as “evidence” that the “external” and “dead letters” of Protestantism could not protect them.Footnote ⁷⁹)

When the cantonal division received official recognition in 1832, the ecclesiastical structures in the countryside collapsed. On December 6, 1832, the government of Basel-Landschaft mandated that ministers in its territory take a new oath of office. Pastors must pledge not only “to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ, as contained in the Scriptures, solely according to the principles of evangelical truth and biblical study” it held but also “to accept from no other authority besides the Canton of Basel-Landschaft any instructions regarding the fulfillment of official duties.” Remarkably, only two pastors remained after the imposition of the new oath: Wilhelm Hoch (1789–1847), a native of Liestal, and Markus Lutz, the Enlightenment thinker devoted to the political manifestation of spiritual freedom, in Läufelfingen. The vast majority did not take the oath; gradually, they were forced to leave their parishes, with little prospects elsewhere. Some found positions of one sort or another in Basel-Stadt, but many did not; backed into a corner, they renounced their offices and entered into premature retirement.Footnote ⁸⁰ Their callings as spiritual servants of the Word and officers of the church thus came into conflict with their status as essentially civil servants of the state. From the perspective of the more conservative and pietist citizens, the attacks on the church showed the radical cause as morally bankrupt.

Twenty-eight of the ministers expelled, in effect, from the countryside published an “Explanation and Testimony” in September 1833.Footnote ⁸¹ Since at least January 1831, they wrote, when the armed “revolution” broke out, the “ecclesiastical and political . . . history of our Canton has never been the same. It draws the attention of our contemporaries, and especially of our ministerial brothers, far and wide.” The “misery of our people has been a heavy burden on our souls, and the misfortunes of our communities are tearing apart our hearts.” Given this, they explained, the time had come to “make an outspoken declaration of our position during the revolution of our Canton, and the political and ecclesiastical oppression brought about by this revolution.” Whereas Baslers of the city and the country were once “prosperous, happy, and contented,” they maintained, “leading quiet and peaceable lives in all godliness and respectability . . . under a mild authority that was concerned for their welfare, unhampered in the exercise of their civil rights, enjoying legal liberty and unburdened by any heavy levies,” now they had fallen victim to the “freedom” promised by the revolution that was in reality a “seductive,” “dizzying,” “false freedom” leading only to “political fanaticism.”Footnote ⁸²

Above all, the authors of the “Explanation and Testimony” lamented the havoc that the Troubles had inflicted on individuals and communities across the canton desiring “to remain faithful to the authorities ordained by God.” Many Baslers who did not take up arms against the magistrate, they said, had suddenly found themselves “declared traitors to the fatherland and rebels, and threatened, persecuted, maltreated, robbed, and ostracized to the highest degree.” No class felt this as much as the pastors in the countryside.

Almost overnight, the countryside pastors had found themselves laboring in regions politically separated from that of the state church in which they were ordained, which brought no small amount of unease. At the time, “the city government had not yet recognized those at Liestal; the separation that took place did not yet extend either to churches or to schools . . . [and the pastors] still received their salary from the city. Under such conditions they should now swear to the government of Liestal!” What opinion can there be, the authors judged, but to confess “how sad it is in the Canton of Basel-Landschaft for ecclesiastical affairs . . . . Where are the rights of our Reformed churches, who have their own confession?”Footnote ⁸³

Finally, the ministers ended the “Explanation and Testimony” with a prayer. “May God, our Savior, free his Church everywhere, especially in our torn country, from all excessive urges, ridicule, and tyranny!” they pleaded. “O, how many times have we prayed to Him, confessing our need for help and salvation from the distress that the last years have brought our communities! But His thoughts are not our thoughts, and our ways are not His ways . . . . His kingdom shall come, it cannot and will not perish . . . [and] we shall recognize with thanks and adoration the miracles of grace which the Lord has done even in the tribulation of His Church.”Footnote ⁸⁴

Before the expulsion, the clergy found themselves vilified by the countryside residents for opposing the actions of the radicals. Afterwards, the “Explanation and Testimony” sounded in the ears of the radicals more like kowtowing to the patrician establishment—an Erastian arrangement, from their perspective, gone awry—and confirmation that their earlier criticisms had hit the mark.Footnote ⁸⁵

Once the rupture with the countryside seemed possibly permanent—but before the Basel-Landschaft government began to enforce the new pastoral oath—Falkeisen held out something like an olive branch to the “dear brothers” of the city, the “pastors of the Christian communities in the Basel countryside,” and pledged his hope that “Christian wisdom,” “brotherly affection,” and “the peace of God” would overcome the “mistakes” of the times—though without assuming any real responsibility on behalf of the city for the latter.Footnote ⁸⁶ Once the new oath came into effect in the countryside, Basel-Stadt worked behind the scenes in an attempt to prevent ministers ordained in other Swiss cantons from taking the newly vacant posts in Basel-Landschaft. The results of this policy were mixed. Aarau came to the protection of some of its ministers who had been laboring in the Basel area. Church officials in Thurgau replied, for their part, that “in the close connection between church and state, a political separation had to be followed by an ecclesiastical one.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Organization and oversight of the churches in Basel-Landschaft would remain an unresolved matter. From 1838, a provisional measure in the rural half-canton's constitution stated that the while the rights of the existing Protestant Reformed Church were “guaranteed,” the “particular circumstances” of the former were to be more specifically determined by future proposed law. This state of affairs lasted for over a century.Footnote ⁸⁸

As the events in the countryside escalated, the Church Council in the city began to contemplate possible reasons for the “afflictions” Basel faced. Members stressed that while perhaps no single cause bore final responsibility for the Troubles, a few causes did nevertheless stand out. Already in February 1831, Falkeisen spoke of the general contempt for religion among the people and a contempt for scripture among Basel's students of “modern theology”—by which he seemingly meant students of de Wette and Hagenbach in Basel's theological faculty and likely of various other German exiles at the university. In subsequent council discussions, Hagenbach defended their positions with reference to their actions and to the theology students’ general acceptance of biblical doctrines, such as the atonement.Footnote ⁸⁹ Throughout the Troubles, de Wette and Hagenbach—like most of the Basel professors—had actually expressed openness to moderate reform but not revolution, and had in any rate come to the general aid of the city in sermons and other public addresses; de Wette even enlisted in the city militia organized in early January 1831.Footnote ⁹⁰ But suspicions that the university's rector, Troxler, and with him other “exile professors,” plotted to turn the students against the city had grown considerably.

On January 15, 1831, Troxler began to be investigated by cantonal authorities. Taking umbrage, he refused to uphold his rectorial duties in the university. The administrative void put the university in a precarious situation. Nationalist impulses across Switzerland had again focused on collapsing all of the Swiss universities into one national institution. Questions over the potential loss of the University of Basel, Switzerland's oldest, founded by the humanist pope Pius II in 1460, soon hovered over the debates surrounding the question of the cantonal division. De Wette and Hagenbach had been chief defenders of the continued existence of Basel's university, but Troxler and Snell had lent robust support to the plan for consolidation.Footnote ⁹¹ The position of the latter pair as proponents of the Basel-Landschaft cause was thus bound up intimately with grander ambitions of Swiss nationalism; closing the university was simply one step of a larger plan.

The university could not go on without a rector, so de Wette, Hagenbach, and Jung began to lobby the overseeing committee to fill the post. After some time, Gerlach received an interim appointment. On May 9, 1831, Troxler was cleared of the suspicions against him, but he quickly began to attack his colleagues who had sided with the city. Here, too, theological interests remained central.Footnote ⁹² Because of contempt for de Wette, large segments of the rural population had given critical assistance to Troxler and public assurance of their agreement with the proposed barring and shuttering of the university.Footnote ⁹³ After all, quipped many, “was not the university a drain on public expenditure and a haven for suspect theologians?”Footnote ⁹⁴ But this had put Troxler under additional scrutiny in the eyes of city officials. Looking for an escape, Troxler fled to Aaaru in the summer of 1831. These actions prompted de Wette's judgment that “Troxler is the most passionate, most vicious person I have ever seen,” one whose “wickedness is infinitely boundless, who is a true creature of hell.”Footnote ⁹⁵ As for Troxler's disciple Gutzwiller, said de Wette, he was only the head of a “pack of scoundrels from Liestal.”Footnote ⁹⁶

For Basel's theologians, however, problems continued to mount. In early 1833, an anonymous “open letter” against de Wette, sent from a professed “Bible believing minister,” gained some traction in both urban and rural Basel, in some respects recapitulating the earlier controversy with Spittler.Footnote ⁹⁷ The letter condemned de Wette for deviating from the confessional standards of Basel's Reformed Church and gave a stern warning that he was a dangerous influence on the youth. Rather than responding himself, de Wette left the task to two colleagues, Hagenbach and Friedrich Fischer, a lecturer in philosophy who had recently arrived from Tübingen. The affair was well publicized in the Basler Zeitung, the city newspaper steered by Andreas Heusler against the rural agitators and their sympathizers since 1831.Footnote ⁹⁸ Fischer objected that the open letter was nothing more than an unlearned pietist “inquisition” into Basel's honored and revered professor. “Whoever lacks scholarly formation,” by which he meant primarily training in modern German scientific theology, “should be modest in all judgments about [de Wette], who in fact should be protected from the attacks of pastoral zeal,” he protested.Footnote ⁹⁹ Hagenbach's piece, on “the science of criticism,” was one of the few overtly polemical texts he ever wrote. If the author of the open letter possessed no real scientific learning, as Fischer had argued, then perhaps he would do well to receive some instruction in the practice of criticism, Hagenbach reasoned. Applying the tools of historical criticism to the letter, he concluded that the author came from the pietist strongholds surrounding Basel; was likely a preacher but a layman in modern, scientific theology (Hagenbach used the Greek, idiotes); and exemplified those against whom the New Testament cautioned for having “zeal without knowledge.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

What is more, in August 1833, a regional periodical, Der graue Mann, followed this by blaming the university for the Troubles because Basel's professors, above all its theologians, stood “in rebellion against the heavenly sovereignty of Jesus Christ.” By giving refuge to Prussian dissidents, it argued, Basel not only bore responsibility for the sins they had previously committed but also for the bloodshed they had caused in the once “wholesome” city-republic during the Troubles. “The very people whom Basel has in large part regarded as martyrs of freedom and victims of northern Teutonic despotism have become masters and leaders of their own demagogues, and now fill this beautiful little country with blood and murder.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

The paper's editor was E. G. de Valenti (1794–1871), who had tried to obtain the right to give lectures in the theological faculty but was prohibited by de Wette on account of his lack of formal qualifications. De Valenti had presided over Der graue Mann for the past three years. In December 1831, he had moved to Basel from Halle specifically to be part of the city's German Christian Society. In May 1833, he had helped establish the related Pilgrim's Mission Society, working alongside de Wette's erstwhile adversary, Spittler. After being prevented from discoursing on theological topics at the university, de Valenti then decided to hold his own public lectures; in response, de Wette and Hagenbach had printed in the Basler Zeitung an explanation that, with their scholarly training, they were “sincerely convinced” of de Valenti's “inability” to give lectures in theology.Footnote ¹⁰² With the personal history quite obviously in the background, de Valenti now proclaimed that Basel had experienced divine judgment for giving refuge to German radicals, whether political, theological, or both. His attacks on de Wette and Jung in particular reached such a level that the pair sued de Valenti for libel, thought the court threw out the case.Footnote ¹⁰³ The éclat surrounding the de Valenti affair itself was not especially long lasting, but the suit was followed with rapt interest, and de Wette felt himself forced to publish his own account of the controversy to clear his name.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The theologians, like the churches and the university, found themselves at the center of the storm.

V. Aftermath

The close of the Troubles in 1833 brought about certain resolutions. Part of the final settlement negotiated by the Swiss Confederation granted Basel-Stadt full custody of the university on condition that it compensate Basel-Landschaft 331,451 francs.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Wilhelm Snell, who had provided legal counsel to the countryside, left for the University of Zurich. The following year Snell was appointed rector at the newly established University of Bern, where, simultaneously, Troxler also accepted a call. Snell's 1834 rectorial address hinted rather openly at his assessment of Basel's Troubles when he held up the universities of Zurich and Bern, above all others, as beacons of “education and spiritual freedom throughout the fatherland,” “temple[s] . . . justifying the political rejuvenation of Switzerland in the years 1830 and 1831,” and which might yet become “a nursery in Switzerland and perhaps a place of refuge that will provide for a better future in Germany.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Following Gerlach's interim tenure as rector at the University of Basel, Hagenbach stepped in as rector in 1832. In his first rectorial address, he compared de Wette to Luther and the collective “pietists”—insurgents who had fostered revolution, denounced the “modern theologians,” or clamored for the university's closure—he likened to Thomas Müntzer and the radicals in the Peasants’ War of 1524–1525. (Invocations of Luther and the Peasants’ War would eventually become a standard trope in modern German history, but it is curious to observe a crucial difference; later uses, typically Marxist and born of Engels's view of the European revolutions of 1848, depicted Luther as the aggressive political reactionary and “class traitor,” rather than a “keeper of peace” who preached the Pauline imperative to submit to governing authorities [Romans 13].)Footnote ¹⁰⁷ But “we may say with confidence,” Hagenbach intoned, “those among us who would wish the abolition of our higher educational establishment place the light under a bushel.” The pietists and rebellious landowners “debase far too much the sense of science [Wissenschaft] in our hometown,” he proclaimed. “In a word, the enemy of the principle of science is the principle of barbarism and vulgarity, cloaked in a cheaply acquired wisdom.” Reform might take place, but it needed a measure of paternal guidance and insights made possible by higher education.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ During Basel's 1833–1834 lecture cycle, when he ostensibly covered the Reformation in the sixteenth century, he said simply, “Revolution is not a child of the Reformation.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Immediately following the Troubles, when de Wette was elected rector of the university, he used his address to call for a new spirit of “genuine critical scholarship.” In the final settlement of the cantonal division, the old single Canton of Basel had its assets divided between the two new half-cantons—but according to population, not tax rolls. Basel Landschaft was considerably poorer but received two-thirds of the total assets. The university, the pride of the elite, was thus threatened with ruin again. De Wette marshaled his own personal experiences in support of the embattled institution as proof of how he had always dedicated himself to the health of Basel, because of the “high meaning of science and the enthusiasm I carry for it,” he said, “which filled my soul from an early age to adulthood and shall fill it beyond. I would venture to express again today that the question concerning the continuance and reestablishment of our university is truly a vital question for Basel.” With perseverance, he argued, the city as a whole might still emerge from the troubled times as a “bastion of science, where the holy flame of truth is kept.”Footnote ¹¹⁰

The university's small faculty had mostly supported the city's cause during the Troubles—the cases of Wilhelm Snell and Troxler being significant exceptions—and so, in turn, enjoyed support for the continued existence of the university by the cantonal authorities and the patriciate even in the midst of the financial shortfalls their venerable institution faced. When the following decade brought new political turmoil, the university's fate was once more called into doubt. In 1841, the radical countryside newspaper, the Basellandschaftliches Volksblatt, called the university “a nursery home for an invalid intelligentsia, a sinecure for burned out brains,” and “a totally useless, money-eating institution.” Prompted in part by falling enrollments, the more moderate Schweizerische Nationalzeitung, published within Basel-Stadt, now called it a “satire on the concept of a universitas litterarum.”Footnote ¹¹¹

And yet, despite the resumed assault on the institution, the university did undergo a significant transformation into a leading center of theological and other scholarly inquiry, due in no small part to the efforts of de Wette and Hagenbach. In this light, it is also intriguing to note the experiences of some of their direct students in the following years. There is, of course, the well-known historicist turn taken by Burckhardt fils as a young Basel theology student. One might also mention his friend, the Zuricher Alois Biedermann (1819–1885), known later as the “most prominent dogmatician” of the Young Hegelians for his attempts to hold together radical historical criticism and speculation.Footnote ¹¹² His father had sent him to study in Basel in the second half of the 1830s with the intent that he might escape radicalism elsewhere. Though Biedermann's subsequent encounters with the Hegelian speculative theologians Philipp Marheineke (1780–1846) and Wilhelm Vatke (1806–1882) in Berlin influenced the flowering of his thought—and so, like Burckhardt, he turned away from the fatherly direction he had received—his initial studies under de Wette and Hagenbach arguably helped prepare the soil.Footnote ¹¹³ De Wette continued to teach until his death in 1849, and Hagenbach's career in Basel extended to 1873 and the arrival in the city of Friedrich Nietzsche (1869) and Franz Overbeck (1870). The institution would also attract such distinguished scholars as Wilhelm Dilthey (1867), Karl Barth (1935), and Karl Jaspers (1948), among others.

VI. Broader Ramifications

Beyond the university, the religious dimensions of the Troubles left a lasting if somewhat ambivalent legacy. They cast a shadow over the work of the churches, as long memories of the expulsion endured, and bold identifications of each cause, city and countryside, with the will of God persisted.Footnote ¹¹⁴ They also helped account for the centrist reputation of Basel-Stadt across the rest of the nineteenth century, in which “‘liberals’ in the elite . . . tried to meet modernity halfway,” including when it came to Christian doctrine.Footnote ¹¹⁵ At the same time, the creation of a new Protestant canton in Basel-Landschaft altered the balance of confessional forces within the shaky Swiss Confederation. The uprisings in the 1830s can thus be seen as a prelude to the strife of the 1840s, when the predominantly Protestant cantons in Switzerland (Basel-Stadt and Basel-Landschaft included and now on the same side) clashed with seven of the conservative, traditionalist, Catholic cantons—Fribourg, Lucerne, Nidwalden and Obwalden, Schwyz, Uri, Valais, and Zug—who had formed a separate league against the Confederation.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Closure of the monasteries in Aarau (1841–1843) and the return of the Jesuits in Lucerne (1844) pushed the situation to its breaking point and culminated in the Swiss civil war of 1847.Footnote ¹¹⁷

If the cantonal division was a watershed, the combination of its political, cultural, and, indeed, religious components together mark a noteworthy juncture in modern European and ecclesiastical history. The horizon for these events was not only regional or local, but also European, too.Footnote ¹¹⁸ In important respects, Basel's cantonal division bore witness to the ramifications of the German Confederation's “persecution of demagogues.” One should also note that the events in Basel coincided with the rise of the religious “Awakening” movements, which unbalanced relationships within Protestant churches across Europe. The Troubles offer, in fact, an illuminating case study for exploring the complexities involved in such attempts to create new expressions of Protestantism in rapidly changing contexts.Footnote ¹¹⁹

The history of the Troubles gives strong support to the claim that towns and cities of the era “brought together individuals and groups entertaining different visions, intentions, and ambitions. Although it is not always possible to refrain from describing towns as actors, to do so represents an abstraction, and a bold one at that.”Footnote ¹²⁰ Lines of allegiance—both theologically and politically—ran across urban and rural spheres, making for strange bedfellows. Throughout, the theologians and the clergy occupied substantial roles in the Troubles—from the acts which precipitated the cantonal division to its aftermath—showing the entanglement of religious ideas, individuals, and institutions in broader historical events. The overall story, moreover, breathes new life into sometimes abstract trends: the complex concepts of nationalism and revolution, the balance of forces attending state-building, and the enduring specter of the heated politics of Protestantism in modern European life.