Historical Dictionary of Switzerland

• 1. Introduction

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  The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland set out to do something no country had managed cleanly in decades: put the whole sweep of Swiss history into a single, authoritative reference work published simultaneously in three languages. When the paper version was finally completed at the end of 2014, it contained around 36,000 articles spread across thirteen volumes. But the story of how it got there spans more than half a century of false starts, financial disasters, and one pivotal gamble with the internet that changed the shape of scholarly publishing. What made a banker from Zurich and two Swiss Federal Councillors want to attempt this? And why did the project nearly die before it even began?

• 2. A Tradition of Dictionaries

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  Diebold Schilling the Elder was producing illustrated chronicles of Swiss history in the fifteenth century, and the impulse to compile and organize that history never really stopped. Aegidius Tschudi's Chronicon Helveticum, completed in 1569, gathered around a thousand documents in a single work. Then came a far more ambitious undertaking: the twenty-volume Allgemeines Helvetisches, Eydgenössisches, Oder Schweitzerisches Lexicon, written by a Zurich banker and politician across eighteen years between 1747 and 1765.

  The tradition continued into the twentieth century with the Dictionnaire historique et biographique de la Suisse, known by its initials DHBS. Published in seven volumes between 1921 and 1934 and edited from Neuchâtel, it was meant to be the definitive Swiss historical reference. Instead, it became a cautionary tale. The DHBS was a financial failure, and the reasons were specific: authors had been recruited largely through cantonal archivists with little central supervision, and the costs spiraled out of control. The publishing company behind it eventually went bankrupt. That collapse cast a long shadow over Swiss historical publishing for decades, making both publishers and historians reluctant to attempt anything similar.

• 3. Decades of False Starts

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  As early as the 1950s, individuals were pushing to create a successor to the DHBS. Federal Councillor Philipp Etter raised the idea in 1958, and Federal Councillor Hans Peter Tschudi followed with a similar initiative a few years later. Neither led anywhere. The memory of the DHBS bankruptcy was, according to the editor-in-chief of the eventual dictionary as quoted in the newspaper Le Temps, the primary obstacle.

  The idea finally found traction in the early 1980s. Two publishers took it up, and in 1983 the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences commissioned two professors, one from the University of Fribourg and one from the University of Lausanne. Together with the archivist of the Canton of Lucerne, they launched the project that would become the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland. The Swiss Historical Society quickly added its support. In 1987, the Federal Assembly approved funding, tying the project to the celebrations planned around the 700th anniversary of the Swiss Confederation in 1991, alongside several other historical publications including the six-volume Schweizer Lexikon. The following year, the Foundation Historical Dictionary of Switzerland was formally created, with a dual mandate: produce a multi-volume dictionary reflecting current research while remaining readable by the general public, and publish it as an electronic database.

• 4. The Internet Gamble

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  On the 4th of September 1998, the first 8,000 articles of the online edition were presented to the media in Berne in three languages. That launch had been shaped by a decision made just months earlier that surprised everyone involved. In August 1997, the Foundation had made an online prototype available to staff. The response was immediate enough that the Foundation Board decided in the autumn of 1997 to reverse the planned publication sequence entirely: instead of releasing the first paper volume in 1998 as scheduled, they would launch the website first.

  The practical consequence was significant. Articles already completed could be made available without waiting for alphabetical order to be filled in, a constraint that would have held back the paper version. By 2002, the site offered 11,300 entries in at least one of the three languages. The website was deliberately plain and without illustrations, and it had cost almost 10,000 francs to build. It was updated every four weeks. A CD-ROM version was planned but eventually abandoned due to lack of funds, and development of a keyword search engine was delayed. One notable technical decision had been made much earlier: as far back as 1992, texts were entered in a Standard Generalized Markup Language compliant format, which allowed automatic conversion to HTML when the web edition was eventually built.

• 5. Publishing the Paper Version

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  While the website was gathering users, the paper version needed a new foundation. On the 14th of June 1999, a contract was signed with the Schwabe publishing house after two of the original three publishers left the project following changes in their editorial direction. The Federal Council then added a 500,000-franc subsidy to cover printing costs for the first ten volumes, clearing the path for the first book.

  On the 31st of October 2002, the first volume was officially presented at a ceremony at the Swiss National Library. Jean Guinand, President of the Foundation, and Federal Councillor for Culture Ruth Dreifuss presided. The German edition, titled Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz and published by Schwabe, appeared in a red binding. The French edition, Dictionnaire Historique de la Suisse, came out in blue through Gilles Attinger in Hauterive. The Italian edition, Dizionario Storico della Svizzera, was published in yellow by Armando Dadò in Locarno. Subsequent volumes followed at a rate of one per year, each released in autumn. The final, thirteenth volume arrived in 2014.

• 6. What the Dictionary Contains

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  The 36,000 articles in the completed dictionary were not assembled at random. Before a single article was written, the Foundation defined the complete list of entries using criteria set in advance. Biographies make up 35% of the total. Articles on places, including municipalities, cantons, bailliages, fortresses, abbeys, and archaeological sites, account for around 30%. Families and genealogy account for roughly 10%, and the remaining quarter covers historical phenomena, institutions, and events.

  The articles range in length from a few lines to several pages, depending on the subject. Historical images drawn from museums, print cabinets, and archives illustrate the volumes, with captions, maps, and charts added alongside the text. This iconographic work was carried out by Werner Bosshard and a colleague from 1990 to 2014. The dictionary gives greater weight to some periods than others, reflecting the available historical material: 10% of the articles cover the span from the Palaeolithic to the Early Middle Ages, while 20% address the period from the First World War to the end of the twentieth century. A reduced version of the dictionary was also published in Romansh under the title Lexicon Istoric Retic, running to 3,200 articles on the history of the Grisons region and neighboring areas, with the first volume appearing at the end of 2010 and the second in 2012.

• 7. The People Behind It

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  Marco Jorio led the operation from 1988 to 2014, the full span of the dictionary's active production. The foundation employed around forty staff members at its main office in Berne and at branches in Bellinzona and Chur. Beyond the salaried staff, the project relied on roughly 75 translators, around a hundred advisors drawn from Swiss and foreign universities and from archives across the country, and nearly 2,500 authors who contributed articles.

  The Foundation Board governing the project was capped at thirteen members, appointed by the Swiss Historical Society, the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences, the Swiss Confederation, the Swiss National Science Foundation, and other bodies. The Foundation had five presidents across its active years: Georges-André Chevallaz from 1988 to 1992, followed by three successive presidents through to 2010, and then Martine Brunschwig Graf from 2011 to 2016. On the 1st of January 2017, the DHS Foundation formally concluded its work and handed responsibility to the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences. The Lexicon Istoric Retic carries the distinction of being the first dictionary in the world, according to those responsible for the site, where editorial work was conducted directly on the internet.