CHAPTER IIIIII. Carrying the Torch to Switzerland
SWITZERLAND
AT THE close of the 1830's, Switzerland was a center of revo¬
lutionary propaganda. The policy of most of the Swiss
cantons toward political refugees was remarkably liberal.
In the neighboring Italian, German, and Austrian states censorship
of the press was rigid; in Switzerland the press was relatively free
and, with few exceptions, the Swiss managed to maintain their
liberal policies despite diplomatic pressures and international com
plications. In Zurich, Julius Fröbel published Herwegh's Ge¬
dichte eines Lebendigen, a powerful leaven for revolution in
Germany. Switzerland also was the publishing center for other
German liberals and radicals, such as Hoffmann von Fallersleben
and Ludwig Seeger; for Arnold Ruge's atheism; and for Ludwig
Feuerbach's assaults upon organized Christianity.^1 Though the im
pact for the revolutionary eruptions of 1848 in Germany came
from Paris, Switzerland was the spiritual home in which many of
of the German revolutionists nurtured their ideas to maturity.
Both the Young Europe movement and the Young Germany
agitation centered in Switzerland, and Mazzini moved the head
quarters of the Central Committee of Young Italy from Marseilles
to Switzerland in 1834. All such movements had the common ob
jectives of unifying the nations politically, uniting all men in a
fraternity of freedom, equality, and brotherhood, and liberating
the oppressed wherever they were held in bondage. Radical
(^1) Werner Näf, Die Schweiz in der deutschen Revolution (Leipzig, 1929), 50.