The university article of 1848 and the compromise of 1854

An old idea and Article 22 of the Federal Constitution

The idea of a Swiss national institution of higher learning is older than the federal state. Enlightenment writers such as the Basel philosopher Isaak Iselin had called for it in the eighteenth century, and during the Helvetic Republic the minister of arts and sciences, Philipp Albert Stapfer, drew up plans for a university serving the whole country.¹ Neither the Mediation nor the Restoration offered a political framework in which such plans could be realised. The Confederation of the Federal Pact of 1815 had no competence in education and hardly any central administration. Higher education remained a cantonal matter, carried by the academies of the Reformed cities and by the new cantonal universities of the liberal era. Zurich founded its university in 1833 and Bern followed in 1834, while Basel possessed an old university dating from 1460.

The Federal Constitution of 12 September 1848 opened a new possibility. Its Article 22 read in full: “Der Bund ist befugt, eine Universität und eine polytechnische Schule zu errichten.”² The provision was a permission and imposed no obligation. It named two institutions, a university and a polytechnic school, and said nothing about their seat, their organisation or their financing. It thus left every contested question to the ordinary legislature. That economy was characteristic of the constitution of 1848, which settled the architecture of the new state and deferred the details to statutes. The same technique governed the coinage and customs articles described in Part C. In the case of higher education, however, the deferral meant that the fundamental political conflict of the young federal state, the tension between the Protestant and liberal cities and the Catholic and rural cantons that had just lost the Sonderbund War, would be fought out again in the debate over the federal university.

Franscini's commission and the university project

The matter fell to the Federal Department of Home Affairs, whose head from 1848 was the Ticinese statesman Stefano Franscini. Franscini had originally hoped to create a national university founded on ideals of patriotic identity. Cantonal rivalries later forced him to give up that plan in favour of a school of technology.³ In 1851 a commission on higher education was appointed under his direction to prepare the legislation.⁴ The work of that commission produced two bills: one for a federal university and one for a polytechnic school. Recent research has emphasised that for most of the period the polytechnic school was treated as an appendix to the university project. The political energy of its supporters went into the university, and Zurich was the city in which it was to be established.⁵

The resistance to a federal university came from several directions at once. The Catholic and rural cantons feared that a national university would become an instrument of cultural domination by the Protestant urban centres of Geneva, Bern, Basel and Zurich. The multilingual character of the country raised the question of which language or languages such a university would use and whether the French-speaking cantons would accept an institution in German-speaking Zurich. The cantons that already maintained universities, finally, had no wish to see a federal competitor draw away their students and their best professors.⁶ These objections combined confessional, linguistic and institutional interests in a way that made a majority in both chambers of the Federal Assembly difficult to assemble. The dual structure of the new parliament mattered here. In the National Council the populous liberal cantons carried more weight, whereas in the Council of States each canton had two seats regardless of its size, so that the small Catholic cantons could block a project that the larger cantons favoured.

The vote of February 1854 and the foundation law

The decisive turn came at the beginning of 1854. On 1 February 1854 the Council of States voted against the federal university and in favour of a polytechnic school. Six days later, on 7 February, the corresponding law was passed.⁷ The Council of States had not simply rejected the idea of higher education in the humanities. It accepted a polytechnic that would also teach arts subjects, so that the future engineers, chemists and foresters would receive a general education alongside their technical training.⁸ This element of the compromise is visible in the official title of the statute, which established “the federal polytechnic school in connection with a school for the higher study of the exact, political and humanistic sciences”.⁹

The formula gave something to each side. The supporters of the university could present the humanistic and political chairs of the new school as the nucleus of a future federal university. Its opponents could point out that the Confederation had created no faculty of theology, law or medicine and therefore no institution that competed with the cantonal universities in the fields that defined a university in the nineteenth century. The historians of ETH have stressed that the reduction of the project to technical subjects was the condition that made it politically feasible at all.¹⁰ They have also noted that the technical orientation matched the needs of the moment. In the early 1850s Switzerland was about to build its railway network (see Chapter D.I) and needed engineers, surveyors and machine builders in numbers that no cantonal institution could supply.

The law of 1854 was a federal statute of modest length. It provided for a school with several specialised divisions and a general division, placed it under a federal school board (Schulrat) appointed by the Federal Council, and fixed its seat in Zurich.¹¹ The seat was the price that the Confederation paid to Zurich for the loss of the university. It came with conditions. The canton and city of Zurich were required to provide the premises and a range of material services for the school, a burden that is discussed below. For the federal state, the arrangement had the advantage of keeping the federal budget small. The Confederation paid the salaries and the running costs of teaching, while the seat canton bore the cost of the buildings. The division reflected the financial weakness of the early federal state, whose revenues consisted mainly of customs duties and postal income and which could not have financed a large construction programme of its own.

The ceremonial copy of the law, in German, French and Italian, bound in red velvet and tied with ribbons in the national colours, was handed to the first president of the school board at the opening ceremony.¹² The symbolism was deliberate. In a state that possessed few federal institutions and few federal buildings, the polytechnic school was intended from the beginning as a national institution. Its trilingual foundation document expressed the claim that it belonged to the whole Confederation, including the French- and Italian-speaking regions whose resistance had defeated the university.

The part played by Alfred Escher

Although Alfred Escher appears in every account of the foundation, the extent of his role has been the subject of an instructive historiographical debate. The standard biographical entry states that Escher had a substantial influence on the foundation of the polytechnic opened in 1855 and records that he served as vice-president of the federal school board from 1854 to 1882.¹³ At the time of the decisive votes, Escher was simultaneously a member of the National Council, a member of the Zurich cantonal government and director of the Nordostbahn, which was being organised in precisely these years. His position as head of Zurich's education department made him the natural negotiator for the seat canton.

The historian Daniela Zetti has shown how the image of Escher as founder of ETH changed over the course of the anniversary literature. Wilhelm Oechsli, writing for the fiftieth anniversary in 1905, described Escher as the soul of the university project and as an indispensable figure in a complex process, though he did not present him as the driving force behind the polytechnic itself. Gottfried Guggenbühl, writing for the centenary in 1955, praised the exemplary manner in which Escher had handled extensive and demanding legislative tasks. The account of Klaus Urner for the 125th anniversary emphasised Escher's role as Zurich's director of education and gave the design of the school's fundamentals to the mathematician Joseph Wolfgang von Deschwanden.¹⁴ According to Zetti, Escher's documented contributions consisted in drafting legislation, in consulting Deschwanden, who became the first director of the school in 1855, and in accepting the defeat of his preferred university project with good grace by supporting the polytechnic option in public. His idea of a supreme federal authority over the school was realised in the school board, which placed the Polytechnikum under the Federal Council and denied it the autonomy of a traditional university.

The same author has criticised the tendency of the recent jubilee culture to present Escher as an entrepreneurial founder of ETH. In 2019, the two-hundredth anniversary of his birth, ETH created a prize named after him that was dedicated to his supposed entrepreneurial spirit. Zetti regarded that link as an invention unsupported by the sources.¹⁵ For the purposes of this book, the balanced view is the most useful one. Escher was the political representative of the seat canton, a skilled drafter of legislation and for almost three decades the second man on the school board. He was not the intellectual designer of the school. His importance lies in the fact that the same person sat on the school board, chaired the Nordostbahn and, from 1856, presided over the board of the Schweizerische Kreditanstalt. In his person the three spheres of this chapter, education, industry and finance, were joined long before anyone spoke of knowledge transfer.

Notes

1. ETH Zurich, “1848–1855: The polytechnic realisation of a long-held dream”, https://ethz.ch/en/the-eth-zurich/portrait/history/epochs/1848-1855.html. Stapfer’s plans of 1798–1799 are described in the Helvetic chapter of this book (Part C) only in passing. ↩
2. Bundesverfassung der Schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft vom 12. September 1848, Art. 22, text at verfassungen.ch, https://www.verfassungen.ch/verf48.htm. ↩
3. Wikipedia, “Stefano Franscini”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefano_Franscini. Cited for orientation. Franscini (1796–1857) was the only Italian-speaking member of the first Federal Council. ↩
4. ETHistory 1855–2005, “1848–1855: Polytechnische Fundierung eines alten Traums”, http://www.ethistory.ethz.ch/besichtigungen/epochen/debatte1/. ↩
5. Daniela Zetti, “Was hat Alfred Escher zur Gründung der ETH beigetragen?”, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 8 May 2019, https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/was-hat-alfred-escher-zur-gruendung-der-eth-beigetragen-ld.1459053. Zetti is a historian of technology who worked on the ETH history project of 2005. ↩
6. ETHistory 1855–2005, “1848–1855: Polytechnische Fundierung eines alten Traums”, ETH Zurich, epoch summary in PDF form, https://www.ethistory.ethz.ch/besichtigungen/epochen/ETH05_epochen.pdf. ↩
7. Daniela Zetti, “Was hat Alfred Escher zur Gründung der ETH beigetragen?”, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 8 May 2019, https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/was-hat-alfred-escher-zur-gruendung-der-eth-beigetragen-ld.1459053. ↩
8. J. J. O’Connor and E. F. Robertson, “Zurich Federal Polytechnic history”, MacTutor History of Mathematics, University of St Andrews, https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/HistTopics/ETH_history/. ↩
9. ETHistory 1855–2005, “1848–1855: Polytechnische Fundierung eines alten Traums”, http://www.ethistory.ethz.ch/besichtigungen/epochen/debatte1/. The German title of the law is “Bundesgesetz betreffend die Errichtung einer eidgenössischen polytechnischen Schule” of 7 February 1854. ↩
10. ETH Zurich, “1848–1855: The polytechnic realisation of a long-held dream”, https://ethz.ch/en/the-eth-zurich/portrait/history/epochs/1848-1855.html. The page describes the founding debate as having established the polytechnic’s academic credibility and a distinctly Swiss federalist model focused on engineering expertise. ↩
11. Wikipedia (English), “ETH Zurich”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETH_Zurich, which records the foundation by federal decree in 1854 and the initial six divisions (architecture, civil engineering, mechanical engineering, chemistry, forestry and an integrated department for mathematics, natural sciences, literature and social and political sciences). J. J. O’Connor and E. F. Robertson, “Zurich Federal Polytechnic history”, MacTutor History of Mathematics, https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/HistTopics/ETH_history/, confirm that the Schulrat was appointed by the Federal Council and that Zurich was chosen as the seat. ↩
12. ETH-Bibliothek, “Bundessymbolik: Die Prachtausgabe des Polytechnikum-Gesetzes vom 7. Februar 1854”, ETHeritage blog, 7 February 2008, https://blogs.ethz.ch/digital-collections/2008/02/07/bundessymbolik-die-prachtausgabe-des-polygesetzes-vom-7-februar-1854/. ↩
13. Markus Bürgi and Michael Zeuske, “Escher, Alfred”, Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz (HLS), version of 26 August 2024, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/003626/2024-08-26/. The entry also lists his offices as member of the Zurich Education Council from 1845 to 1855 (president from 1849) and director of education from 1850. ↩
14. Daniela Zetti, “Was hat Alfred Escher zur Gründung der ETH beigetragen?”, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 8 May 2019, https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/was-hat-alfred-escher-zur-gruendung-der-eth-beigetragen-ld.1459053. Zetti also refers to the 2005 study by David Gugerli, Patrick Kupper and Daniel Speich, which returned to the parliamentary debates and gave Deschwanden independent significance. ↩
15. Daniela Zetti, “Was hat Alfred Escher zur Gründung der ETH beigetragen?”, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 8 May 2019, https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/was-hat-alfred-escher-zur-gruendung-der-eth-beigetragen-ld.1459053. ↩

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