William E. Rappard · 1948
Rappard’s centennial study is not an article-by-article legal commentary, but a historical interpretation of the Swiss Federal Constitution as origin, settlement, and continuing process. Its guiding aim is explanatory: to understand why the constitution of 1848 became possible, what political transformation it enacted, and how later revisions altered the balance between liberty, democracy, federalism, and state power.
Die drei Faktoren sind das Bedürfnis nach nationaler Sicherheit, nach freier wirtschaftlicher Entwicklungsmöglichkeit und nach politischer Freiheit und Gleichheit.
English translation: The three factors are the need for national security, for the free possibility of economic development, and for political freedom and equality.
This triad organizes the book’s account of Swiss constitutional development. Rappard treats federal reform as the institutional answer to practical pressures: the need for collective defense, the demand for an integrated economic space, and the liberal-democratic claim to equal political status. The constitution was therefore neither a purely doctrinal liberal document nor a mere administrative modernization. It was the political form through which Switzerland reconciled national necessities with inherited cantonal diversity.
The decisive break with the Federal Pact of 1815 lies in the changed subject of sovereignty. In Rappard’s reading, 1848 did not simply improve a treaty among independent cantons; it created a federal state in which the Swiss nation appeared as a unified constitutional actor.
Es handelte sich nicht mehr, wie beim Bundesvertrag von 1815, um eine Vereinbarung zwischen politisch unabhängigen Staatswesen, sondern um einen politischen Akt einer Nation, die ihre Einheit und Souveränität verkündet.
English translation: It was no longer a matter, as with the Federal Treaty of 1815, of an agreement between politically independent polities, but of a political act of a nation proclaiming its unity and sovereignty.
Yet the book resists any simple story of centralization. The Swiss achievement consists in joining national unity to cantonal plurality. Rappard’s federalism is built on mutual dependence: the Confederation requires living member communities, while the cantons require the common political order that gives them security and effectiveness.
Die Einheit ohne Glieder ist eine leere Masse, die Glieder ohne Einheit sind ohnmächtig.
English translation: Unity without members is an empty mass; members without unity are powerless.
Within this framework, equality before the law becomes one of the constitution’s deepest innovations. The old world of local privilege, subordinate statuses, and inherited distinctions gives way to a national citizenship. At the same time, the meaning of cantonal sovereignty changes. Cantons remain indispensable constitutional organs, but no longer stand as fully independent states between a sovereign people and an internationally recognized Confederation. Rappard thus presents Swiss federalism as real, durable, and plural, but no longer confederal in the older sense.
The later history of the constitution is described as adaptation under pressure. The revision of 1874 and the many partial revisions that followed enlarged democratic participation, strengthened federal authority, and brought new domains—railways, communications, military organization, economic regulation, social policy—into the constitutional field. Direct democracy, especially referendum and initiative, appears as both a safeguard and an engine of change: it democratizes constitutional development while also exposing the constitution to organized interests and tactical compromise.
Als wichtigste Faktoren, welche die Verfassungsgeschichte der Schweiz seit 1848 verständlich machen, finden wir daher den doppelten Fortschritt der Demokratie und der Technik.
English translation: As the most important factors that make the constitutional history of Switzerland since 1848 intelligible, we therefore find the twofold advance of democracy and of technology.
This later development is ambivalent. Democracy and technology expand the claims placed on the federal state, but each expansion can narrow individual freedom and cantonal autonomy. Rappard’s tone is therefore sober rather than triumphalist. He honors 1848 as the successful creation of a democratic federal order, yet he also sees that the constitution’s later vitality depends on continual revision, and that revision increasingly responds to material and economic demands.
Die jüngste Entwicklung ist mehr von wirtschaftlichen Interessen als von geistigen Überlegungen geleitet worden.
English translation: The most recent development has been guided more by economic interests than by intellectual considerations.
The work’s enduring importance lies in this double vision. Rappard presents the Swiss Constitution as a founding act of national sovereignty and liberal equality, but also as a living framework reshaped by democracy, technology, and the growing tasks of the modern state.
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