Swiss Guards

• 1. Introduction

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  Swiss Guards have stood at the gates of kings, popes, and doges for more than five centuries. They are mercenaries by trade and legends by reputation. A single afternoon in Paris on the 10th of August 1792 would make them immortal. On that day, roughly nine hundred Swiss soldiers defended the Tuileries Palace against a revolutionary mob. About six hundred of them died in the fighting or were massacred after they surrendered. It is one of the most brutal episodes of loyalty in military history. Yet the Swiss Guards did not begin or end at the Tuileries. From the court of Louis XI to the Vatican of today, they served European royalty in peacetime and war, in ceremony and in blood. How did a small mountainous republic become the preferred source of palace guards across an entire continent? And what force of law, revolution, and treaty eventually reduced their world to a single walled city state?

• 2. The French Service

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  Louis XI of France retained a Swiss company for his personal guard in 1480, planting the seed of what would become the longest-running foreign guard relationship in European history. By 1496, that original company had grown to roughly one hundred guardsmen supported by about twenty-seven officers and sergeants. They took the name Cent Suisses, the Hundred Swiss, and their primary duty was to protect the King within the palace itself, serving as what the French called the garde du dedans du Louvre.

  Along with the halberds they carried into battle, each guardsman bore a blade engraved with the Royal arms in gold. Their ceremonial dress until 1789 was a richly braided 16th-century Swiss costume. A surviving example is held today in the Musee de l'Armee in Paris.

  In 1616, Louis XIII gave an existing Swiss infantry regiment the formal name Gardes Suisses. This regiment took the outer ring of duty: guarding doors, gates, and palace perimeters. In peacetime they were barracked on the outskirts of Paris. They wore red coats like the eleven Swiss line regiments in French service, but were distinguished by dark blue lapels and cuffs edged in white embroidery.

  The Gardes Suisses maintained a consistent reputation for discipline across two centuries of service. Their officers were all Swiss, and their pay was substantially higher than that of regular French soldiers. Disciplinary matters were handled internally by Swiss officers, under a code harsher than the rest of the French army. The nominal establishment was 1,600 men, though actual numbers usually fell below that figure.

• 3. Blood at the Tuileries

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  The regimental standards of the Gardes Suisses were secretly buried by the regiment's adjutant on the night of the 8th or the 9th of August 1792. He foresaw what was coming. The following morning, roughly nine hundred Swiss Guards held the Tuileries Palace as a revolutionary crowd surged toward it.

  Fighting broke out spontaneously after the royal family were escorted from the palace to take refuge with the National Assembly. A note from Louis XVI has survived ordering the Swiss to retreat to their barracks, but by the accounts that followed, they only fell back once their position became untenable and their ammunition ran out. About six hundred Swiss were killed in the fighting or massacred after surrendering. One group of sixty was taken prisoner to the Paris City Hall and killed there by the crowd. An estimated one hundred and sixty more died later of their wounds in prison or were killed during the September Massacres.

  Major Karl Josef von Bachmann, in command at the Tuileries, was formally tried and guillotined in September, still wearing his red uniform coat. Two officers, captains Henri de Salis and Joseph Zimmermann, survived and later reached senior ranks under Napoleon and the Bourbon Restoration.

  The only sizeable group of survivors was a detachment of roughly three hundred men sent to Normandy a few days before the massacre to escort grain convoys. Those buried regimental standards were discovered by a gardener and ceremonially burned by Republican authorities on the 14th of August. The barracks at Courbevoie were stormed the same week; the Swiss still on duty there were killed as well.

• 4. The Lion of Lucerne

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  Bertel Thorvaldsen, the Danish sculptor, designed a monument to the fallen guards that was dedicated in Lucerne in 1821. It shows a dying lion collapsed upon broken symbols of the French monarchy, carved directly into a cliff face. An inscription on the monument names the twenty-six Swiss officers who died on the 10th of August and the 2nd and the 3rd of September 1792, and records that approximately 760 Swiss Guardsmen were killed on those days.

  The monument made the event a fixed point in Swiss national memory. It drew the deaths into a civic tradition of honorable sacrifice, separate from any verdict on the monarchy the guards had died defending. Mark Twain would later call it the most mournful and moving piece of stone in the world, though that observation comes from outside the source of this documentary.

  The guards themselves had no say in the politics of their employers. Their code of service was contractual, their loyalty purchased but genuinely performed. The Lion of Lucerne stands as the clearest evidence that Swiss public memory accepted that bargain as honorable, even after the political order it had served collapsed.

• 5. Guards Across Europe

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  France was the most prominent employer of Swiss soldiers, but far from the only one. From 1579 onward, a Swiss Guard served the House of Savoy, rulers of what eventually became the Kingdom of Sardinia. That guard was dissolved in 1798. From 1696 to 1713, a Swiss Guard served the court of Frederick I of Prussia.

  The aristocratic Republic of Genoa employed Swiss Guards from 1609 to 1797 to protect its Doge's Palace and city gates. The City Republic of Lucca used a Swiss Guard from 1663 to 1804 to protect its government treasury and palace. A Swiss Guard established in 1581 for the Duke of Lorraine eventually followed the duke as he was indemnified with the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in 1737, and then to Austria after he was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1745; it was dismissed in Vienna in 1767.

  In the Dutch Republic, a company of Swiss served as personal guard for the Stadhouder from 1672 until 1796. A Swiss Guards Regiment in the same service ran from 1749 to 1796. The Swiss Guard to the Electoral Palatinate by Rhine was disbanded and reformed multiple times between 1582 and 1778.

  Even Egypt made use of Swiss soldiers. Khedive Mohamed Tewfik Pasha hired an irregular Swiss Guard in 1882 to serve as constabulary in Alexandria; it was dismissed the following year. In total, Swiss mercenary regiments served in seventeen different armies across the continent and beyond.

• 6. The Constitutional Exception

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  The first Swiss Federal Constitution, as amended in 1848, outlawed military capitulations, the formal contracts by which Swiss men were hired out to foreign armies. A federal law amended on the 30th of September 1859 extended the prohibition to cover all recruitment of Swiss citizens by foreign powers. Individual volunteering continued until it was banned outright in 1927.

  One unit survived all of it. The Pontifical Swiss Guard, stationed in Vatican City, was exempted from each wave of prohibition by virtue of its particular circumstances. The Holy See is not a conventional foreign power, and the Vatican City State sits under a special diplomatic accord with the Swiss government. That accord explicitly defines the Guard as an exception.

  Established in 1506, the Pontifical Swiss Guard is recognized as one of the oldest military units in the world. It holds another distinction: it is also the smallest army in the world. Today it serves as both a ceremonial unit and a working bodyguard for the Pope. The legal framework that makes it possible is the same treaty tradition that once governed the whole mercenary system. The constitutions and laws that shuttered every other Swiss Guard simply drew a boundary around the Vatican and left it standing.

• 7. Legacy and Language

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  Shakespeare assumed, apparently from his sources, that the royal house of Denmark kept a Swiss Guard. In Act IV, Scene v of Hamlet, King Claudius calls out "Where are my Switzers? Let them guard the door." No historical Swiss Guard served the Danish crown in that period. The line reveals something more interesting than a factual error: by Shakespeare's time, the word "Swiss" had become a generic term in European usage for any royal guard.

  The coincidence extends to the present. The gatekeepers of the royal palace of Copenhagen are still called schweizere, the Danish word for Swiss, though no Swiss soldiers have served there in the modern era. The Tuileries veterans who survived 1792 fed into the next century's armies. In 1831, disbanded veterans of the Swiss regiments and another foreign unit, the Hohenlohe Regiment, were recruited into the newly raised French Foreign Legion for service in Algeria. The soldiers who had once guarded the Palace of Versailles became the founding cadre of a force that would fight on a different continent entirely.