« Nous sur notre montagne... » Les Suisses romands et l’universalisation de la mémoire protestante

Abstract

Analysis of the speeches delivered during various commemorations of the Reformation, in French-speaking Switzerland, reveals three main areas where the memory of the Reformation underwent a transformation: historiography; the birth of a transnational Protestant community; the role of Switzerland and the Swiss. This article shows that the 1917 Lutheran anniversary marked a sea change in the representation of Protestant identity, detaching it definitively from the “Germanic race” with which it had been associated until then. Exacerbated European nationalisms and their murderous confrontations shook the foundations of confessional solidarity and durably reconfigured Protestant apologetics. The history of the International Monument of the Reformation, whose corner stone was laid with pomp and ceremony in 1909 and which was then discreetly handed over to the City of Geneva in the summer of 1917, symbolised by itself the upheavals occurring in less than a decade but prepared by a century of secularisation. With the first World War, the links associating Protestant states, modernity, progress and freedom lost all their relevance. National identity and denominational identity were severed once and for all. The result was a universalization of Luther’s 1517 gesture by Swiss Protestants in the course of the twentieth century. Construed as one of the sources of modernity, it was progressively seen as the foundation of Protestantism beyond Germany as well as the source of renovation for the whole of Christianity, including Catholicism, and the inspiration of a quest for freedom across all societies.

Keywords

• Commemoration
• Historiography
• Protestant identity
• Memory Devices