“Robert de Traz created the myth of the Swiss Abroad”

In 1911, discontent with the Gotthard Treaty was building in Switzerland. The agreement gave the Axis powers unrestricted use of the railway tunnel. A Franco-German war seemed imminent.

Against this backdrop, linguist Alexis François and writers Gonzague de Reynold and Robert de Traz convened a meeting in Geneva, the outcome of which was the New Helvetic Society (Neue Helvetische Gesellschaft, NHG), which still exists today. Its objective: “to manage the national heritage, strengthen patriotic sentiment, and ensure a worthy future for Switzerland”. The movement quickly gained traction, formed many chapters and experienced initial highlights, as in 1914 for example, when Carl Spitteler gave his “Unser Schweizer Standpunkt” (our Swiss position) speech in Zurich, arguing that the German and French-speaking areas of the country were not so different after all. The NHG also played a big part in Switzerland’s accession to the League of Nations in 1920.

“To be European means closing down a company bequeathed to us by our forebears and whose goods still feed us. Europe will exist if we want it to. If we don’t want it to, we must prepare for the most vicious barbarism ever seen.” 

Robert de Traz in October 1922 in “Revue de Genève” following a journey to Berlin

First Swiss Abroad secretary

However, shortly before then, in September 1919, one of the founding members, Robert de Traz, was selected by the NHG central committee as the first secretary of the Swiss Abroad. Within 24 months, de Traz had set up a functional organisation, which was well equipped for the future with its logistical and propagandistic platform. “Robert de Traz created the myth of the Swiss Abroad,” acknowledged Agénor Kraft, one of his successors, after de Traz died in 1951: “He was the architect of the doctrine that Switzerland had responsibilities towards him. It took a poet, a visionary to do that as the idea was completely new at the time and almost laughable to many people.”

“Offensive insolence”

However, in 1917 when the war was raging, the celebrated officer and son-in-law of the banker Pictet published the novel “La Puritaine et l’Amour” (the puritan and the love affair) about the secret romance between a Geneva banker’s wife and a bank trainee. Not only was this book condemned as immoral from the pulpit of Geneva cathedral, it was also described in the Swiss press as “offensive insolence”, (“Der Bund”) or “Madame Bovary Geneva-style” (“Revue de Lausanne”). It took the new Paris edition of 1928 and the voice of François Mauriac to give the book its due as one of the great love stories of the time.

Publisher of “Revue de Genève”

De Traz was not only atypically Swiss in his writing; he also established a position through his commitment to the Swiss armed forces and the “Fifth Switzerland”, which made him one of the main intellectual bridge builders and conciliators following the First World War. On 1 July 1920, four months following Switzerland’s accession to the League of Nations, de Traz published the first edition of “Revue de Genève”, which covered the League of Nations and of which there were to be 127 editions, going up to the end of 1930. A European institution in which Cocteau, Gide, Ramuz and Proust as well as Sigmund Freud and Virginia Woolf were able to have their say and in which, even if they were ultimately disappointed, the hope is touchingly documented that the generation that lived through the First World War would strive for a more peaceful world.

Bibliography: “La Puritaine et l’Amour” or in German “Genfer Liebe 1913” with a detailed biography of de Traz by Charles Linsmayer as Vol. 5 of “Reprinted by Huber” in Th.Gut, Zurich, publishing house. The French edition is out of print.

Charles Linsmayer is a literary scholar and journalist based in Zurich