1. General Characteristics
Francophone literatures can reveal both linguistic and cultural variation within a shared language, but they pass through distinct phases of growth. Early stages are usually spontaneous and undirected. Later developments will be more strongly marked culturally as writers assert their autonomy and collective self-consciousness. Later, writers will again de-emphasize their francophone role and establish themselves simply as writers in French. They will, however, benefit from an accepted cultural autonomy and momentum, a receptive local public, and receptive publishers. As a result, literatures such as that of Suisse Romande remain something of an abstraction, and many have doubted whether a French-Swiss literary culture exists as a reality. Some have seen Suisse Romande as ‘un corps qui cherche une âme’ (Amiel) or ‘une province [de France] qui n'en est pas une’ (Ramuz). Some suggest that it is itself a collection of distinctive regional literatures (Vaudois, Jurassien, etc.). Others say simply that: ‘Il n'y a point de littérature romande, il n'y a que des écrivains romands’ (P. André). Whatever the nomenclature adopted, Swiss literature in French has a distinctive history.
The Suisse Romande has a quarter of the Swiss population, but no natural ethnic or political identity. It embraces the French-speaking cantons of Geneva, Vaud, Neuchâtel, francophone Fribourg and Valais, and the isolated canton of Jura. Each mirrors the religious, ethnic, and cultural pluralism of Switzerland as a whole. Vaud joined the 1291 Confederation as recently as 1803; Geneva, Valais, and Neuchâtel in 1815; French-speaking Jura in 1979. The Swiss bourgeoisie was traditionally exposed to French, German, or Italian cultural imperialism, and Paris has long been the cultural catalyst of French-speaking intellectuals and artists. Many emigrated to France: Rousseau, Constant, de Staël, Pourtalès, Borgeaud, Cingria, Cendrars, Landry, etc. Rural communities, however, remained untouched by cosmopolitanism, and strongly cantonal or communal in culture. Any idea of a hermetic Suisse-Romande culture is to some extent a political or academic fabrication. Unlike other francophone countries, Suisse Romande generated no dialectal literature, though patois persisted in Valais, Gruyère, and elsewhere. When Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, the dominant figure of Suisse-Romande literature, set out to ‘écrire une langue parlée: la langue parlée par ceux dont je suis né’, he was in search of a distinctive voice, ‘une inflexion’.
2. Beginnings to 1800
There was no major literature in French in Suisse Romande prior to the Reformation though there were 13th-c. Jurassien trouvère poets: Simonin de Boncourt and Girard de Pleujose. There was also the 14th-c. Savoyard courtly poet Oton de Grandson, known to Froissart and Chaucer. With the coming of the Reformation in 1536, Geneva and its Académie (1559) became a cultural centre of European reformed religion. Much of the activity was that of immigrant writers: Farel, Calvin, Bèze, and d'Aubigné. The exception is the satirist Pierre Viret, the first authentic Swiss-French writer, ‘le sourire de la Réforme’ and a native Vaudois. He was the creator of Tobie, an archetypal Vaudois Panurge. His contemporary was François Bonivard (1493-1570, Chroniques de Genève, published 1831) the famous prisoner of Chillon.
There was then a fallow period until the second French Huguenot immigration after 1685, with Jean-Robert Chouet (1642-1731), Jean-Alphonse Turrettini (1671-1737), Jean Barbeyrac (1674-1744), and Firmin Abauzit (1679-1767). Their writing was dominated by science, liberal Protestant evangelical theology, and later pietism. Swiss Enlightenment thinkers Jacob Vernet (1698-1789), Abraham Trembley (1710-84), and Charles Bonnet (1720-93) opposed Voltaire's anticlericalism and secularism. Jean-Jacques Rousseau too championed his Genevese pastor friends against Voltaire, who was in exile near Geneva. In his Confessions and Rêveries, Rousseau, like Albrecht von Haller (1707-77, Die Alpen), first found literary inspiration in the Swiss landscape. His autobiographical writings fore-shadow Amiel, and there are clear areas in which Rousseau laid the foundations for later developments in Swiss-French writing.
3. Nineteenth Century
In the early 19th c. Germaine de Staël and Benjamin Constant abandoned their native cantons for Paris [see also Coppet]. Madame de Staël was above all cosmopolitan. Constant's work focused on the Paris scene, though his Journal intime set him in the auto-biographical tradition. With the Napoleonic invasion of the cantons, a nationalist reaction against Paris brought closer ties with German Switzerland and a clearer Helvetic dimension.
In the later 19th c. liberal Protestant writing reawakened. Educational writing followed Rousseau and Pestalozzi (1746-1827) in developing the education of the whole man. The outstanding literary figure, however, was the Vaudois moralist and Christian thinker Alexandre Vinet (1797-1847). He left his mark on cultural, educational, and religious life, even on literature. This Christian tradition continued, remaining anti-dogmatic, devout, and evangelical. However, with its firm grip over academia, intellectuals, and scientists, it ossified easily into a middle-class morality which gave the cantons an ultra-puritanical image. Pourtalès would later highlight its hypocrisy, and Mercanton its repression of natural instinct. If we tend to associate the Suisse Romande with Protestant writing, Catholic writers were none the less active, predominantly in the Jura and Valais.
The move towards a French-language Helvetic literature (linked with Swiss-German Helvetismus) first emerged in the 18th c. with Philippe-Cyriaque (known as le doyen) Bridel (1757-1845, Poésies helvétiennes 1782). It developed briefly again in World War I under an academic historian Gonzague de Reynold (1880-1970). More significant was the mood set earlier by the Genevese Rodolphe Toepffer (1799-1846). He was a liberal Protestant thinker, novelist, satirist, caricaturist, and literary historian and a major transitional figure between Rousseau and Ramuz. Toepffer's appeal was limited outside Geneva, but he seriously influenced writers with his demonstration of vernacular art. Then came Juste Olivier (1807-76) with his ‘Un génie est caché dans tous ces lieux que j'aime’ (later termed génie du lieu). These figures dominated the 1830-50 period and stirred a new consciousness of terroir. They were followed by Philippe Godet (1850-1922), who accused young Swiss intellects of creating ‘un art d'importation et d'imitation, où il ne restera rien de romand’, and pleaded for ‘une patrie distincte de la France, mais liée à la France par la langue et la culture’. Others pursuing the vernacular in art included the Genevese painter Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918), whose art anticipates Ramuz on canvas.
The most significant 19th-c. development was not in vernacular but in introspective writing. Henri-Frédéric Amiel wrote 174 cahiers, over 16, 000 manuscript pages, in his private Journal intime (1839/47-81). Only a part of the journal was published, posthumously, revealing a lucid, contemplative, spiritually alive, and sexually repressed self-portrait. As a diarist of psychological and intellectual penetration, he established the contemplative self-portrait as a characteristic genre of Suisse-Romande literary expression.
4. Twentieth Century
The year 1904 is the watershed in Suisse-Romande writing, when a group of writers opened a fundamental debate on the character and function of a vernacular literature, first in Pénates d'argile and then in La Voile latine (1904-10). This first secession from French influence was led by Gonzague de Reynold and his associates, but it united writers in pursuit of an autonomous and autochthonous artistic culture. This first phase collapsed when literary Helvetism was abandoned by Ramuz and his Vaudois associates. They branded it as ‘suissisme de château’, ‘enduit pastoral’, and ‘semis professoral’, a product of academic intellectualism and patrician nostalgia. Reynold's formation of a group called the Nouvelle Société Helvétique in 1914 was an attempt to avoid the disintegration of the Confederation into linguistic areas. The Vaudois rejected it as ‘voile latinerie’ and launched a renaissance vaudoise through a journal that they provocatively named Cahiers vaudois (1913/14-19). This contained Ramuz's manifesto for a Swiss-French literature, ‘Raison d'être’, asserting the reality of the pays as the root of personal and ethnic identity. His ars poetica expanded Juste Olivier's génie du lieu into what we now term enracinement. He rejected folklorisme, helvétisme, political engagement, and the introspective tradition, coming closer to Toepffer and Hodler and closer still to Cézanne, who clearly influenced him.
The renaissance vaudoise in its original form was led by the Helvetists Gonzague de Reynold, Robert de Traz (1884-1951), and Alexis François, but it had now narrowed to Ramuz, Edmond Gilliard (1875-1969), Paul Budry (1883-1949), and close associates. Ramuz in many ways parallels Gottfried Keller, his German-Swiss counterpart. Swiss-French literature became for him an autonomous area of creative literary activity, sharing a common language with France but using Paris as a crucible rather than a mould. It created the voice of a region without relapsing into provincialism or regionalism. Ramuz and his followers claimed to have created an authentic, vernacular voice in art, the voice of homo alpinus.
If the period is inevitably dominated by Ramuz's charismatic figure, this has obscured the contribution of a major international talent: the Neuchâtelois Guy de Pourtalès (1881-1941). His Marins d'eau douce (1912), Monclar (1927), and La Pêche miraculeuse (1937) are marks of an extraordinary talent, deeply rooted in Neuchâtel, Geneva, and the Lac Léman. His genius is in many ways akin to Thomas Mann's. Other figures include the unclassifiable Charles-Albert Cingria (1883-1954), an anti-‘Swiss’, globe-trotting essayist of a Polish-Turkish family background; and the Neuchâtelois Blaise Cendrars, travel-writer extraordinary, novelist, poet, and anti-poet.
The Vaudois renaissance cleared the way for autonomous and autochthonous creative activity in all the cantons, in the novel, in poetry, on stage and screen. Poets, many influenced by Rilke, are at least as significant as novelists in this development and they number major talents such as Edmond Gilliard (1875-1969), Pierre-Louis Matthey (1893-1970), Gustave Roud (1897-1976), and Edmond-Henri Crisinel (1897-1948), all in their twenties when Cahiers vaudois appeared. They were followed by others: Maurice Chappaz (b. 1916), Philippe Jaccottet, Jacques Chessex (b. 1934), and Jurassiens such as Alexandre Voisard (b. 1930). Roud and Jaccottet above all have emerged as talents of international stature.
The Swiss identify their academic and critical tradition as a distinctive element. At the beginning of the century Ferdinand de Saussure, lecturing in German, revolutionized the science of linguistics; his work had an incalculable effect on 20th-c. thought. A little later came a remarkable group of gifted literary critics, including Albert Béguin, Charly Guyot (1898-1974), Marcel Raymond, Jean Starobinski, and Pierre-Olivier Walzer (b. 1915). To these we have to add the enabling activity of publisher-patrons, most recently Bertil Galland (b. 1931).
The modern Swiss-French novel, before and after World War II, is no longer marginalized by French or Swiss critics. It is the genre in which artistic activity is most evident to the Swiss themselves. Suisse Romande can boast an élite of men and women novelists outstanding by any standard. Ramuz himself, Pourtalès, Catherine Colomb (1893-1965: Châteaux en enfance, 1945; Les Esprits de la terre 1953), Alice Rivaz (b. 1901: Jette ton pain, 1978; Ce nom qui n'est pas le mien, 1980, Prix Ramuz), Jacques Mercanton (b. 1910: Le Soleil ni la mort, 1948; La Sybille, 1979), Corinna Bille (1912-79: Théoda, 1944; La Demoiselle sauvage, 1974; Le Salon ovale, 1976), Georges Borgeaud (b. 1914: Le Préau, 1952, Prix des Critiques; Le Voyage à l' étranger, 1974, Prix Renaudot), Jean-Pierre Monnier (b.1921; La Clarté de la nuit, 1956; L'Arbre un jour, 1971), and Jacques Chessex (b. 1934: L'Ogre, 1973, Prix Goncourt).
Other distinctive themes recur sufficiently in Suisse-Romande literature to warrant mention. There is the cross-fertilization of the arts, and the frequency with which writers invade the worlds of music and painting (Pourtalès, Ramuz, Landry). Many are both poets and novelists (Roud, Chessex, Chappaz), a factor profoundly affecting style and vision. There is an endemic globe-trotter syndrome (Cingria, Cendrars, Mercanton, Galland, Bille, Pourtalès) with its themes of departure, alienation, and return. The Protestant or Catholic conscience lives on, for moralist and enfant terrible (Chappaz, Chessex, Borgeaud, Monnier). There is the special optic of the diarist and autobiographer (Ramuz, Colomb, Borgeaud, Chessex, Zermatten), and the mythos of lake and mountain, mostly centred on the Valais (Ramuz, Chessex, Chappaz, Saussure, Zermatten). Polyglot writers are inevitably involved in translation (Jaccottet, Roud, Matthey).
[Sam Taylor]
Bibliography
- C. Guyot (ed.), Écrivains de Suisse française (1961)
- A. Berchtold, La Suisse Romande au cap du XXe siècle (1966)
- M. Gsteiger, La Nouvelle Littérature romande (1978); J. L. Flood (ed.), Modern Swiss Literature: Unity and Diversity (1985)
