Basle, Bachofen and the Critique of Modernity in the Second Half of

Basle, Bachofen and the Critique of Modernity in the Second Half of the Nineteenth
Century
Lionel Gossman
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 47. (1984), pp. 136-185.
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BASLE, BACHOFEN AND T H E C R I T I Q U E O F MODERNITY I N T H E SECOND HALF O F T H E NINETEENTH CENTURY Lionel Gossman BASLE
Une rkpublique sage ne doit rien hasarder qui
l'expose i la bonne ou i la mauvaise fortune: le seul
bien auquel elle doit aspirer, c'est la perpttuitk de son
ttat.
-Montesquieu, Grandeur et dicadence des Romains, IX.
wedged between France, Germany and the rest of Switzerland, Basle
has always had to defend its identity and independence against the designs of
hostile or covetous neighbours - Habsburgs, Bourbons and Bonapartes alike. I t
has always served both as a meeting ground and place of exchange and as an obstacle, a
limit to the influence and ambition of outsiders - a bulwark and a refuge at the same
time. Because of its peculiar situation, the view of the world from the 'Dreilanderecke' of
Basle was different from those which could be enjoyed from the great centres of European
power - from Paris, London, Berlin or Vienna. It was not the dominating view of the
hero and conqueror; but the cautious, questioning, mistrustful view of the prosaic antihero among giants whose dangerous games threaten his livelihood and his very existence.
In the second half of the century of blood and iron, Basle emerged as a focus of
resistance to the dominant progressivist trend of contemporary European, and especially
German culture. The present essay is mostly concerned with aspects ofthe work ofJohanrl
Jacob Bachofen, a Basle philologist still remembered for his comparative approach to the
study of classical antiquity, his pioneering anthropological investigation of the so-called
'avunculate' or relation between mother's brother and sister's son in early societies, and
his bold and imaginative rethinking of woman's place in the history of civi1ization.l
A
BORDER CITY
Translations are mine unless otherwrise indicated.
'
Bachofen's name appears in most of the standard
histories of anthropology. but there has been no fulllength study of him in English to date. TLVO
shorter
studies deserve mention -Joseph Campbell's Introduction to the Bollingen volume, .lG/h, Religion, and
'Itother Right: Selected rt'rilings o f J . J. Bachofen. Princeton,
195.1, pp.xxv-lvii: and a slighter piece by Philipp
il'olff-il'indegg. 'C. G . Jung - Bachofen. Burckhardt,
and Basel', in the Jungian journal Spring. 1976,
pp. 137-47. See also Gossman. Orpheus Philologus,
Philadelphia 1983. I n German the literature is considerable. T h e follo\cing is a select bibliography:
r\lSred Baeumler. D a s fnythische Cliltalter: Bachofens
Deutung des Altertums m i / einem ,Vachwort - Bachofen und die
Religionsgeschichte. hiunich 1965 [apart from the 'Nachwort'. this is the text ofBaeumler's 1926 Introduction to
Der .tlythus con Orient und Occident: eine .bletaphysik der Alten
ll'elt aus den l t i r k e n con J . J . Bachofen].
\Valter Benjamin. 'Johann Jacob Bachofen'. Text +
Kritik. 1971.XXXI-XXXII. pp. 28--42.
Johannes Dormann. 'il'ar Johann Jakob Bachofen
Evolutionist?', Anthropos, 1965. LX,pp. 1-48.
Id., J . J. Bachofen: Religionsforscher und Ethnologe, 1966 (Studia Instituti r\nthropos. XXI). 1968-69, Id.. 'Bachofen-llorgan'. Anthropos,
LXIII-LXIV,
pp. I 29-38 136
Journal of the Mhrburg and Courtauld Inrtttutes. Volume 47 , 1984
BASLE AND BACHOFEN
I37
I t is intended as a contribution to a larger projected study of nineteenth-century
Ba~le.~
Among the Basle intellectuals four achieved particular renown. Two were natives of
Basle and contemporaries - Bachofen himself and Jacob Burckhardt; and two, both
younger men who received support and encouragement from the Baselers, were immigrants from Germany - Nietzsche, who came to Basle in 1869 as Professor of Classical
Philology at the University, and Franz Overbeck who was called, around the same time,
to the chair of T h e ~ l o g y Though
.~
the character of their relations varied, all four men
knew each other and followed each other's work. And all four were sharply critical of the
optimistic modernist culture that had come to be the established culture of Wilhelminian
Germany just before and during the G r i i n d e r j ~ h r e Seen
. ~ from Basle, Berlin, even more
than Paris, appeared as the capital of the nineteenth century. In classical philology
Theodor Mommsen was the prestigious Berlin professor whom Bachofen identified as the
incarnation of modernism and the object of his special loathing, while the bgte noire of
Overbeck, whose scholarly work was nothing less than a long, perpetually renewed
critique of the very subject he had been engaged to teach, was hIommsen's colleague at
the Prussian Academy, Adolf Harnack, a prominent liberal theologian highly regarded a t
Kaiser Wilhelm 11's court and dedicated to working out an accommodation between
religion and modern life.5 During his years as Professor of Philology at Basle, Nietzsche
Erich E'romm. 'Die sozialpsychologisct~eBedeutung
der Llutterrechtstheorie'. Zeitschrlft fur Sozialforschung,
1934. Ill. pp. 1 9&227.
Thomas Gelzer, 'Die Bachofen-Briefe: Betrachtungen zu \.ision und FVerk. Fl'irklichkeit und Leben
J .J . Bachofens anhand von Band X der 'Gesammelten
IVerke', Schu,eizer~scheZeitschriJi f u r Geschichte. I 969, xlx.
PP. 777-869.
Marielouise Janssen-Jurreit. Sexis~nus: iiber die
Abtreibung der Frauenfrage. Llunich and Vienna 1976,
ch. 6. pp. 96-1 I I .
Karl Kerenyi, Bachofen und die Z u k u n f t des Humanismus, Zurich 1945.
Id.. 'Johann Jakob Bachofens Portrat'. in Tessiner
Schreibtisch: .Ll,:thologisches 1n~nythologische.i. Stuttgart
1963. pp. 2 1-3 I .
Rudolf h l a r s , Introduction to his .lfutterecht und
Crreligion: eine A u s u ~ a h i . Stuttgart 1927. repr. 1954%
pp. vii-xxviii.
IValter 51uschg, Bachofen als Schriftsteller (Rectorial
address. 25 November I 949) Basle I 9.19.
Gerhard Plumpe, 'Die Entdeckung der \'or\velt:
Erlauterungen zu Benjamins Bachofenlekture'. Text
Kritik I 97 I , xxxl-xxx11. pp. I ~ 2 7 .
.-\drien Turel, Baehojin-Fleud, Bern 1939.
I n addition, the remarkable introductions and
afterwrords by Karl Lleuli, Emanuel Kienzle. Johannes
Dormann and others, to the published volumes of the
Gesammelte llerke, under the general editorship of Karl
Lleuli. Basle 1943- , publication interrupted at vol. x.
See nn. 8 and I I below for further bibliography.
T h e project, on ~vhichProfessor Carl Schorske and I
are working together. grew out of a seminar we taught
jointly in rgjcj. in the European Cultural Studies
+
Program at Princeton, of lvhich Schorske was then
director. I thank hl.Charles GilliPron at the Swiss
Consulate General in Ye\\- York for his interest in the
project a n d the Pro Helvetia Foundation in Zurich for
helping to finance some of the research associated lvith
it. These four were the most prominent and the best- known. Later. i t is hoped to include their teachers. colleagues and associates: Alexandre LTinet, Franz
Dorotheus Gerlach, FV. LI.1,. De \Vette, Karl Steffensen and others.
T h e opposition and contrast ofBerlin and Basle Lvas
a topic developed by Friedrich Lleinecke, especially in
the aftermath of the Second \Vorld F\'ar. ~ v h e nit seemed
finally incontrovertible that Burckhardt had, after all.
been less deluded than Ranke. See his 'Ranke and
Burckhardt' (orig. German 1948) in Hans Kohn, ed.,
German History: Some AVew l7eu.s. Boston 1 954.
pp. 141-j6.
'One could call theolog! the Satan of religion'.
( C h r i ~ t e n t u mund Kultur: Gedanken und Anmerkungeti i u r
modernen Theoio,~ie,['onFran: Oierbeck. Aus dem Nachlass
herausgegeben von C. A. Bernoulli. Basle 1919.p. 1 3 ) .
O n Overbeck and Harnack. ibid.. pp. 198--'~41.
See also
Karl Barth, 'Vnsettled Questions for Theology Today'.
a I 920 re\ iew of Christentum und Kultur, in his T h e o i o ~ ua nd
Church: Shortel lliitings 1920-1928. trans. Louise P.
Smith. London 1962. pp. 57-73; Karl Kupisch. Karl
Barth, H a m b u r g 1971,p p 46-49; Thomas F. Torrance.
K a l l Barth: A n Introduelion to his Ear!,: Theolo,py 1,91~1,9,yi.
London 1962, pp.36-38, 42-43. 72-73; and Llax
Schoch. 'Die Entdecku~lg\on 1,'ranz Overbeck', in his
K a l l Balth: Theologie in Aktion. Frauenfeld and Stuttgart
1967. p p 58-68.
138
LIONEL GOSSMAN
also frequently expressed contempt for the 'philistine' scholars of his native Germany,
notably those of Berlin.'j
The stance of the Basle scholars and critics was a peculiar mixture of negativity and
affirmation. In the face of the common nineteenth-century view of history as a story
moving toward a happy ending -a 'romance', as Hayden White would say7- they came
increasingly to stress the distinctiveness of history as a temporal category, with respect
both to pre-history and to any possible transcendence or fulfilment of itself. Shut off from
both origins and ends, history was not a directed movement, but a constant ebbing and
flowing, a sphere of alienation and perpetual conflict, more or less favourable, at various
times, to human well-being. All pretended historical solutions, all claims that history itself
could definitively overcome the reality of alienation and the discomforts of culture, were
bogus. The Baselers thus looked on the 'quick fix' offered by premature pseudo-totalities
such as the nation-state or the folk with suspicion and hostility.
This did not mean that the ideal of totality and of a life undivided by competing and
seemingly incompatible demands and impulses - individuality and community, selfcontrol and self-abandonment, morality and sensuality, rationality and affectivity - had
to be relinquished. I t meant that it had to be seen as something beyond all historical
experience or reasonable historical expectation. In this way, in the midst ofhis scepticism
and even pessimism about his own world, Bachofen kept alive the idea of a pre-historical
world of heroic proportions, in which the sensual and the ethical had been briefly
harmonized, and of which actual traces were still to be found in the 'primitive' cultures of
Africa and America. Such cultures, however, were survivals, not models that historical
man could hope to emulate. Similarly, the philosopher Karl Steffensen, an immigrant to
Basle from Schleswig-Holstein, argued that German idealism was untenable and dangerous in so far as it claimed to account for the real historical world, but defended its ideals of
totality and presence, as ideals, against the encroachments of an agnostic Anglo-French
positivism.
Historically, the work of the Basle critics not only contributed to the growing critique
of liberal progressivism in the second half of the nineteenth century, it was also exploited
by many who did not share their diffidence and distrust of all popular and populist
movements. Burckhardt and Overbeck were least easily appropriated, in part no doubt
because both deliberately eschewed those forms of writing, lyrical or oratorical, that aim
Nietzsche's biting attacks on \Yilamowitz are
notorious. Burckhardt presents a special problem.
Always more temperate than Bachofen, who could not
share his disengaged, aesthetic outlook - Bachofen at
first called him 'familiaris meus et amicissirnus
antecessor Basiliensis' in a letter recommending him to
the Italian scholar Gervasio u o h a n n Jakob Bachofens
Gesammelte Werke, ed. Karl Meuli, Basle 1943-67, x
[hereafter Bachofen, Briefe], letter 37, 2 1 March 1846)
but later cooled notably tolvard him (Bachofen, Briefe,
letters 109, I 16)- Burckhardt was ready to enjoy what
the new Prussian Weltstadt had to offer without fear of
compromising his virtue (see LVerner Kaegi, Jacob
Burckhardt: eine Biographie, Basle 1947-77, IV,p. 416, on
Burckhardt in Berlin in 1882) and he never created a
Berlin double as over\vhelming and threatening as
Bachofen's \lommsen. Nevertheless, when he was
approached about succeeding Ranke in the chair of
history at Berlin, he let it be known that he did not want
to be considered (Kaegi, op. cit., IV, pp. 3c-33). In
addition, despite genuine admiration for Ranke, who
had been his teacher, his attitude became increasingly
reserved. Likewise, though he entertained courteous
relations with nationalist historians such as Sybel and
Treitschke, he was aware of the important difference
between what he called ironically his 'dilettantism' on
the one hand and their practice ofhistoriography on the
other. 'Ich werde nie eine Schule griinden', he wrote,
not without a certain satisfaction (letter to Paul Heyse,
2 2 April 1862;also Kaegi, op. cit., 111, pp. 135-37).
Hayden LVhite, Metahistov: The Historical Imagination in A'ineteenth C e n t u v Europe, Baltimore 1973, pp. 811, 15-52,
'
BASLE AND BACHOFEN
'39
to seduce or transport the reader. Burckhardt's style is marked by leaps and hiatuses: it is
anything but soothing or reassuring. Overbeck's is dense, intricate and scholarly,
rebuffing all but the most serious and committed readers. Bachofen and Nietzsche,
however, could be and often were perceived as pointing beyond the courageous scepticism
resolutely held to by Burckhardt and Overbeck, Bachofen by appearing at times, through
a selective and tendentious reading of his work, to advocate a regressive retreat into
religious myth and symbolism, Nietzsche by recommending a straining forward to a more
heroic form of myth.
Bachofen was in fact richly exploited by ideologists of both the Left and the Right: in a
generally leftward direction first by Engels himself, then to some extent by Erich Fromm
and Lewis M u m f ~ r din
; ~a more right-wing and irrationalist direction by the members of
the Kosmische Runde, an avant-garde artistic and philosophical movement in Munich at the
end of the last century, which included the philosopher Ludwig K l a g e ~ and
, ~ subsequently in a distinctly fascist direction, in the 1920s and 193os, by Manfred Schroter and
Alfred Baeumler. Baeumler, a Berlin professor of philosophy who in 1937 was appointed
Director of the Nazi Institute for Political Pedagogy, contributed a long and immensely
learned three-hundred-page introductory essay to his colleague Schroter's I 926 edition of
selections from Bachofen (Der Mythus von Orient und Occident, reissued in 1956).Reviewing
this publication, which marked the high point of the Bachofen revival in Germany in the
1g20s,'O Thomas Mann took Bachofen and Nietzsche as representative of the two
directions between which modern man, faced with the failure of nineteenth-century
Friedrich Engels. Origins o f t h e Farnil7 (1884), ch. 2.
and Preface to 4th edn. New York 1 9 4 2 pp. 8-10.28--50.
Erich Fromm, op. cit. n. I above, 111,pp. 196--227. Ilhlls:
Res Sanctae. Res Sacrae. .4 passage from 'Lersuch iiher die
Graehers~mholikder Alten'. Translated by B. Q. Morgan
and with a Note o n J . J . Bachofen by Lewis Xlumford,
Lexington 1 9 6 r T h a t hlumford w a o n Bachofen is
not surprising. His entire view of man and society, and
especially of early society. is very close to Bachofen's,
notably in the contrast he establishes between the
feminine neolithic village community and the domineering, aggressive, male city that emerged later from what
he sees as the fusion ofneolithic and palaeolithic. as well
as that bet\veen the Orphic and the Promethean aspects
o f m a n . (See The TransformationsufA\fan, S e w York 1952,
chapters 1-2, and The CiO in History, New York 1961,
chapters 1-3). There is a link between hlumford and
Bachofen in the person of Elie Reclus, the French
Utopian, who was an admirer and correspondent of
Bachofen, and \vho also taught at the famous Edinburgh
summer seminars of hlumford's mentor Patrick Geddes.
O n the Kosmische Runde and Bachofen's relation to
the George circle in Xlunich, see Claude David. Stefan
George et son aur.re poitique. Lyons and Paris 1952,
pp. 1 9 6 2 0 9 : Hans-Jurgen Linke, D a s Kultische in der
Dichtung Stefan Georges, XIunich and Dusseldorf 1960, 1,
pp. 6-62; Ernst hlorwitz, Komrnentarzu dem lt'erke Stefan
Georges, hlunich and Dusseldorf 1960, p p 46, 3 0 9
l o This revival was marked by a number of republications of texts by Bachofen, as well as by an active
exchange of critical vie\vs of his work. I n 1923 hlanfred
Schroter put out the essay on Oknos der Seigechter
(Leipzig: Beck) and the follo\ving year D a s (rkische I'olk
(Leipzig: Haessel). I n 1925 L u d ~ v i gKlages and C . .A.
Bernoulli saw the whole of the Grabersrmholik through
the press in Basle. I n 1926 Schroter and Baeumler
published their 600-page selection of Bachofen texts
known as Der A\[ythus uon Orient und Occident (see also n. 1
above), and Philip Reclam published a 3-volume
selection, running to over 1500 pages, edited by C . .A.
Bernoulli - Crreligion und antzke Symhole i1926). T h e
following year yet another selection. edited by Rudolf
hlarx, appeared in the popular 'pocket editions' of the
Kroner firm in Leipzig under the title ~Johann Jakoh
Hachofen: 'Wutterrecht und L'rreli<gion (see also n. 1 above).
192j also saw a new edition of Bachofen's ;lutohiograp~y
(first published by Hermann Blocher in the Basler
Jahrhuch for 191j ) , along \vith his inaugural lecture on
natural law and historical la\<, b> ,\Ifred Baeumler
(HalleISaale), and Georg Schmidt's edition of the
hitherto unpublished Grierhische Reise (Heidelberg-). It
was probably Ludwig Klages's I h m kosmogonischen Eros
(hlunich 1922) that launched the Bachofen revival.
This work went through a second edition in 1926. and a
third edition in 1930. I n 1924 t\vo major studies by C . .A.
Bernoulli appeared: Johann Jacob Bachofen und das
.lhtur~yrnhol (Basle), and the shorter Johann Jakoh
B a c h o j n 01s Religionsforscher i l e i p z i g ) . T h e Ziirich
philologist Ernst Ho\vald responded to the rehabilitation of Bachofen with an attack 'IVider Johann Jakob
Bachofen' in 1924 (repr. in his Humanismus und
140
LIONEL GOSSMAN
liberalism, must choose: that of regression into the dark world of myth and the Unconscious (Bachofen) and that of progress, heroic transcendence of old fears and idols and
courageous assumption of freedom (Nietzsche).I1
There is nothing surprising, no doubt, about this popular use ofNietzsche. Bachofen's
part in the debate, on the other hand, is somewhat unexpected. Nietzsche's repudiation of
philology and his departure from Basle in 1879marked a decisive break with the cautious,
conservative, carefully masked criticism represented by Basle scholarship, and the later
Nietzsche trod paths on which none of his colleagues at Basle was prepared to accompany
him, not Burckhardt, not Bachofen, not even Overbeck, who remained personally loyal to
the end. Nietzsche's relations with Burckhardt - the theme of a well known essay by
Erich Heller in The Disinherited Mind and of countless books and articles by German and
Swiss historians12 -became more and more problematical as his challenge to traditional
philology and traditional philosophy became more radical and more violent. Likewise
Bachofen, who had befriended Nietzsche in his early years at Basle and who had
welcomed The Birth of Tragedy with great interest, greeted his later writings first with
reserve, then with dismay. Eventually, all communication between the two men ceased.13
Bachofen's historical role in the popular ideological struggles of the twenties in Germany
is thus hardly in keeping with the character of the man or his work, for in the end, despite
the vehemence of his attacks on contemporary scholarship, Bachofen himself always
remained a respectable bourgeois of Basle, living quietly, seeking neither scandal nor
notoriety, entertaining relations almost exclusively with other scholars, preferably
wealthy private ones like himself, and pursuing his work in a recognizably scholarly
manner. Above all, his outlook was profoundly Christian. No doubt the criticisms of
contemporary culture that came from the pen of men like Nietzsche or Wagner evoked a
sympathetic response from him, but he could have reacted only with consternation to the
Europiiertum [Ziirich and Stuttgart 19571, pp.63-77).
Howald was among the first to suggest an opposition
between Bachofen and Xietzsche. I n 1926 Baeumler
entered the fray with a massive goo-page introduction to
his and Schroter's selection of texts, entitled 'Bachofen,
der hlythologe der Romantik'. This publication prompted a n important commentary by Thomas h l a n n in his
Pariser Rechenschaj (1926), where Howald's contrast of
Bachofen and Sietzsche is taken up again. I n 1927 a n
article on 'Der K a m p f um Johann Jakob Bachofen', by
\Verner Deubel, appeared in the Preussische Jahrbiicher
(ccrx, pp. 66-75) and the year after K . E. \Vinter
investigated \<hat he termed the 'Bachofen-Renaissance' in the Zeitschrl'ji fur die gesamte Staafslcissenschaft
( ~ x x x v1928,
.
pp. 3 1 6 - p ) , while the same year in Italy
Croce was sufficiently intrigued by the revival of a n
author who had been neglected in his lifetime to inquire
into the reasons ('I1 Bachofen e la storiografia
afilologica', ;Itti della Reale .4ccadem1a di Scienze moral1 e
politiche di .\hpoli. 1928. LI. pp. I j8-76). 1929 saw the
publication of Georg Schmidt's doctoral dissertation,
Johann Jakob Bachofens Geschichtsph~losophie; and of an
important article b) Baeumler on 'Bachofen und
Nietzsche'. (repr, in his S t u d ~ e n zur deutschen Geistesgeschichte. Berlin 1937, pp. 22-43),
l 1 l l a n n ' s criticism of Bachofen grew out of his deep
sympathy with him and reflected his concern at the use
being made of Bachofen in the political climate of the
mid-1920s in Germany. hlann's own work shows the
influence of Bachofen. and it was he who introduced the
philologist Karl Kerenyi to the work of his predecessor,
thus totally transforming the direction of Kerenyi's
interests and the character of his scholarship.
l 2 Erich Heller, 'Burckhardt and Nietzsche', in his The
Disinherited .\find, Cambridge 1952. See also C . A .
Bernoulli. Franz Oterbeck und Friedrich S i e t ~ s c h e : eine
Freundschaft, Jena 1908, 2 vols; Alfred von hlartin,
Aliet~scheund Burckhardt. l l u n i c h 1942: and Edgar Salin,
Jakob Burckhardt u n d x i e t ~ s c h eHeidelberg
,
1948.
l 3 See Baeumler. Studien Zur deutschen Geistesgeschichte.
3rd edn. 1943. pp. 22-43, I n November 1871 Nietzsche
was writing to his mother and sister that he had been
invited to lunch at the Bachofens (Briefe. Berlin and
Leipzig, 190-1909, v, I , no 107). O n I I November
1909, ho~vever,Frau Bachofen wrote to C . A. Bernoulli:
'Then The Birth o f Tragedy appeared. hly husband was
delighted with it and had high hopes for Nietzsche. But
then came his subsequent writings, ~ v h i c h my late
husband judged quite unfavourably. Thereafter our
pleasant association with Nietzsche became more and
more clouded until finally all relations between us
ceased' (quoted by Bernoulli, Bachofen und das n h l u r g r n bol. op. cit. n , 10 above, p. 593).
BASLE AND BACHOFEN
141
anti-Christian heroic ideal proposed both in the writings of his young friend and in those
early ones at least - of the prophet of Tribschen.
T o some extent the Basle scholars can be considered 'cultural pessimists'. Despite the
abusive exploitation of Bachofen in the 1920s, however, they cannot rightly be lumped
with popular cultural pessimists of the type studied by Fritz Stern in his Politics of Cultural
Despair (Berkeley 1961).Attracted and fascinated at first by Lagarde, in whose writings
they easily recognized themes and concerns similar to their own, Bachofen, Burckhardt
and Overbeck all ultimately drew back from him.14 Though they were sharply critical of
the civilization created by modern enlightenment, they distrusted every attempt to restore
a way of life and a form of existence - whether represented by primitive religious faith
(Overbeck), primitive matriarchal society (Bachofen) or the seamless culture of the early
polis (Burckhardt) - that they saw as no longer possible or even, perhaps, desirable.
Burckhardt's astringent reminder that the Greek polis was intolerant of all individual
deviations from the communal norm contrasts strikingly, for instance, with the unrestrained enthusiasm of the author of 'Art and Revolution'. The historian's well known
distaste both for Wagner's charismatic and manipulative personality and for his engulfing
music, his abiding affection for Haydn and Mozart, seem more than incidental.
Burckhardt was probably repelled by an art that he saw as subversive of hard won
distinctions and orders and that may well have been associated in his mind with the
demagogy of modern mass politics. The poet Carl Spitteler, who came from Liestal, near
Basle, and was a student of Burckhardt's at the Basle Piidagogium, put his finger on an
essential aspect of Burckhardt's relation to antiquity that is equally characteristic of
Bachofen's relation to prehistory. 'Jacob Burckhardt's ideal', he noted, 'is not so much
antiquity itselfas the study ofantiquity'.15 Not the original presence, in other words, but a
religious attitude to irreparable absence and loss.
I n I 88j MallarmC observed that the proper attitude of the poet in the age of industrial
capitalism was a kind of heroic abstentionism. The poet, he declared, is 'en grkve devant
la sociCt6':
- the
Au fond je considtre l'tpoque contemporaine comme un interi-egne pour le poete qui n'a point i s'y
m&ler:elle est trop en dtsuttude et en effervescence prkparatoire pour qu'il ait autre chose i faire
q u ' i travailler avec mysttre en vue de plus tard ou de jamais . . .
Most of the Basle critics would have subscribed to this judgment. But they would
probably have rejected the faint anarchist undercurrent in MallarmC's remarks, had they
detected it. For their relation to their small city-state, which they saw at one and the same
time as a microcosm of the modern world and as a haven from it, was more ambivalent
than that of the French poet to thejn-de-siicle France of the Third Republic.16
l4 O n the relation of the Basle scholars to Lagarde, see
the excellent pages in Robert \V. Lougee, Paul de
Lagarde, 1827--91, Cambridge \lass. 1962, p p 22G31.
O n Burckhardt and IVagner, see Burckhardt's letters to
Von Preen (New Year's Eve 1872)and Max Alioth
(25August 1878) in The Letters o f Jacob Burckhardt.
selected. edited and translated by Alexander Dru,
London 1955,pp. 157, 182-83. In the first of these
Burckhardt associates Wagner and Bismarck as clever
manipulators.
l5 Carl Spitteler, 'Bocklin, Burckhardt, Basel'. Gesammelte Werke, Ziirich 1945-58, VI.p. 164.
l6 Mallarmt on the artist 'en grkve devant la socittt' in
replies to a questionnaire on the future of literature. by
Jules Huret (18g1),in Oeucres complites de Stlphane
~ M a l l a r m l e, d. Henry hlondor and G.Jean-Aubry, Paris
1951.p. 870; on the contemporary period as an
interregnum, in a letter to Verlaine, 16November 1885,
ibid., p. 664.O n hlallarme's anarchist sympathies, see
James Joll, The .4narchists, New York 1964, pp. 1 33,
167-69;Giampiero Posani. dMallarmi: il tramonto di D i o e
il mezrogiorno del Capitale, Naples 1975, pp. 75-1 I 1 ;
George Woodstock, Anarchism: A H i s t o v o f Libertarian
Ideas and Movements, Xew York 1962,pp. 295. 305-06.
LIONEL GOSSMAN
From the time it joined the Swiss Confederation in 1501 until the second half of the
nineteenth century, Basle was the largest, wealthiest and most important Germanspeaking town in Switzerland. A former Imperial City, the residence at various times of
Erasmus and Holbein, the home of the Bernoullis and the Eulers, it was a centre of
humanist scholarship and printing, art, science and letters as well as a thriving commercial place. Yet it was a compact, moderately sized town, even by the standards of an
earlier age. Its population, entirely contained within the fourteenth-century walls,
remained stable from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth century at about I 5,000, which
was a modest figure compared not only with new commercial and industrial cities like
Liverpool or Philadelphia, but with many traditional trading centres, such as Frankfurt
or Strasbourg. I t owed its importance to its situation, at the head of the long navigable
stretch of the Rhine and astride the main trading routes between Northern and Southern
Europe, to the enterprise and resourcefulness of its merchants and manufacturers, and to
its political independence and republican traditions, which made it a preferred place of
refuge for many seeking asylum from religious or political persecution or from conditions
ofviolence and unrest in the neighbouring lands or in the lands along its trading routes. As
we shall see, the city's ruling elite was composed predominantly of immigrants and
refugees.
Prior to the Federal Constitution of 1848the Swiss Confederation was little more than
a loose defensive alliance among communities that varied greatly in size, population,
social and economic structure, and political organization, with virtually no central
authority, let alone a common language or religion, common laws, or a common coinage.
Unlike most other European states, Switzerland owed its existence not to the unifying and
acquisitive ambitions of a prince or princely house, but -on the contrary -to resistance
to such ambitions. Even in the first half of the nineteenth century, the country had no
capital city: the Federal Diet met at Zurich, Lucerne or Bern. The obligations of the Diet,
moreover, were still limited to protecting the independence and the rights of the member
communities and to mediating in disputes that might arise among them.
Though it was the largest city in the Confederation and its most important centre of
trade, Basle was geographically the most eccentric and militarily the most vulnerable of
the members of the Confederation. Trading relations, as well as the countless occasions of
friction and cooperation, dispute and negotiation, that inevitably arise in a border city,
bound it to France and Germany, Italy and the Netherlands as much as, and even more
than, to the other cantons. Basle's trading connections in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries extended to Bremen, Hamburg, Lubeck and Copenhagen in the North;
Frankfurt-on-the-Oder and beyond (Poland, Russia, Turkey) in the East; Venice, Genoa,
Milan and Marseilles in the South; and Paris, Nantes, Amsterdam, London and the
Atlantic colonies in the West. I n the early nineteenth century Basle merchants were active
from Rio de Janeiro and New York to Africa and the Far East, and Basle capital was
financing the industrialization of neighbouring Alsace. Basle's relation to the rest of
Switzerland was tempered by these international connections, which contributed, along
with the city's history and the almost total political and institutional autonomy it
continued to enjoy as a member of the Confederation, to preserve among its citizens a
strong sense of distinctiveness and civic independence.17
142
l7 O n the history of Basle, see especially Paul
Burckhardt, Geschzchte der Stadt Basel ton der Reformatton
bis Cur Gegenwart, Basle 1957, 2nd edn; in addition
Martin Alioth, Ulrich Barth, Dorothee Huber, Basler
BASLE AND BACHOFEN
I43
Basle's eccentricity as a member of the Swiss Confederation was highlighted and
aggravated in the early nineteenth century when, alone among the populous and
prosperous Protestant cantons, the traditionally enlightened and progressive city-state
did not put a liberal government in power in the wake of the 1830 revolution in Paris. O n
the contrary, a bitter, protracted and - for Switzerland - costly struggle, both in
economic terms and in terms of lives lost, between the city and its rebellious country
districts ended in 1833, after the humiliating defeat of the city army at the village of
Pratteln, with the division of the old city-state into the two independent half-cantons of
Basel-Stadt and Basel-Land, and the consolidation rather than the overturning of the
prudent, essentially conservative rule of the merchant elite.
The Basle Wirren or 'Troubles' of 1830-33 increased the city's isolation in two ways.
Firstly, there was a sense of estrangement from the predominantly liberal Confederation,
which had intervened to mediate in the dispute and had helped negotiate a settlement that
placed a heavy financial burden on the city. To the city fathers and to many of the leading
citizens of the time it seemed that the Federal Diet had not been even-handed but had
consistently favoured the rebels. As a result, after 1833, there was not much support left
among the leaders of Basle society for projects to enhance the powers of the Diet and give
the Confederation a more effective and centralized state apparatus. The Federal Constitution of 1848 was adopted by 66 votes to 5 in the city Council, but almost half the
councillors had stayed away. Unwilling to reject it, they were not willing to vote for it
either.ls
Secondly, the amputation of the country districts not only consolidated the power of
Basle's ruling elite by removing the principal source ofopposition to it, it strengthened the
city's sense of its peculiarly urban and civic destiny. The country districts had demanded
a more equitable distribution of representatives on the Council, one that would have
accurately reflected the distribution of the population. While the regime had been
prepared to make changes, it had balked at any arrangement, no matter how equitable,
that would have deprived the city of its majority vote in Council. The city's destiny, the
city fathers maintained, was urban and commercial and could not therefore be entrusted
to a majority of peasants and country squires. This reasoning was not peculiar to Basle.
Sismondi spoke against extension of the suffrage at Geneva in 1831 on exactly the same
grounds.19 There is nothing implausible about the claim made later by the liberal
Schreleizerische National-Zeitung (which, as its name implies, strongly favoured the development of centralized state power in Switzerland) that the division of the canton had at no
time been an objective of the country districts, which desired equitable representation,
not autonomy, and that it had been proposed, and even secretly desired by the city.20
The amputation of the country districts from the city made clear the opposition of
urban and rural interests a t Basle and thus the essential difference between the nineteenth
Stadtgeschichte, 11, 'Vom Briickenschlag 1225 bis zur
Gegenwart', Basle 1981, a volume put out by the
Historisches Museum; and the richly documented articles
by Carl Roth, August Burckhardt, Anton Haefinger,
L. E. Iselin and Ernst Stahelin in Dictionnaire historique et
biographique de la Suisse, NeuchLtel, 1921,I. pp. 522-55.
O n Basle's trading connections, see especially Andreas
Stahelin, 'Gold a u s Seide' and Carl Burckhardt-Sarasin
'Untergang und Ubergang' in Schaffendes Basel: 2000
Jahre Basler Wirirtschaft, Basle 1957, pp. 1 15-1 6, I 22. Is Burckhardt, op. cit. n. 17 above, pp. 252-53; Dictionnaire historique et biographique de la Suisse, n. I 7 above, art. 'BLle', p. 536. l9 See William E. Rappard, L a Carriere parlementaire de trois konomistes genevois: Sismondi, Rossi, Cherbuliez, Geneva 1941,p p 113-14. 20 Schreleirer National-Zeitung, 20 October 1842, p. 497. See also Charles Andler, LaJeunesse de Nietzsche jusqu' a la rupture auec Bayreuth, Paris 192I , pp. I I 3-14. LIONEL GOSSMAN
century city-state and the city republics of antiquity with which it liked to compare itself.
Nevertheless, fbr most Baselers, the events of 183*33 confirmed the city's traditional
perception of itself as a polis, an autonomous Republic within the Confederation but with
interests and connections extending far beyond Switzerland. The formula SPQB (Senatus
populusque basiliensis) which until the last century appeared everywhere in Basle, in
documents, on monuments, and on public buildings, conveys an idea of how the citizens,
especially the well-to-do elite, thought of their city. When a Biirgermeister was described
on medals struck to commemorate his term of office as Illustr. Reip. Basiliensis Consul Pater
Patriae, the Patria that was referred to was Basle, not Switzerland.
From about the mid-seventeenth century until the mid-nineteenth Basle was effectively governed by an elite of some thirty or forty families drawn from the five hundred or
so burgher families of the city.21 These families, most of which were in the silk-ribbon
trade, the mainstay of the city's economy until the First World War, were closely linked to
each other by an intricate web of marriages and business partnerships. Family name
alone, however, was neither an indication nor a guarantee of social standing or influence
at Bade -members of the less well-to-do branches of prominent families did not move in
the same circles as their more successful cousins, as Jacob Burckhardt's career confirms
- and the term 'patriciate', which is often used to refer to the elite, can be misleading.
Whereas the ruling elite in other patrician cities, such as Bern or Fribourg, was a
landed aristocracy, and at Lucerne, from the beginning, membership in the cantonal
council or Rat could be bequeathed from father to son, the government of Basle was
essentially, like that of Zurich, in the hands of the guilds, the old nobility having
abandoned the city completely by the middle of the sixteenth century. The concentration
of power and prestige in a few families should not therefore be misinterpreted. The
condition of distinction and prominence at Basle was wealth, not birth. The ruling elite, as
the liberal National-Zeitung never tired of pointing out, was a ' G e l d a r i s t ~ k r a t i e ' . ~ ~
In addition, from the seventeenth century on, this ruling elite was composed less and
less of indigenous families, like the Iselins and the Faesch, and more and more of wealthy
immigrants. The names of many of these - Battier, Burckhardt, De Bary, Sarasin, Socin
- figure prominently among the Burgermeisters of the seventeenth, eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. Most of the immigrants came to Basle as refugees from religious
persecution in Italy, France and the Spanish Netherlands, or from the ravages of the
Thirty Years' War in neighbouring parts of France, Germany and Eastern Switzerland.
As the city did not welcome poor refugees, almost all those who immigrated to Basle were
well-to-do merchants or skilled artisans in possession of some capital resources.23
Being used to more advanced business practices than those current in their adopted
city - most of them, for instance, engaged in general merchandising rather than in a
single craft activity, and it was they who introduced the putting-out system of
I44
21 [\larkus Lutz]. Baslerisches Burter-Buch, enthaltend
alle gegenrc7artip in der Stadt Base1 eingebiir~ertenGeschlechter.
Basle 1819. pp. 1-25.
22 Schreeizerische .l'ational-Zeztung.
2 0 October I 842.
p , 397. See also Alfred Burgin. Geschichte des G e i u Cnternehrnens. Basle 1 g j 8 , p. 16. According to Peter Stolz
(Basler ll'irtschaft in ror- und,fiuhindustrieller Zeit. Zurich
1977. pp. 147-48). at the end of the eighteenth century
about 85% of the ivealth of Basle was in the hands of
IO% of the population. Rlany of the Basle fortunes were
considerable. I n 1946 the personal fortune ofthe Merian
family, to which Bachofen's mother belonged, was
estimated a t about 1 8 million Swiss francs, and up to
that time the family had made gifts to the city of about
32 million francs.
23 O n immigration to Basle, see A. Stahelin. op. cit.
n. 17 abo\.e, pp. 102-06: Stolz. op. cit. n. 2 2 above,
p . 150.
BASLE AND BACHOFEN
I45
manufacture to Basle in place of the traditional artisan's shop - these men might have
come into conflict with the city's powerful guilds. Instead, they did what they could to
reach an accommodation with the guilds, avoiding as far as possible activities that would
have placed them in direct competition with guild members. Indeed, they themselves
sought membership in an appropriate guild and, in this way, instead of challenging the
guilds, they came, because of their wealth, to dominate them and, through them, the city
government which was organized around them. They thus gained control of the city
without attacking its existing political and institutional structure.
Moreover, their way of life, even in the golden years of eighteenth-century prosperity,
did not alienate them excessively from the artisan class. Many of them maintained a
patriarchal relation to their direct employees that was not incompatible with the temper
of the old Basle of guildsmen and artisans. The wealthy ribbon manufacturer and
capitalist Johann Rudolf Forcart-Weiss, for instance, was frequently godfather to the
children of his employees, and as late as the early nineteenth century unmarried
employees of the Bachofen firm lived under the same roof as their employer, above the
firm's shop and offices in the palatial Weisses
The Basle elite, in short, was not a real patriciate but a band of feisty and successful
entrepreneurs and businessmen. In the course of the eighteenth century these men
amassed immense fortunes which, in the pre-industrial age, were not easily invested.
Inevitably a good deal oftheir money went into real estate, and this altered to some extent
their style of life. T h e magnificent late baroque, rococo, neoclassical and Empire style
ho^telsparticulierswhich the ribbon manufacturers -the Bandelherren, as they were called had built for themselves in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are to this day
silent testimony to the wealth, taste and aspirations of the ruling elite.25At the same time,
however, the proprietors still lived 'over the shop', as artisans and merchants had
traditionally done. The ground floor of the imposing baroque Weisses Haus or of Johann
Rudolf Burckhardt's more austerely neoclassical Zum Kirschgarten (now part of the
Historical Museum of the City of Basle) was occupied by the offices and store-rooms of the
firm. In the same way, there may have been a prudent business side to the art collections
of the Bandelherren- some ofwhich, like the Bachofen and Faesch collections, were almost
princely. I t has been suggested that some of the Basle collectors were in fact also dealers
and that this accounts for the otherwise mysterious movement of paintings in and out of
their c ~ l l e c t i o n sI.t~is~ as though these men were tradesmen to their fingertips. Even if
they did not intend it from the beginning, everything they touched became potentially
tradeable.
Having gained control of the city, the merchants ofBasle had only one ambition: to be
able to pursue their business interests with as little interference as possible. T o borrow
Pareto's - or Machiavelli's - categories, they were 'foxes', not 'lions'. Indeed, their
24 Carl Burckhardt-Sarasin, op. cit. n. 17 above.
P. 134.
25 .imong the man! still standing: the Blaues Haus and
the ll>isses H a u s (both by Samuel \Verenfels, 1763-70).
for Lucas Sarasin and Jacob Sarasin-Battier: the rococo
Il'ildl'sches H a u s on the Petersplatz [by Johann Jacob
Fechter. 1762-63). for Jeremias \Vild-Socin: the Holsleiner H q f (modernized in I 713-52). for Samuel
Burckhardt; the Ramsteiner H o f (by ,Johann Carl
Hemeling. I 727-32). for Samuel Burckhardt-Zaeslin:
the Rollerhof ( I 758), for .\fartin Bachofen. T h e Bandelherren also built themselves handsome retrrats in the
countryside. close to the city but outside thr walls: the
Ilhnkenhofi I 740) in Riehen and Sandgrube ( I 745-46. by
J . J . 12echter). on the present Riehenstrasse. are still
standinq.
26 .A. Stahelin, op. cit. n. 17 above. p. H 7: Paul
Burckhardt. o p . cit. n. I 7 abo\,e. pp. 87-88.
146
LIONEL GOSSMAK
interests and policies constantly brought them into conflict with the 'lions' around them.
The protectionist economic policies of Napoleon, for instance, ruined the fledgling calico
industry at Basle and created enormous difficulties even for the well-established ribbon
manufacturers, who saw the condition of their prosperity - an intricate web of foreign
connections and the ability to respond promptly to the opportunities of the international
market - undermined by the Continental B l o ~ k a d e . ~The
'
merchant-manufacturers
responded by infringing the law wherever possible, and in 1809 nine of the most
distinguished citizens of Basle were sentenced to prison for ' s m ~ g g l i n g ' . ~ ~
T o the merchants, in short, the powerful states on Basle's doorstep, with their- to the
Baseler's way of thinking - irrational ambitions, whether dynastic or nationalist,
represented a constant menace, which was symbolized by the massive, supposedly
'defensive' fortress built by Louis XIV at Huningue or Hiiningen, just outside the city. As
late as 1860, Bachofen still thought of Basle as 'bedroht' by the armed and haughty
'Franzmann' at her gates, and he compared the situation ofthe city on the Rhine with that
ofher sister city Geneva, similarly eccentric and similarly in danger of being swallowed up
by 'annexationist' neighbouring powers.29 Burckhardt's scathing account of the French
occupation of Tahiti in the Basler Zeitung in 1844 probably reflects the attitude of a
majority of the Basle elite to the policies and ambitions of the so-called Great Powers. 'It is
not difficult to see that this battle of Mahahana was scarcely a heroic exploit on the part of
the experienced French soldiers, who were almost equal in number to the natives and far
better armed', Burckhardt wrote. 'This war could well go on until the harmless people of
the island has been completely wiped out. In the Museum at Versailles, where so many
underhand attacks and crimes have been immortalized alongside a few noble deeds, a
Tahiti room will then no doubt be set up and fitted out with battle scenes as tall as houses
commissioned from Horace Vernet'.30
The Basle elite, though conservative at home, was thus liberal in economic matters
and even in international affairs.31 Similarly, though it looked suspiciously on every
encroachment of Federal authority, it was not narrow-minded or provincial. The Basle
merchants were cosmopolitan men of the world. They themselves travelled widely on
business, and they sent their children abroad - to England, France, Germany and Italy
- as part of their education. Bachofen, as we shall see, spent several years in France and
England and attended university in Germany. His brothers Carl and Wilhelm, who took
over the family ribbon business from their father, also spent time abroad: Carl in London
and Paris, FYilhelm in New York, where he served an apprenticeship in a company with
which the Basle firm had dealings.32J.J. Bachofen senior clearly intended that his sons
27 Carl Burckhardt-Sarasin, op. cit. n. 17 above,
pp. 119-21.
28 Maurice Ltvy-Boyer, Les Banques europbnnes et
l'industrialisation internationale duns la premiire moitie' du
XIX' siicle, Paris I 964, p . 45 1".
29 'Das Musikfest in Basel' (Beilage of the Augsburger
Allgemeine Zeitung, I I May 1860) in J.J. Bachofen,
Gesammelte Werke, ed. Karl Meuli, Basle and Stuttgart
1943-67, PP. 443-45.
30 Basler Zeitung, 17 October 1844, quoted in Kaegi,
op. cit. n. 6 above, 11, p. 43 I .
31 See Stolz, op. cit. n. 2 2 above, p. 153. There was no
tradition of mercantilism at Basle such as there was at
'>
Bern. .iccording to Stolz, the 'Honorationsregime', in
which public service was virtually unremunerated,
discouraged the pursuit of purely political careers. T h e
Basle elite was opposed to a professional administrative
bureaucracy, both for reasons of economy and because
they wanted to keep the role and influence of
government to a minimum.
32 R. Forcart-Bachofen, Chronik der Familie Bachofen In
Basel, Basle 191I . \\'ilhelm returned from New York in
1847 at the age of 2 2 .
BASLE AND BACHOFEN should be personally familiar with the firm's principal customers and markets. In
addition, members of leading Basle families had settled in the major trading centres of
Europe and America, where they conducted their own businesses, often in close cooperation with their brethren in Basle. The Burckhardts, the Iselins, the hlerians, the
Vondermiihlls, the Weisses had family members in the French Atlantic port cities of Le
Havre, Nantes and La Rochelle, as well as in Paris, London, Hamburg, Copenhagen,
Vienna. Moscow and New k ' ~ r k . ~ ~
In this way, Basle political conservatism was coupled with commercial flair and
resourcefulness. T h e city's affinity was with Figaro, not Almaviva. In the early nineteenth
century, for example, the ribbon manufacturers were quicker to adopt modern production
techniques than their French competitors and soon cornered all the major markets.
Around the same time, Basle merchant capital was financing a wide range of industrial
and commercial enterprises in A l ~ a c eThe
. ~ ~opportunities given by Basle businessmen to
French and German chemists launched an industry which, starting as a n adjunct to the
manufacture of ribbons, has grown into the mammoth undertaking of today.35The city's
merchant bankers quickly realized that modern industrial and institutional borrowers
required far vaster amounts of capital than any one of them individually could command
-banking, for most of them, was only one of a range ofcommercial operations centred on
the ribbon trade - and they soon banded together in syndicates. The old families thus
moved as resolutely into the world of modern finance as they moved into the world of
modern i n d u ~ t r v . ~ ~
The energy, skill, and enterprise of the Basle elite were also expended on behalf of the
very Confederation that the city had welcomed so half-heartedly, Men from the great
merchant families, such as Geigy and Laroche, were behind some of the most important
Burckhardt-Sarasin, op. cit, n. I ; above. p . 122.
O n Basle's success in ribbon manufacturing, see
Ltvy-Boyer, o p , cit. n. 28 above, pp. 132-38. 011Basle
credit operations. see pp. 349-51. Basle merchants
invested heavily in France. not only in land ( a syndicate
\\.as formed in 1806 to acquire Church lands that \yere
u p fbr sale [ p . q j o n ] ) , but in early industrial enterprises. such as those of J. P. Peugeot and F.Japy. and
above all in the calico mills of hlulhouse. .As of 1806. the
house of Forcart, IVeiss and Son, for instance, \\.as
investing regularly in French enterprises and making
loans to French clients (for the breakdown of their
operations cf. p.45511). so that by August 1842 the
company's portfolio contained holdings to the value of
3go.000 francs in France, of which 200,000 were in
hlsace alone. Lev)-Boyer describes the Basle activities
as 'une veritable colonisation financikre' ( p . 450)
O n the chemical industry, see L. F. Haber, The
Chemical I n d u s t y during the ,Vineteenth Century. Oxford
1958: Paul h l . Hohenberg. Chemzcals tn Pt7estern Europe,
181j-1914. Chicago 196j: Heinz Polivka. D i e chemische
Industrie l m Raume z80n Basel, Basle 1974; The S o c i e ~oj'
Chemical Industry in Basle 1884-1934, Zurich n.d.; above
all Alfred Burgin's outstanding company history
marking the bicentennial of the Geigy company. op. cit.
n. 2 2 above.
36 According to Polivka. the Basle ribbon manufacturers \yere 'fabricants-marchands-banquiers' iop. cit.
n. 35 above), Basle bankers were among the 44 Swiss
33
34
"
bankers represented in Paris in 1714.and by the end of
the eighteenth century the city had become a significant
banking centre (.August Puntener, D a s schze'eizerische
Bankwesen, Bern and Stuttgart. p . 1 4 ) . I n the nineteenth
century distinguished families like the Laroches. the
Iselins, the Heuslers. the Burckhardts. the Stahelins.
the hlerians. the Forcarts and the Passavants were all
heavily involved in private banking. T h e French
historian Jules hlichelet relates that a Stahelin 'professeur de theologie. fort occupk des Hkbreux et d e la
dixii.me d)nastie des Pharaons' \\.as not above lending
money [Journal, ed. P . Yiallaneix, Paris 1 9 5 9 6 2 . I.
p. j 2 g ) . According to 1,tvy-Boyer, op. cit. n. 28 above.
'en 1837 B81e compte outre 2 0 0 maisons de gros. et 1 2 0
de detail. 82 banquiers' ( p . 45411) and the city had
become a major centre of capital for eastern France.
south-west Germany, and the rest of Switzerland
(PP. 349-50. 49-51, 4 5 - 5 5 > 469. 471. 592, 705": also
h l a x Iklt, Die Schu'eiz als internationaler Bank- und
F ~ n a n z p l a t z . Zurich 1970, pp. 21-23). Until mid-century, however. few of the Basle banking houses \\.?re
pure banks: they were commercial houses engaged in a
variety of business activities. But by 1854 several of the
old family banks had banded together to form the
Schz~ezzerischer Bankzerein, and in I 863 the Basler
Handelsbank was formed from a consortium of five
private banks. On hanking in Basle. see also Hansrudolf
Sch~vabe.'Neue Zeit, neue LVirtschaft', in SchqfJendes
Basel, n. I ;above, pp. I 36-j3.
148
LIONEL GOSSMAN
federal enterprises of the middle years of the nineteenth century: the customs union, the
postal system, the currency and the Central Bank, and the building of a railway network
intended both to knit the Confederation together and to ensure that Swiss commercial
interests would continue to play a dominant role in trade between Northern and Southern
Europe.37
I t is true that not all the leaders of Basle society were consistently progressive or
favourably disposed to the expansion of trade and industry. Though the elite's position
rested mainly on its business success, it also supplied the city with most of its preachers,
professors, and scholars, and this spiritual arm of the elite was not unequivocally in
sympathy with the aims and ambitions of its commercial brethren. In addition, many
artisans were now threatened by the free trade policies favoured by the elite. There was
enough public concern about the possible deleterious effects ofthe new chemical industry,
for instance, to prompt Johann Rudolf Geigy to enter it with great caution, by first
providing financial backing for an associate and only later engaging the reputation of the
old-established family drysalters' firm.38 Similarly, the extension of the Strasbourg
railway line into the city was hotly debated in the Council, where it met with opposition
from a coalition of extreme conservatives and traditional artisans. These groups saw the
steam locomotive as a Trojan horse that could only undermine what they valued most
about Basle - the city's traditions and its autonomy - by introducing foreign goods,
industrial spies, Catholic priests, and French morals. Even after the extension of the
railway into the city had been approved, a new city gate was built at the point ofentry, and
this was closed and barred every night after the last train had passed through it.
Nevertheless, most of the leading families were well aware that their own prosperity
and that of the city as a whole rested on trade with the outside world and that Basle could
not afford not to seize the opportunity offered by the extension of the Strasbourg line and
proposals to build lines to Germany and central Switzerland of becoming, as the NationalZeitung put it, 'a city like no other on the Continent . . . the terminus of the railways of
three c o ~ n t r i e s .The
' ~ ~ conservatives had not been wrong when they sensed that the
arrival of the railway would mean the end of the old Basle. Within fifteen years, the City
Council yielded to pressure to permit the razing of the ancient city walls and the
development of land previously occupied by the fortifications. Significantly, however, one
of the two city officials most closely associated with the 'Entfestigung' of Basle was a
member of the old 'patrician' family of Sarasin: Karl Sarasin, director of the sanitation
department from 1850 to 1855 and head of the buildings department from 1858 to 1866.
Just as characteristically, Sarasin tried to combine commercial enterprise with public
service: it was he who was largely responsible for the gardens and open spaces that were
included in the development plans.
So far from being obstructed by the politically conservative ruling elite, the economic
transformation of Basle and its entry into the modern world were thus in large measure
the achievement of that elite. When a writer in the National-Zeitung complained in 1842
37 SeePaul Burckhardt, op. cit, n. r above, pp. 258-61;
Edgar Bonjour, 'Basels Anteil an der Entwicklung der
neuen Schweiz', Die Schweir und Europa, V I , Basle 1979,
pp. 133-233; Paul Siegfried, Basel im neuen Bund, Basle
1925. Basler Neqahrsblatt, 1925; Albert Hauser,
Schweirerische
Wrtschaftsund
Sozialgeschichte,
Ellenbach-Ziirich I 961,p. 193.
38 Haber, op. cit, n. 35 above, pp. I 18-19; Biirgin, op.
cit. n. 2 2 above, pp. 104-08.
39 Schweizerische ,\'ational-Zeitung,
I I December 1842,
6 May 1843, I I May 1843.
BASLE AND BACHOFEN
I49
that in the twelve years since 1830 Basle had fallen further and further behind the other
cantons - 'while they have progressed, Basle has stood still' - it was 'political development' alone that he was measuring. Basle's isolation, he had to acknowledge, had not hurt
the city economically. 'We have tried to make our own home and conduct our own
business, and it is true that from the point of view of material success we can do that
without any ~ a c r i f i c e ' . ~ ~
T h e 'reactionary' government of Basle, to sum up, was not a government of genuine
patricians. It was not dominated by landed interests or by an old nobility or by
traditionalist Catholics, as were most ofthe other cantons that banded together with Basle
in the conservative Sarnen League. Above all, the ancien rCgime the Basle elite wanted to
defend bore no resemblance to the absolutist regimes of the past. O n the contrary, the
most diehard Basle conservatives were still republicans -ardent republicans. They were
unimpressed by nobilities and courts and they despised 'despotism'. Openly expressing
his hatred of democracy, as he described with horror the events he witnessed at Rome in
I 848, Bachofen did not fail to criticize the arbitrary, indifferent and improvident regime of
Gregory X V I and to charge it with having created the conditions that Pius I X then
proved incapable of curing. And after the debacle of 1870 he expressed the hope that at
least it might teach the French the value oftrue r e p u b l i c a n i ~ mBasle
. ~ ~ conservatism had
more in common with the LVhiggism ofBurke, who was widely read in elite circles, both in
the original and in the Gentz translation, than with the ideals of Metternich or of Prussian
reactionaires such as Arndt and von Arnim.
O n some issues the Basle government even came into direct conflict with the more
repressive regimes of Restoration Europe. In 1824, for instance, it resisted pressure from
the Prussian and Austrian governments to extradite Wilhelm Snell and Karl Follen, two
liberals who had been given appointments at the University and who were considered
dangerous by Berlin and Vienna. Among the professors at the University there were
several who had left Germany to escape political persecution. De LVette in theology and
Carl Gustav Jung, the professor of anatomy, were only the most notable of these.
T h e position of even the most conservative members of the Basle elite is well
illustrated by an anecdote. In 1847 Andreas Heusler and Peter Merian, who were
regarded throughout Switzerland as pillars of conservative Basle politics, paid a courtesy
call on a couple of visiting Prussian dignitaries, Ludwig von Gerlach and Reinhold von
Thadden-Trieglaff, both dyed-in-the-wool Junker reactionaries. 'Do you know', Merian
is said to have remarked to Heusler afterwards, 'compared to these gentlemen, we are
arrant J a ~ o b i n s ' . ~ ~
Even at home, Basle conservatism was shrewd and pliant. The men of the so-called
'juste milieu' in particular - active and enterprising businessmen and men of the world
like Achilles Bischoff and August Stahelin - knew how to hold on to power by making
adroit and timely concessions. In 1846, and again in 1857, they succeeded in forestalling
the plans of the liberals and radicals by themselves proposing a revision of the city
Schz~eizerischehTatiational-Zeitung, 27 August 1842.
'Die romische Staatsum\valzung vom Tode Gregors
XVI. his zur M'iederherstellung Pius IX.' (supplement
to the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, 24 and 25 August
1850),Gesammelte M'erke. op. cit. n. 29 above, I. pp. 397410; Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 above, letter no 283, g February
187I , For the Baselers, as for the Genevan Sismondi,
republicanism had nothing to do with revolution. 'J'ai
40
41
besoin de protester I? haute voix qu'il n'y a rien de
commun entre I'esprit des rtpubliques et l'esprit des
rtvolutions'. Sismondi declared; 'que I'antique Gengve
Ctait rtpublicaine et non rtvolutionnaire' (quoted in
Rappard, op, cit. n. 19 above, p. 35).
42 Quoted in C. A. Bernoulli, Franz Ouerbeck und
Friedrich Nietzsche: eine Freundschaft, Jena 1908, I , p. 41.
150
LIONEL GOSSMAIV
constitution and thus forcing their opponents to choose between settling for moderate
reform or leaving themselves no cards to play except the risky one, in a city not given to
precipitate action, of r e v ~ l u t i o n . ~ ~
It may be that the peculiarities of the situation at Basle and the ambivalent view the
citizens had of their city as both a progressive centre of commerce, industry and finance,
and a last repository of rapidly vanishing republican virtues, gave to the criticism of
modernity associated with the city's writers and artists a character that distinguishes it
from that of French writers such as Flaubert, Baudelaire and MallarmC. For while
Burckhardt, Bachofen and Bocklin were to some extent marginalized in relation to the
mainstream of their society, they were still in important respects integrated into the fabric
of the little city. Burckhardt was a much admired and highly successful public lecturer.
Bocklin received important civic commissions, even Bachofen continued to play his role in
Basle society, and his withdrawal from the family business in favour ofhis brother appears
to have had the full support ofJ. J. Bachofen senior, himself an ardent amateur scholar
and connoisseur, so that it can in no way be construed as a gesture ofrebellion. Above all,
Burckhardt, Steffensen, Overbeck and Nietzsche, as professors at the University of Basle,
all enjoyed the official approval and protection of the city, for it was part of the elite's
image of itself that it took care not only of the city's material prosperity but of its cultural
well-being too. In a free city-state, culture and learning could not be left to aristocrats and
professionals any more than administration could be entrusted to bureaucrats or defence
to a hired army ofprofessional soldiers. The citizens ofthe virtuous republic, in contrast to
the subjects of the powerful monarchies around them, intended to alienate none of the
their privileges or responsibilities. Traditionally, therefore, the leading families of Basle
had not only been merchants, they had provided the city's professors and preachers as
well as its Biirgermeisters, civil servants and military officers.
Like their Genevan counterpart Sismondi before them, however, the Basle critics
came to question whether the values of the elite culture- material success and individual
enterprise on the one hand, social cohesion and community well being on the other were compatible, and whether the elite's commitment to the development of commerce
and industry might not be bound, sooner or later, to come into conflict with the ideals it
professed and the mission by which it justified its rule: to protect the moral as well as the
material well-being ofthe polis, and to preserve the traditions ofthe city republic. In 1833,
as we saw, the elite had accepted the loss of most of the country districts dependent on the
city in order not to have to share power with landowners and peasants whose interests and
outlook, they felt, were different from those ofa city ofinternational traders. Yet one effect
of the loss of the country districts was the development of factory production in the city,
especially after the introduction of steam-driven looms around the middle of the
century.44 Large numbers of immigrant workers, many of them politically radicalized,
43 Paul Burckhardt, op. cit. n. 17 above, pp. 245-47,
279-80.
44 Ibid., p. 207; Schwabe, op. cit. n. 36 above, p. 142.
According to Heinz Polivka, op. cit. n. 35 above, p. 32,
the putting-out system dominated until 1 8 3 3 The
majority of the looms were in the country districts of
Arlesheim, Sissach, Liesetal and Waldenburg (LtvyBoyer, op. cit. n. 28 above, p. 1 3 5 ) ~
but the 'division of
the canton in 1833 forced the ribbon manufacturers to
switch from the traditional putting-out system to factory
production' (ibid., p. 43; see also William E. Rappard,
L a Rluolution industrielle et les origines de la protection du
traz'ail en Suisse, Berne 1914, pp. 182-83). After about
1839 factory work increased markedly, and by 1844 one
eighth of the looms employed by the ribbon manufacturers were in factories. By I 880, ofa total of 7000 looms,
2000 were steam-driven in factories in the city ( L a Suisse
iconomique et sociale, Ouvrage publit par le DCpartement
ftdtral de I'Economie publique, Einsiedeln 1927, p. 27).
BASLE AND BACHOFEN
151
began to arrive from Germany, France, other parts of Switzerland, and the erstwhile
country districts themselves. In I 779 the city population stood at I 5,000, of whom about
half enjoyed burgher-rights. By 1880 it had swollen to 61,000, but only a quarter of these
were burghers.45 At the same time, relations between employers and employees deteriorated, the workers resorted to strike action, and in 1869, after a particularly bitter
industrial dispute, the city was selected as the site of the fourth Congress of the First
Workers' International. T h e conflict of interest between manufacturers and workers
which, in the putting-out days, had been a n aspect of the conflict between town and
countryside had thus become, in part as a result of the Kantontrennung, a social conflict
within the town itself. The old frommes Basel, in which rich and poor, manufacturers,
merchants, and artisans had lived together in relative harmony, had been made over into
a modern industrial and commercial town.
T h e Basle intellectuals, especially those who emerged from the elite, observed the
transformation of their city and foresaw its consequences with dismay. Many of them had
personally seen the social effects of industrialization in England, and in the considerable
literature on that topic they could have read frightening accounts of the human degradation and the revolutionary situations 'Manchesterism' had produced. T h e price of
'progress' seemed to them unacceptably high, the two goals of the moderate leaders economic progress and politic21 conservatism - incompatible.
Yet most of these critics -whom we now think of, not without reason, as dyed-in-thewool conservatives, even 'reactionaries' -started out, in the years betwen I 8 I 5 and I 848,
as moderates. In 1841 Burckhardt still saw Switzerland's future in a 'definite - though
not political - Anschluss with Germany', that is, as part of a larger, culturally defined
German ' N a t i ~ n ' Correspondingly,
.~~
he appears to have had, at this time, a fairly
optimistic view of history. 'When I see the present lying quite clearly in the past', he
declared, 'I feel moved by a shudder of profound respect. The highest conception of the
history of mankind: the development of the spirit to freedom, has become my leading
c o n ~ i c t i o n ' .I~n ~1844, when he accepted the editorship of the Basler Zeitung, he did
so not only to oppose the 'raucous Swiss radicals', but 'to exterminate . . . the odious
sympathy . . . among the ruling clique here for absolutism of every kind'.48
I t appears to have been the experience ofradical volunteer bands attacking the canton
of Lucerne in I 845 that soured Burckhardt irrevocably. 'Conditions in Switzerland - so
disgusting and barbarous -have spoilt everything for me', he wrote in April 1845. 'The
45 The number of active burghers - those possessing
both voting rights and the right to hold office - was, of
course, far smaller, since it was restricted by an income
qualification. The foreign population - largely drawn
from neighbouring Baden - also increased - to 30% of
the total by 1860-and was made up almost exclusively
of factory workers and domestic servants. See Paul
Dopper, Organisation und Aufgabenkreis der Stadtgemetnde
Basel, 1803-1876, Ingebohl 1933, p. 7; Paul Burckhardt,
op. cit. n. I 7 above, pp. 206, 284; M'illiam Rappard, op.
cit. n. 44 above, pp. 182-88.
46 Letters ofJacob Burckhardt, op. cit. n. 14 above, letter
65, 25 September 1841.
47 Ibid., letter 73, 19June 1842.
48 Ibid., letter 9 1 , 2 1 April
1 8 4 4 Fritz Blaser
(Bibliographic der Schweizer Presse, Basle 1956, 2 vols),
describes the Basler Zeztung as 'the organ of the now
conservative "old liberals" of 1830'. Until June 1839 it
was liberal-leaning but after that was described by its
critics as the 'official organ of the conservative Basle
establishment'. In 1844 Burckhardt was still expressing
confidence that 'the liberalism of 184-43 was only the
first sour bloom which encloses the fruit and which is
bound to fall away. A new liberalism and a broad public
opinion will arise all the stronger and the purer of every
kind of extravagance . . . Only such a liberalism,
grounded in the people, will gather strength and be able
to put together a new Federation' ( B r z e j , ed. Max
Burckhardt, Basle 1949-80, 11, 78, letter of 28-29
January 1844 to Eduard Schauenburg).
LIONEL GOSSMAN
word freedom sounds rich and beautiful, but no one should talk about it who has not seen
and experienced slavery under the loudmouthed masses called "the people"'. The
erstwhile moderately liberal critic of the local conservatives now declares that he knows
'too much history to expect anything from the despotism of the masses but a future
tyranny', and tells his liberal friends in Germany that they are 'political children' who
ought to 'thank God that there are Prussian garrisons in Cologne, Coblenz and other
places, so that the first crowd ofcommunized boors cannot fall on you in the middle of the
night, and carry you off bag and baggage'.49 By February I 846 he was announcing that he
had turned his back on 'this wretched age' and on the historical world in general. 'I have
secretly fallen out with it entirely, and for that reason am escaping from it to the beautiful,
lazy south, where history is dead'. All that now remains is to stand up for human values in
the private sphere. From the public sphere, the world ofhistory, nothing is to be expected:
'I mean to be a good private individual, a n affectionate friend, a good spirit . . . I can do
nothing more with society as a whole; my attitude towards it is willy-nilly ironical'.50 The
new nationalism and democracy will give rise, in the end, he predicts, to despotic and
militarist regimes,51 and the attack on private capital will be used to justify the most
deadly philistinism and barbarism.s2 I n such circumstances, in which 'I hope for nothing
from the future', except perhaps 'a few half-bearable decades, a sort of Roman Empire',s3
there is nothing left for the virtuous republican to do but withdraw: 'We, on the contrary,
are steadily becoming strangers to the world and its ways'.54
Though disenchanted'politically and convinced there was no way ofstemming the tide
of 'barbarism', Burckhardt did not withdraw completely from all aspects of public life.
Like other disappointed and disaffected talents, he retreated to Basle's cultural and
educational institutions -the libraries, the Kunstmuseum, the various learned societies,
the Music Society, above all the University- where he dug himselfin, as it were, in order
to uphold, in adversity and against the current, values he considered i m p ~ r t a n t'M
. ~Y~
business is simple', he wrote in 1874: 'it is to stay at my post even though I have had
several attractive opportunities of leaving
Despite their pessimism and their caustic rejection of contemporary liberal and
nationalist optimism, the Basle intellectuals resisted despair. Precisely because history
could no longer be viewed by them as in itself a process of redemption, but was seen as a
constant ebb and flow, offering more or less favourable conditions for the cultivation of
timeless human values, they understood their task as that ofholding out in evil times until
the storm had passed. 'I want to debauch myselfwith a real eyeful of aristocratic culture',
Burckhardt declared, 'so that, when the social revolution has exhausted itself for a
moment, I shall be able to take part in the inevitable restoration. . . . I want to help save
things, as far as my humble station allow^'.^' The old optimism was finished for good,
however, and the historian's role was no longer to reconcile, to show how everything
152
49 Letters of Jacob Burckhardt, op. cit. n. 14 above, letter
93, 18 April I 845.
Ibid., letter 96, 28 February 1846.
51 Ibid., letter 107, September 1849.
52 Ibid., letter g j , 5 March I 846.
53 Ibid., letter 1 0j , September 1849.
54 Ibid., letter 105, 2 2 March 1847
55 For a good Marxist analysis of this strategy of
withdrawal, see Heinz Schlaffer, 'Jacob Burckhardt
oder das Asyl der Kulturgeschichte', in Hannelore
Schlaffer and Heinz Schlaffer, Studien z u m asthetischen
Htstonsmus, Frankfurt 1 g 75, p p 72-1 1 I .
5 6 Letter to Bernhard Kugler, g August 1874, quoted
by Kaegi, op. cit. n. 6 above, VII, p. 13j .
5 7 Letters ofJacob Burckhardt, op. cit. n. 14 above, letter
g j, 5 March I 846.
BASLE AND BACHOFEN contributed to the great design of history, as it had been in the great days of Restoration
liberal historiography, but to criticize relentlessly: 'It is high time for me to free myself
from the generally accepted bogus-objective recognition of the value of everything,
whatever it may be, and to become thoroughly i n t ~ l e r a n t ' . ~ ~
T h e idea that the elite should serve as the guardian of a cultural heritage is often
expressed by Burckhardt. 'If there is some happiness in the general misery of man', he
wrote in the Fragmente, 'it can only be a spiritual one, one that looks backward in order to
save the culture of a previous age and forward toward a joyful and uninhibited
manifestation of spirit in a time that might otherwise fall completely prey to matter'.59
Similarly Bachofen, commenting on Mommsen's Roman History,which he saw as the
epitome of modern philistinism: 'I do not hope to convince or to convert. But at least it
should not be possible later, when humanity has recovered its good sense, to say that our
age had sunk so low that it did not even enter a protest'.60
If Bachofen and Burckhardt continually emphasized cultural, religious, and social
values over material development, if they spoke slightingly of railways, credit banks 'and
other swindles that go by the name of progress',61 they were in part remaining true to the
principles of their mentors of the 1820s and 183os, few of whom were yet prepared to
profess a thoroughgoing materialism. Benjamin Constant, it is true, had argued against
Montesquieu that the economic conditions of modern life had far more influence on the
conduct and the ideas of men than the political systems they lived under, so that 'citizens
of republics and subjects of monarchies alike all desire material goods, and no one, in the
present state of society, can avoid desiring them'. But the old civic ideals died hard,
especially in Switzerland perhaps. Pellegrino Rossi, for instance - the refugee from
Austrian repression in Italy who became a Genevan citizen and one of the leading lights of
Genevan and Swiss liberal politics in the 1820s - referred to economics, which he was
called by Guizot to teach at the Collkge de France, as the 'parties honteuses' of politics.
Rossi always insisted that economics should not be confused with politics or ethics and
should not be expected to take their place. The science of economics, he wrote, provides
answers to economic questions, not to political or moral questions. 'The aim of society,
like that ofthe individual, is not only to be wealthy. Indeed, that aim may, in certain cases,
be subordinated to a higher ~ n e 'The
. ~ citizen,
~
in short, was not completely reducible to
the bourgeois, nor the body politic to society.
I t was because they appeared to him to have discarded even the remnants of idealism
that Bachofen, for one, became severely critical, in the 185os,of those members of his own
class who hoped to preserve their position by adroit concessions. It was the Roman senate,
according to Bossuet, that 'preserved the ancient principles and the spirit, so to speak, of
the republic'. But at Basle the senate itself had succumbed to corruption. The regime's
58 Ibid., letter I I I , 15 August 1852. See the excellent
account of Burckhardt's rejection of contemporary
'Fortschrittschwarmerei' in Carl Spitteler's recollections of his teacher (Gesammelte Werke, n. 1 5 above, v ~
P P 374-772 385-86,388-89).
59 Jacob Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, ed. Emil
Diirr, Stuttgart 1957, p. 269.
60 Bachofen, Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 143,
24 January 1862.
61 Bachofen, Briefe, letter 152, 14 January 1863, on
banks. Two years earlier (Briefe, letter 132) he had
extolled the modern 'achievements' of 'railways and
Prussian criticism'. Burckhardt often expressed his
displeasure at what the railways were doing to his native
, city (see Kaegi, op. cit. n. 6 above, ~ I Ip., 136).
Benjamin Constant, 'De I'Esprit de conqutte et de
I'usurpation', ch. VI,in Oeuures, ed. Alfred Roulin, Paris
1957, p. 1047x1; Pellegrino Rossi, Cours d'konomie politique, Paris 1840, I , p p 17-41 (second lecture). See also
p. 285.
I54
LIONEL GOSSMAN
willingness to compromise, its clever playing at 'politics' and its own lack of principle
made it as responsible, according to Bachofen, for what he considered the decay of
political and social life as the liberals and radicals themselves. All were equally motivated,
in his view, by greed and desire for power, equally indifferent to the well-being of the
community as a n enduring political entity. A constitution, Bachofen maintained in 1857
against the advocates of reform in the governing elite, must be based on principles whose
validity does not vary from one decade to the next according to the interests or whims of
different groups or individuals. Already, it seems, he was pondering the contrast between
his own city, where the constitution was apparently to be subject to revision every ten
years, and those ancient peoples whom he admired, like his contemporary Fustel de
Coulanges, because they 'do not work for the day but have eternity in mind in all their
activity', and to whom he devoted a lifetime of study.'j3 Even in the middle of the
nineteenth century, the enduring model ofany authentic human community remained, it
seems, for Bachofen - notwithstanding Constant's assertion that it is unrealisable in
modern conditions - something close to the virtuous city-republics of earliest antiquity
or, at the very least, to the free cities of the Middle Ages. It was certainly not the modern
nation state. In the end, he warned, continual tampering with the constitution destroys all
political confidence: 'The revision of the constitution' - and for Bachofen the 'artificial'
written constitutions of his day already marked a falling away from the original
foundations of political life in 'Sitte und Gesinnung', the first step on the road to political
ruin - 'is soon perceived by the people as what it truly is: an ambitious struggle for
influence, favour and seats in the chamber. Convictions are put up for sale; egoism
emerges completely naked. . . . The good of the state is not a goal but a pretext'. What has
happened at Basle is typical. 'The government, forgetful of its true obligations, joins with
its assailants in order subsequently to share the spoils with them and win the reputation of
liberalism. The old try to please the young, the men of the future'. But no one attends to
the common people as they stand silently by, watching. 'So far, they are still waiting at the
door, but they too have their desires, passions and reawakened hopes that they would like
to have fulfilled. Whoever speaks of revision, must truly deliver it. A minimum appeases
only for a short time; soon the maximum will be demanded, and taken'.64 When
renunciation and sacrifice are no longer the order ofthe day among the leaders, in short, it
is only a matter of time before everybody demands the full satisfaction of his desires and
social order dissolves in the chaos of class conflict.
The fear is patent. At the end of the road of political reform lies the proletarian
revolution, socialism, the regression - so Bachofen would have it - to barbarism.
I t could be argued that Bachofen's relentless criticism of Wilhelminian Germany, of
the vulgarity and materialism, as he saw it, ofthe Griinderzeit, ofprussian philology, and of
the brash new imperial Berlin of Bismarck, was actually directed at Basle and had simply
been deflected on to a -for Bachofen himself- less problematic object. For Basle too, as
the art historians point out, had its Griinderzeit. The city of Geigy and Speiser, of railways,
chemical factories and banks, also expressed its optimism and prosperity, albeit on a
smaller scale, in sumptuous neo-Renaissance and neo-baroque buildings. About 1850,
according to a recent historian, 'the clear, sober, late classical building cubes produced
'.4utobiography', in Myth, Religion, and MotherRzght: Selected Writings of J.J. Bachofen, trans. Ralph
Manheim, Princeton 1967, p. 1 2 .
64 iDie Verfassungsrevision von Basel' (Supplement
to the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, 3 I October I 857),
Gesammelte Weerke, op. cit. n . 29 above, I , pp. 4 3 6 3 9 .
BASLE AND BACHOFEN
I55
during the period of the Regeneration' by architects such as Burckhardt's brother-in-law
Melchior Berri (the most austere) and Christoph Riggenbach (younger and more given to
the picturesque), yielded to 'a striving after monumental representation, the expression
through buildings of political success'.65
The chief exponents of the new style were the two Johann Jacob Stehlins, father and
son. As Burgermeister and head ofthe city's department of buildings Johann Jacob senior
presided over the final demolition of the fourteenth-century city walls and the implementation of a vast programme of urban expansion and development. Ambitious and clever,
the two men succeeded in winning many contracts for major buildings from less astute
rivals. They were also somewhat ruthless. Amadeus Merian, the city's Inspector of
Buildings, recalls with bitterness, for instance, that when it was proposed to open up a
square in front of the old Aeschentor he drew up a design which would have incorporated
the familiar city gate into the new urban space. Stehlin, however, marched into his office
and, as vice-president of the Buildings Committee (Baucollegium),threw out his plan and
imposed one that required the destruction of the gate, telling Merian - a member of the
younger branch of the distinguished family - to concern himself henceforward exclusively with the inner city and to leave all the development areas to him.66
Characteristically, Stehlin - whose family name should not be confused with
Stahelin (the Stehlins were recent immigrants from Basel-Land, the Stahelins an old
established city family) - was a leading member of the radical party and both his
architecture and his politics earned him the hatred and contempt ofBachofen. I quote the
latter's comment on him at the time of his election to the Swiss National parliament in
1860,because it sums up a series of changes and the response these evoked. It is a scandal,
Bachofen wrote to a Zurich friend, that the only likely candidates for Basle's seat in the
Federal Parliament are 'der Bauer Stehlin, ein grober Zimmermann . . . und der
.Mazzinist Klein, ein S ~ h u l l e h r e r ' . ~ '
The contempt here is unbounded, and effectively expressed. The term Bauer conveys
the idea of a builder who, unlike the humanistically educated architects of the 1820s and
I ~ ~ O the
S , Schinkels and the Berris, has no philosophy of architecture and builds without
principles - a mere builder. This implication is reinforced by the second term, 'a crude
carpenter'. So a mere mindless artisan, a practical self-made man, without a classical
education, that is to say without an education in first principle^.^^ In addition, of course,
the word Bauer also means 'peasant', an allusion to Stehlin's modest family origins in the
Basle countryside. In fact, Stehlin was no stranger to Bachofen. In 1825 he had been the
builder employed to execute Melchior Berri's design for J. J. Bachofen senior's town
house on the Sankt Alban Graben. Whatever the merits and education of this elder
Stehlin, the younger had in fact received his training in Paris, and Burckhardt, for
instance, thought highly of him. But facts do not concern us here as much as attitudes. T o
Bachofen, clearly, the chief architect of the new Basle that emerged in the 185os, 1860s
65 Joseph Gantner and AdolfKeinle, Kunstgeschtchte der
Schweir, Frauenfeld 193G62, IV (by Adolf Reinle), p. 4.
See Paul Siegfried, 'Basels Entfestigung', Basler
Jahrbuch, 1923, p p 81-146; Birkner Othmar, Bauen und
Wohnen in Basel (18jo-rgoo), Basle 1981 (.Veujahrsblatt,
159); Rolf Bronnimann, Basler Bauten 186e1910, Basle
1973,pp. 31-32 (on the Stehlins and .-\madeus hlerian).
67 Brie),
op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 124. 26 October
I 860.
''
" T O Bachofen's teacher Bockh, as to most of the
strongly Platonic neohumanists, a classical education
was above all an education in the first principles or
origins of things before they had been corrupted and
obscured by custom and convention ( E n g k l o p a d i e und
.Wethodologie der philologischen Wissenschaften, ed. Ernst
Bratuschek, Leipzig 1877, p p 31-321
156
LIONEL GOSSMAN
and 1870s was a crude parvenu, a man totally unschooled in the neohumanism that had
inspired Schinkel, Berri and the other architects of an earlier generation, all of whom
thought of architecture as the expression of the ideals and values of the polis. Stehlin had
no ideals, no true knowledge, no sophia, only techni. He was just a builder, a Bauer.
If the Basle critics of modernity had much in common with former liberals from the
1820s and 30s in other parts of Switzerland and Europe, there was another respect in
which, no doubt, they were not unique. Bachofen, Burckhardt, Bocklin and Carl
Spitteler, each in his own way, no less than Nietzsche, were estranged not only from the
materialism and the ostentatious vulgarity, as they experienced it, of the world around
them, from a society dominated by economic ambition and indifferent to questions of
culture, indeed incapable of conceiving culture as anything more than an aggregate of
discrete, more or less pleasurable activities (theatres, concerts, art galleries and
museums), they were also estranged from the restricted way of life that modernity
threatened. They all dreamed, as Holderlin, Zoega, Humboldt and others of the
neohumanist generation had done, of a more glorious, harmonious, generous and heroic
existence, a return to nature and to a life more beautiful and also more bold and
adventurous than that represented by the pious, repressed Calvinist Alt-Basel whose
passing they might lament. Bocklin's great dream-like mythological and symbolic
canvasses, as well as the frescoes he painted for that monument of Basle civic achievement
in the period of the Regeneration, Melchior Berri's noble Schinkel-inspired Museum
( I 844-49) in the Augustinergasse, Spitteler's epic Prometheus und Epimetheus, Bachofen's
evocation of prehistoric matriarchal cultures, and Burckhardt's portraits of the princes
and artists of Renaissance Italy all bear witness to that longing.
What seems to distinguish the Basle artists and writers from many others who, at the
time, also imagined more exhilarating and richly human existences than that offered by
the bourgeois society of the time, from Baudelaire and Flaubert to Wagner and Gauguin,
is the particular strain of irony with which they tempered their idealism. While irony is
also essential to Baudelaire or Flaubert, that of the Baselers is characterized by a
distinctive, almost folksy, down-to-earth quality, a cautionary mistrustfulness, such as
Dilthey observed - and was made uncomfortable by - in all the Baselers he met during
his brief stint as professor of philosophy at the University in 1 8 6 7 . Irony
~ ~ and midisance
were (and supposedly still are) second nature to the Baseler, for they were the instruments
a small, bourgeois community was likely to use, both to exert its control over individual
members and, where necessary, cut them down to size, and to deflate the pretensions of
dangerous strangers and neighbours. Often it is a whole community that stands behind
the defensively anti-heroic irony ofthe Baseler, and it is probably not fortuitous that many
of the astringent bonmots for which Burckhardt was famous were spoken in Baseld_vtsch,of
which the eminent professor was reputedly a master. The irony the Baselers used on their
own high-flown fantasies thus reintegrated them, in a certain way, into their city and its
culture. There was nothing contradictory in the praise they often gave to modest virtues
69 'Es liegt etwas so Enges in der Art der Menschen, zu
denken und zu sein. In Berlin gibt jeder sich ganz
gerade, otfen, ohne besonderen Argwohn. Hier finde ich
selbst bedeutende X~lenschen wie Burckhardt, sehr
weltkundige wie die beiden Vischer misstrauisch,
beobachtend. als ware bei dem Gegeniiber auf verborgene Fangeisen irgendwo zu rechnen in die man
treten konne. Xoch mehr fallt etwas andres auf: ein
Mangel an Glaube, an Zuversicht aufdie Welt' (quoted
in Kaegi, op. cit. n. 6 above, VII,pp. 198-99, from Der
junge Dilthey: ein Lebensbild in Briefen und Tagebiichern
1852-1870, ed. Clara hlisch, Leipzig and Berlin 1933,
pp. 237-38).
BASLE AND BACHOFEN
I57
and humble achievements. This may explain why they clung obstinately to their little city
even as they denounced its pettiness, and why Burckhardt, for instance, chose to live a life
that, as he put it himself, was 'as philistine as possible'.'O Again Dilthey's testimony is
revealing. Taken aback by the scepticism and even pessimism of the leading Basle
intellectuals - which he contrasted with the confident optimism of Berlin - put out by
Burckhardt's outbursts about the ageing of Europe and the decadence ofwestern culture,
Dilthey commented to his father in 1867 that 'only someone who had not lived through
Berlin in the last year could attribute such notions to anything other than ignorance of
one's own time'.71 T o Dilthey's surprise and apparent annoyance, the Baselers were
neither inspired by the victory of Sadowa nor inclined to hail modern Prussia as the herald
of a new heroic age.
Perhaps it was its peculiar combination of defiantly prosaic and anti-heroic realism
with nostalgic memories of ancient republican virtue that made Basle, if not congenial,
then at least less intolerable than most other places, both to its disaffected, yet still pious
and unrebellious sons, and to outsiders like Franz Overbeck who were repelled by the
pomp and sycophancy of Wilhelminian Germany and its capital, the brash Grossstadt Berlin.
BACHOFEN
Ich habe immer gehofft und hoffe immer von
neuem. Und uber dem Hoffen bin ich ein Mann
geworden, und nun leide ich mit stolzem
Bewusstsein der Kraft. Aber unbegluckt ist
noch nicht unglucklich. Das Entbehren mit
Bewusstsein weckt ein merkwurdiges
Vertrauen aufsich selbst, einen Stolz, wie ihn
selbst das Bewusstsein glucklich angewandter
Krafte kaum geben kann . . .
-Bachofen, GriechischeReise
Bachofen was in many respects a typical son of a very well-to-do Basle family of silk ribbon
manufacturers. Though not as active in public affairs as the Burckhardts, the Bachofens
were linked by marriage to most of the prominent families of the city. The philologist's
mother, for instance, was a Merian - her father, Samuel Merian-Hoffmann, was a
director of the highly successful international trade and banking firm that had caused
Napoleon so much grief- and he himself married a Burckhardt.
Johann Jacob Bachofen senior had inherited or acquired valuable properties in the
city and the neighbouring countryside and it was in one of these, the palatial late baroque
Weisses Haus on the Rheinsprung ( I 763-70, by Samuel Werenfels), that his son spent his
70 Letter to Paul Heyse, 16November 1860,quoted by
Kaegi, op. cit., VII, p. I 28. Burckhardt boasts ironically:
'I am as philistine as possible, I play dominoes with
philistines, I go for walks with philistines and with
colleagues who also do their utmost to be philistines, I
drink my pint sans pritention and say my piece about the
politics of the day . . .'
7 1 Dilthev, see n. 69 above.
158
LIONEL GOSSMAN
childhood years. Though the Weisses Haus remained the headquarters of the Bachofen firm
until 1906, the Bachofens moved in the mid-twenties to the Dompropstei on the St Alban
Graben, another elegant old house which Bachofen-Merian had had completely remodelled by Melchior Berri, the foremost neoclassical architect in Switzerland. As a child,
however, Bachofen must often have returned to the Weisses Haus, where his grandparents
continued to live, and he was probably also a frequent visitor to the handsome rococo
RollerhoJ on the Miinsterplatz, the original headquarters of the Bachofen firm, which had
become the residence of his pious aunt Margarethe. Later still, after his marriage to
Louise Elizabeth Burckhardt in 1865, Bachofen acquired his own house, the delicately
austere Zur Johanniskapelle ( I 839-41 ), by the prominent local architect Christoph Riggenbach, which still graces the north-eastern corner of the Miinsterplatz. The interiors of
these houses must have been as handsome as their exteriors, and the Bachofens were
among the most assiduous and successful art collectors in a city of collectors. Among the
paintings in their possession, for instance, were works by Giorgione, Rembrandt,
Vermeer, Van Dyck and Poussin.
Born in December 1815, at the end of a year in which the leading citizens of Basle
celebrated their release from the danger of a new French occupation, Bachofen seems to
have been destined by his family for public office in the city. He preceded his more famous
fellow-citizen Jacob Burckhardt, his junior by three years, to the same infants' school
( I 820), then to the Gemeindeschule ( 1822), the reformed Gymnasium ( I 82 j), and finally the
University, which, by the time he reached it (1834),had had to make severe cutbacks in
response to the financial stringency following the settlement of the Wirren or Troubles of
1830-33. The aim of the city government at the Restoration had been to reconstitute the
University along the lines of the new University of Berlin, to transform it, in short, into a
citadel of contemporary neohumanism. After 1833, however, these plans had to be
modified, and it became customary for students to spend only one or two years at Basle
and to proceed thereafter to one of the larger German universities. Bachofen went to
Berlin (1835-37) where, like Burckhardt after him, he studied under Ranke, Bockh and
Savigny. He also spent a year at Gottingen, during which he attended the lectures of
Bockh's favourite pupil, the great Romantic philologist, Carl Otfried Miiller, to whom he
carried a letter of introduction from his teacher and friend at Basle, Franz Dorotheus
G e r l a ~ h Though
.~~
Bachofen's love was philology (as understood by the German
neohumanists), he took a degree in law, almost certainly in response to his family's plans
for his future career. He then spent a year apprenticed to a French lawyer in Paris, and
another year in England studying English law in London and then at Cambridge. I t is
possible to reconstruct Bachofen's ideas in these years from his letters, his early writings
and his own reminiscences, though the last, especially, must be handled with care. He
comes across as a fairly typical Restoration moderate, essentially conservative, but with
some liberal leaning^.'^
As a young man, for instance, he had joined the Zojngerverein, a national Swiss student
organization, f o ~ n d e din 1819to combat the so-called Kantonligeist, or parish pump spirit,
72 Carl Otfried hliiller. B r i e j aus einem gelehrten Leben
1797-1840, ed. Siegfried Reiter, Berlin 1950.I, p. 322.
73 O n Bachofen's life, see his Selbstbiographie (in the
form of a letter to Karl von Savigny. 1854) in ./.,/.
Bachofens Selbstbiographie und Antrittsrede iiber das .Vaturrecht, ed. Alfred Baeumler (HalleISaale 1 9 27): see also
n. 10 above. An abbreviated English translation in
,VQth, Religion, and 'Mother Right, Princeton 1954 (n. 1
ab0L.e); see also n. 63 above. See also Karl Meuli,
'Bachofens Leben', Gesammelte Werke, op. cit. n. 29
above, 111, pp. 1012-79.
BASLE AND BACHOFEN
'59
and promote Swiss national unity, and in 1834, the year after his confirmation in the
Cathedral by Jacob Burckhardt's father, he gave the memorial address to the Basle
Zofingia on the anniversary of the Riithli oath (1307) - supposedly the founding act of
the Confederation. I t is an interesting speech, in which Switzerland is praised, on the one
hand, as one of a very small number of nations founded not on dynastic ambitions but on
popular will, while on the other, this claim is tempered by the presentation of the original
oath as a gesture calmly and reflectively undertaken, owing nothing to blind passion or
impulse. Revolution is rejected, in other words, even as the principle of popular
sovereignty is affirmed.74
Similarly, in later years Bachofen was critical of natural law theory, sympathetic to
Burkean ideas as these were being propagated throughout Germany in Gentz's translation and commentary, respectful of common law (in both England and Switzerland) and
of the 'spontaneous', 'natural' wisdom ofjudges deeply versed in it, and suspicious of legal
codifications in the manner of the code civil, which, in his view, encouraged 'legalism' and
sophistication. Yet at the same time he was also critical of English law: never having
formulated its principles or achieved any conceptual understanding of itself, such as we
find in Roman law, he argued, English law is totally dependent on a kind of natural
creative practice that belongs to an earlier, pre-historical type of culture and that, with
modern reliance on written legal compilations, has almost certainly gone out of it. I t is
therefore vulnerable to violent transformations, since it has nothing to resist them with, no
philosophical understanding of its own principles to build on or to fall back on.75 Pure
rationalism and pure empiricism are both rejected, in short, in favour of a form of legal
historicism which tries to reconcile them by seeking the axioms of law in the tradition
itself. The intellectual context of these and similar ideas of Bachofen at this time is not
hard to find: it is that of the scholars and philosophers of the moderately liberal
Restoration - of Ranke, Schleiermacher, above all Karl von S a ~ i g n y . ~ ~
I n general, one might say, the young Bachofen was not ill at ease in the England of
Melbourne or the France of Louis Philippe. I n the late 1830s he was still expressing his
admiration for the open, public character of all the state institutions in France and for the
salutary effects of centralization - in contrast to the secretiveness of public administration at Basle and the jealously guarded local autonomies characteristic of S ~ i t z e r l a n d . ~ ~
I t is consistent with his attitudes at this time that in Paris he became friendly with
Edmond Laboulaye, the liberal legal and social historian, and that on a visit to Edinburgh
he sought out Sir William Hamilton, the eminent Scottish philosopher whose liberal
sympathies were well known.78
74 O n the Zofingia, see Charles Gilliard, L a Sociiti de
Zojingue 18rprg1g, Lausanne 1 g 1 9. Bachofen's speech
- 'Ueber Herkommen und Zucht. Rede gehalten am
Griitlifest von der Section Basel des Zofingervereins' is reprinted in Zojingia: Centralblatt des schweirerischen
Zojingercereins, I 958, XCVIII,pp. I 45-47.
75 Selbstbiographie, pp. 19-20 (passage omitted from
English translation); see also n. 73 above.
76 See especially Charles von Savigny, O f t h e Vocation o f
our Age for Legislation and Jurisprudence, trans. Abraham
Hayward, London n.d., repr. New York 1975, especially
ch. 2 ('The Origin of Private Law') on law as
inseparable in the early stages of culture from the
language and manners of a people and thus as an
instinctive or 'natural' practice (p. 28: 'the common
consciousness of the people is the seat oflaw'), and ch. 8
('What are we to do when there are no codes?'). On
Savigny and his milieu (relations with Creuzer,
Schleiermacher, and Brentano) see Giuliano Marini,
Savigny e il metodo della scienza giuridica, Milan I 966.
77 Bachofen, Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 abo,ve, letter 3, I j June
1839. Bachofen here identifies 'Offentlichkeit' and
'ungeheure Centralisation' as the causes of the superiority of French political and cultural institutions.
78 O n the friendship with Laboulaye, see Briefe, op. cit.
n. 6 above, letter 188, 29 August 1864; on Sir William
Hamilton. see the note from him in Basle Univ. Library.
Bachoten-Archi\, 272. item 292.
I 60
LIONEL GOSSMAN
The high regard in which Bachofen held Pellegrino Rossi provides another clue to his
opinions in these years. After a brilliant career, first as an Italian patriot with Joachim
,Murat, the self-styled King of Italy, then as a professor of law and a liberal parliamentarian at Geneva, Rossi was called to Paris by Guizot in 1834 to fill the chair of political
economy at the Coll6ge de France, and Bachofen attended his lectures. Rossi had a
reputation in Switzerland as a political liberal and his advocacy of limited reforms moderate strengthening of the authority of the Federal Diet in response to modern needs
and foreign dangers, some extension of the suffrage, public reporting of parliamentary or
council deliberations - had won him the support of the Zofinger clubs.79That Bachofen
carried a letter ofintroduction to him and that he wrote from Paris to his Basle friend Von
Speyr in I 839 expressing his admiration for Rossi's course, which he claimed was the best
at the Collkge de France, seems therefore to be not only an endorsement of Rossi's
moderately liberal positions, but a confirmation of his own.80
Even the experience of the civil war at Basle, which had resulted in his family's selling
off several properties in Basel-Land, seems therefore not to have soured Bachofen unduly.
I n I 837 he wrote indignantly from Gottingen about the firing of the seven professors who
had protested against the suspension of the liberal Hanoverian constitution, at the same
time suggesting, with typical Basle shrewdness, that the University of Basle should seize
the opportunity to secure their s e r v i ~ e s . ~ '
Yet more than London or Paris or Cambridge, it was Berlin, where he was a student
from I 835 until I 838, that filled Bachofen with idealistic enthusiasm. I n view ofthe hatred
and contempt he subsequently expressed for Berlin and all it had come to stand for, this
may seem surprising. But even in the late thirties, the Prussian capital, with its young
university, its handsome neoclassical public buildings, and its passionate pursuit of
scholarship and learning, must have seemed like a new Athens to those who had been
raised on the idealism of its early luminaries -men like Humboldt and Hegel -and who
continued to see the role of Prussia as that of peaceful leader and centre of a revived
German cultural nation, a role Austria was judged too effete, aristocratic, heterogeneous,
and exclusively Catholic to play.
Bachofen had indeed been thoroughly prepared for Berlin. His own teachers had been
brought to Basle - often from other German lands - to carry out the same kind of
modernization of the University there that the neohumanists had carried through when
they founded the University of Berlin in 1810. De Wette in theology, Wackernagel in
German literature, Vinet in French, were among the liberal minds of their time. Even the
philology professor, Franz Dorotheus Gerlach, with whom Bachofen later collaborated on
the ill-fated Geschichte der Romer, and who became, like his student, a byword for
conservatism in scholarship because of his rejection of Niebuhrian criticism, had come to
Basle as a young philologist, fired with the ideals of Berlin neohumanism, committed to
Bildung and reform, and convinced of the regenerative, not to say redemptive power of
79 O n Pellegrino Rossi, see Rappard, op. cit, n. 19
Bachofen, Selbstbiographie, op. cit. n. 73 above, p. I 7;
above, and Laszlo Ledermann, PellegrinoRossi, l'hommeet Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 3, 15June 1839.
l'iconomiste, 1787-1848: une grande carriire internationale au
81 Bachofen, Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 2, I 5
XIX'siicle, Paris 1929. O n Rossi and the Zofinger clubs, December 1837.
P. E. Schazmann, P. Rossi et la Suisse, Geneva 1939,
PP, 55-57,
BASLE .AND BrZCHOFEN
161
philology.82 Opposition to Niebuhr, it should be remembered, was more widespread
among the neohumanists than we might imagine. In the early decades of the nineteenth
century, Hegel - a close friend of Creuzer's and an admirer of his symbolic philology had been sharply opposed to what he considered Niebuhr's pedantic criticisms of the
traditional histories of Rome. There was more truth, according to Hegel, in the literary
narratives of the ancient historians than in all the arbitrary constructions of modern
philologists. In resisting Niebuhr and the even more sceptical hlommsen, Gerlach and
Bachofen were in part remaining faithful to the humanist philology of the I 820s and I 8 3 0 s . ~ ~
The years in Berlin left a deep mark on Bachofen. Much later, in a eulogy of a friend
and fellow-Baseler who had also studied in the Prussian capital, Bachofen recalled 'the
magical enchantment that the Friedrich-Wilhelmsuniversitat exercised on sensitive and
ardent young minds' and the exhilaration of studying, as he and his friend had done,
under teachers such as Ranke, Karl Ritter, Savigny, or Bockh, 'alongside young people
from all the lands where the German tongue is spoken'. It was, he declared, a time of
optimism and faith, when intellect and feeling, hope and realism seemed reconcilable.
'Streuber', he wrote of his friend, 'was blessed in Berlin with what no later period of life
ever brings back' - a feeling of harmony with the present and the past and confidence in
the future.84
Other Baselers also remembered that time of Restoration and Regeneration -of the
optimistic, unifying doctrines of writers as different as Ranke, Schleiermacher and Hegel
- with a mixture of nostalgia and bitterness. Burckhardt, like Bachofen and Streuber,
had also been a student at Berlin and his enthusiastic letters to his friends from these vears
bear out Bachofen's account of Streuber's - and indirectly of his own - experience. In
these decades, when he was growing to manhood, Burckhardt later r e d l e d , it was
possible to believe that the Revolution was something that had happened and was now
over, and that old and new could be reconciled and harmonized in the form, for instance,
of constitutional monarchies. The highpoint of these 'illusions was the spirit of 1830. At
that time books appeared [Burckhardt seems to be alluding maliciously to Ranke here],
very well written, albeit not quite classics, which, though not beyond party, yet aimed to
provide in a spirit of moderation and calm persuasion, a general view of the years from
I 789 to I 8 I 6 as if they were a closed and autonomous period [ein Abgeschlossenes]. Now we
know, however, that we too are swept up in the very same storm that carried men away
after I 78g'.85
82 Gerlach's Verschiedene Ansichten iiber hohere Bildung,
Basle 1822, is a programmatic defence of the neohumanist goals of the newly founded Basle Padagogium,
or preparatory college, against both the pietists, critical
of all secular learning, and the revolutionary and
Napoleonic preference for professional schools, such as
Christoph Bernoulli's Philotechnisches Institut. According
to Andreas Staehelin (Professoren der Unicersitat Basel aus
f u n f Jahrhunderten, Basle I 960, p. 1 2 0 ) , Gerlach 'gilt als
der erste Verkiinder des Neuhumanismus in Basel'. He
opposed the critical 'LVortphilologie' of Hermann and
his school and subscribed to Bockh's 'Altertumswissenschaft'. See also Edgar Bonjour, D i e h i z ' e r s i t a t Basel,
1460-1960, Basle, 2nd edn, 1971,pp. 3 5 ~ 6 8 .
83 See my Orpheus philologus, Philadelphia
1983,
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society,
LXXIII, part 5.
s4 D r . Miilhelm Theodor Streuber. fikrolog., Basle 1857,
pp. vi, viii.
Historische Fragmente, op, cit. n. 59 above, p. 270. Cf.
the strikingly similar comment by Tocqueville in a letter
of 28 April 1850: 'Ce qui est clair pour moi, c'est qu'on
s'est tromp6 depuis soixante ans en croyant voir le bout
de la rtvolution . . . I1 est evident que le flot continue i
marcher, que la mer monte. Ce n'est pas d'une
modification, mais d'une transformation du corps social
qu'il s'agit' (Oeuores complites, Paris 1861-66, v,
pp. 46-61, in Koenraad LV. Swart, The SenseofDecadence
in A'ineteenth Centucy France, The Hague I 964, p. 92).
I 62
LIONEL GOSSMAN
Bachofen's rude awakening from the Humboldtian dreamworld of the liberal Restoration, the Basle Zofingia and the University of Berlin, appears to have begun almost
immediately after he got back from his travels to Basle, where the natives struck him as
quite unlike the ideal creatures in the books of his mentors. Even years later, when he had
learned to accept what he referred to as his 'exile' in his 'highly uninteresting old native
city' -Basilea terra aspera et horrida, as he liked to say, adapting Tacituss6 - with ironical
forbearance, his letters still convey the narrowness, the boredom and the deadly provincialism of life in the largest German-speaking city in Switzerland in the middle of the
nineteenth century. 'An enormous centrifugal force dissipates everything and nothing
significant happens', he wrote to his friend, the philologist Meyer-Ochsner, in Zurich. '. . .
T h e good folk of Basle cherish unconditional peace. What little spirit there is is expended
on credit banks and other swindles that go by the name of p r o g r e s ~ . ' ~O' n another
occasion, he told of receiving a young man from Frankfurt who had already passed
through Zurich and who spoke highly of the dancing assemblies there: 'He will have to
forgo all that sort of thing here. I do not recollect ever hearing of any one dancing in Basle,
except at the vile popular balls at Carnival time. . . . With the best will in the world, I have
nothing to offer the young man except the advice that he not stay too long here. The
natives go to bed early and discipline themselves from early youth to have as few needs as
possible. A lecture, an interminable symphony concert, and a sermon by Peter Hebich,
voil2 tout'.8s Bachofen's unsparing account of cultural life in Basle in the 1860s is borne
out by announcements in the local press. Public lectures on popular religious and
scientific topics by professors at the university, concerts by the local orchestra, a thesis
defence a t the university, a sermon by a revivalist preacher, these were the staples of
cultural life for the Baseler.
Nothing that happened in Basle in the course of the nineteenth century - neither the
city's emergence as a nodal point of the European railway system, nor its steadily
increasing prosperity, nor its physical transformation from a small, crowded, not very
sanitary town, imprisoned within its medieval walls, into a moderately large modern city
with well laid out public gardens and promenades, nor even the expansion of its cultural
institutions, altered Bachofen's view of life 'in dem langweiligen Museen- und Fabriksitz
Basel'. 'Nothing new is to be found either on the Gerbergasse or on the Barfiisserplatz', he
wrote his niece Anita in 1886. 'One day here is very much like another. We get up in the
morning, consume four meals, then go to bed again. If the sun shines, we go out, if it rains
we take our umbrellas along like everybody else. One day I begin my walk with the Sankt
Alban Vorstadt, next day with the Aeschenvorstadt, the day after with the great
Gerbergasse. Every morning I drink cocoa, every evening tea.
Wie intressant, wie intressant
0 du. mein herrlich Schwei~erland!'~~
Bachofen, Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 162,
1863; letter 69, 2 5 January 1851.
Bachofen, Briefe, letter 152, 14January 1863.
Bachofen, Briefe, letter 140, November 1861.
Hebich was a Swabian revivalist, active in Basle around
I 860. His preaching at the Leonhardskirche had caused
an uproar. T h e freethinkers hated him, and those within
the Church who had been influenced by German
idealism and advocated a more rational, philosophical
theology would have liked to see him banned from the
10June
pulpit, but he was defended by the Pietists and their
sympathizers. T h e men of the ljuste milieu' -including
many merchants and academics - were inclined
toward neither philosophical theology nor popular
revivalism. (See Paul Burckhardt, op. cit, n. I 7 above,
p. 290). Bachofen's politely expressed but obvious
disdain is consistent with his contempt for all forms of
populism, whether political or religious.
Bachofen, Briej, op, cit. n. 6 above, letter 333,
I 5 April I 886; letter 336, 8 April 1887.
BASLE AND BACHOFEN
1 63
Bachofen's disenchantment with the prosaic banality of life in Basle had been
immeasurably deepened by the collapse of his political and civic aspirations. His
appointment to a chair ofRoman law at the University in 1841had been sharply criticized
in the Neue Basler Zeitung which, as its subsequent title, Schweizerische National-Zeitung,
suggests, was the liberal-radical counterpart of Andreas Heusler's Basler Zeitung, the
organ of the elite.
T h e point of the criticism was that the ruling elite was squandering limited resources
on unnecessary appointments in the traditional fields of theology, philology and law, in
which there were often more professors than students, while the more modern subjects
that interested the growing middle class - the natural sciences, political economy,
foreign languages - were being starved of the minimum funding needed to keep them
alive. Though Bachofen was not attacked personally, the large salary attaching to what
was already viewed as an unnecessary appointment was judged abusive, especially in
light of the notorious wealth of the Bachofens, the young professor's inexperience, and the
hand-to-mouth existence of several dedicated and deserving teachers of practical subjects
at the U n i v e r ~ i t y . ~ ~
Bachofen reacted to the criticism, as he was to do again and again, not by fighting
back, but by withdrawing. After teaching for a time without drawing his salary, he
resigned his post altogether in 1844. A year later he also withdrew from the Grosser Rat, or
Cantonal Parliament after serving for only a year. He continued to be consulted on
university affairs, especially on appointments, not least perhaps because he was a
generous contributor to the academic treasury,91 but in 1858 he resigned from the threeman Board of Regents or Curatel, claiming he had been insulted by an 'ungewaschener
N e u s c h ~ e i z e r ' In
. ~ ~addition he served for some twenty years, from 1845 until 1866, in a
part-time capacity, as an appeals judge. His participation in the political life of Basle had
been drastically curtailed, however, by the radicals' opposition to his University appointment and by his own response to it. Moreover, it was clear from the way the political
winds were blowing that he would never play the significant public role that he had hoped
and expected to play.
His withdrawal from public life and his general disaffection were probably aggravated
by his awareness that even in his own circles there were many who did not share his
single-minded dedication to humanist learning and his disdain for the new, modern,
practical subjects. It is apparent, as we observed earlier, that substantial elements of the
old ruling elite were willing and eager to swim with the tide of modernity. Already, in the
early years of the century, they had supported Christoph Bernoulli's experimental
Philotechnion, or technical college, and had enrolled their sons in it.93Without the cautious
but continued support, both political and financial, of the ruling elite, Basle could not
have become the communications, banking and industrial centre it in fact became in the
nineteenth century. For railways and banking operations, however, Bachofen never
disguised his contempt, just as he always let it be known that he valued humanistic study,
the study of ideas and the reconstruction of the past, far more highly than the study of
material nature and the construction of the future. He was probably still smarting from
90 A'eue Basler Zeitung, I 8 March I 841; 23 March 1841, for teachers and a scholarship fund for native Basle
students.
1oApri1 1841; 17April 1841; 27 April 1841.
92 Bachofen, Brtefe, letter 129, 30 December 1860.
91 A letter of 28 February 1877 (Briefe, op. cit. n. 6
93 O n Bernoulli and his Phtlotechnisches Institut, see
above, letter 290) outlines the terms of a gift to the
Piidagogium to support sickness and retirement benefits Biirgin, op. cit. n. 2 2 above, pp. 4&47.
164
LIONEL GOSSMAN
the arguments used to criticize his appointment in 1841 when he referred in later years to
the materialist champions of science and technology as 'die Ritter des Drecks' ('the
knights of filth') .94
Through his teaching and his immensely popular public lectures -to the preparation
ofwhich he devoted enormous care -Burckhardt maintained an active, living relation to
his native city. He did what he could to preserve its civic culture and what he believed to
be the best ofits civic traditions, even after the revision of the Federal Constitution in 1874
had drastically diminished its autonomy, effectively ending a history of many centuries.
Bachofen, on the other hand, lived in almost total retirement. Not surprisingly, when
Burckhardt died in 1897 his passing was mourned as a public and civic loss. The NationalZeitung paid tribute to him, above all, for not keeping his knowledge to himself but
sharing it instead with his fellow-citizens.95O n Bachofen's death, in contrast, there was
no more than the usual brief announcement, inserted by the family, in the Schteleicer
Volksfreund (which took over from the 1Vational-Zeitung between I 860 and I 888). The more
conservative Basler Nachrichten, the editor of which was a member of the distinguished
academic family of the Wackernagels, did publish a short obituary notice of some thirty
lines, but the contrast with Burckhardt is striking. The writer of the obituary notes that
Bachofen was hardly known in the city of his birth and residence, and that he had 'for
years lived in seclusion, devoting himself entirely to his studies and to the fine arts'.96
Bachofen himself had said as much. 'My life revolves around my family, my studies, and
some close friends', he wrote to Meyer-Ochsner in 1867. 'I do not seek anything beyond
these. The rest is worthless a n y ~ a y ' . ~ '
Offended by the politically inspired public criticism of which he had been made the
target, embittered by the setback to his civic career, appalled, like Burckhardt, by the
official support the radical cantons gave to the Freischaren, or bands of radical volunteers
which had been organized to harass the conservative Catholic government of Lucerne,
and horrified by his experience of the 1848 revolution in Rome, Bachofen grew increasingly hostile to political liberalism and increasingly pessimistic about the future of
Switzerland and of Europe in general.
He himself was in Rome when Pellegrino Rossi was assassinated as he descended the
steps of the chancellery for the opening of Parliament. In a last attempt to restore his
authority amid the deepening chaos of revolution, Pius IX had prevailed upon Rossi, as a
man of moderately liberal views, to assume the reins of government in the Papal States.
His fate must have seemed emblematic to Bachofen, and there is a significant change,
after 1848, in the latter's attitude to the eloquent cosmopolitan figure he had once
admired. Whereas in 1839 Rossi's course at the Collkge de France had won high praise
from the young Baseler, Bachofen now claims that his great expectations of Rossi had
been disappointed, and that the latter's lectures on constitutional law had been worthless
and trivial. Above all, he claims retrospectively that what he now characterizes as Rossi's
hypocritical concessions to the revolutionary catchwords of the day - trial by jury,
constitutionalism, freedom of the press, Polish independence - were distasteful to him.
94 Briefe, op, cit. n. 6 above, letter 132, 6 February
1861. In a later letter (no 229, 8 May 1867) he tells
Meyer-Ochsner that he stayed away from a dinner
marking the fiftieth anniversary of the ,Vatullforschende
Gesellschaji (Society for Scientific Research), because it
is now dominated by 'certain elements' whose orientation in the direction of'filth' ['Dreck'] is not to his taste.
95 A'ational-Zeitung 10 August 1897.
96 Baslerhhchrichten 26 November 1887.
97 Briefe, op, cit. n. 6 above, letter 229, 8 May 1867.
BASLE .4ND BrZCHOFEN
165
Rossi now appears as a somewhat slippery figure, without firmness, honesty or depth of
conviction, too much of an actor and an orator to be a genuine statesman or scholar.98
With this revised portrait Bachofen established his distance from the moderately liberal
positions he had espoused in his youth.
T h e misguided efforts and policies of liberals had in the end opened the floodgates to
the forces of chaos. Democracy, nationalism and socialism now seemed to Bachofen three
evils that were about to plunge the world back into a new age of barbarism. 'None of the
peaceable burghers of Basle knows how things really stand with Switzerland', he wrote in
1850. 'But my inner voice tells me that grave events are on the way. They are coming
because they must come. Man - and, in the same way, a people - is free to choose the
first step; not so the last. We have reached the final stage of demagogy and nothing now
remains but to plunge into the abyss'.99 Referring to France, about the same time, he was
more specific: 'The abyss is open and ready to devour its victim. Everything is ripe for
despotism'.100H e summed up his new position in his autobiography in a lapidary phrase
worthy of Sismondi: 'It is because I love freedom that I hate demo~racy'.'~'
Bachofen's position was difficult. H e disliked the direction he saw the world moving in
and he was deeply afraid of socialism and of the rapidly growing workers' movements,
which he was able to observe at first hand in Basle and which he saw as destructive not
only of property and family, the two foundations, in his mind, of social order, but of
culture and of freedom.lo2Democracy, to him, meant -sooner or later -demagogy and
despotism,'03 and he came to look on his own earlier liberalism with bitterness as the first
false step on the road to ruin.lo4The decay of culture and freedom, however, was not the
Selbstbiographie, op. cit. n. 73 above, pp. 17-18.
Bachofen, Briefe, op. cit. n . 6 above, letter 57,
3 March 1850. See also Selbstbiographie, p. 36: 'Since the
victory at Lucerne, the doctrine of popular sovereignty
and the irresistible force of democracy have ci~veloped
into the practical foundation ofour public affairs. I have
no doubt that it will continue to advance until it
embraces all its consequences, including the most
extreme, if the pattern of European affairs permits, and
unless great disasters lead the people back to the true
foundations of healthy life for the State'.
l o o Bachofen, Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 59,
2 1 May 1850.
lo' Selbstbiographie, op. cit. n. 73 above, p. 37.
'02 In a letter to Meyer-Ochsner, Bachofen refers to the
Basler ~Vachrichtenfor I 3 October I 869, where a member
ofthe Federal Parliament and ofthe Board of Education
was reported to have announced at a meeting of the
Swiss Teachers' Association that God, property and
family were things of the past (Briefe, letter 264, October
1869). In the same letter he expresses outrage that the
Fourth Congress of the Socialist International had been
given permission to hold its sessions in Basle the
previous month. A year earlier in the midst of a
campaign by the ribbon workers, supported by the
International LVorkingmen's Association, to get a
factory law enacted for Basle, he had commented
sardonically and without compassion on the local
workers' association's affiliation with the international
movement and on its resort to violent protest. The
period was one of crisis in the ribbon industry, and the
workers had already been forced to accept cuts of 25O/0
98
99
in their wages (see Paul Burckhardt, op, cit. n. I 7 above,
P P 299-3091.
'03 See Brtefe, op. cit. n. 6 above, letter I 23, 26 September 1860: 'I find any association with the demos even
more unpleasant than the most oppressive Fohn [a
debilitating wind, similar to the mistral of Southern
France or the chamsun of the Eastern Mediterranean]'.
Later (no 243, 7 February 1868), he predicts that the
Italians will soon recognize that of all possible
governments, the Austrian was not the worst. Switzerland is an example of what happens under democracy:
'No State can survive universal suffrage at the service of
a handful of demagogues . . . O u r contemporary history
is identical to that of the declining free states of ancient
Greece'. Similarly, letter no 188 (29 August 1864) on the
Napoleonic regime in France: 'Under Louis Philippe, a
parliamentary France, with people making all kinds of
speeches about freedom; today, the consequences of
that: an emperor who holds down dangerous elements
with a firm hand and is therefore praised by the majority
of the people as the saviour of the country'. See also
Selbstbiographie, pp. 3 6 3 7 : 'Perfect democracy is the
undoing ofeverything good. Republics have most to fear
from it. I am fearful of its spreading, not out of concern
for mx :oods and chattels, but because it drags us back
into Larbarism . . . I hate democracy because I love
freedom'.
'04 Briefe, letter 256, 27 December 1868: 'Every present
is determined by a past. And what do we find in the past,
since 1830, but revolution after revolution, and a
succession ofgovernments each one ofwhich represents
a lower level of morality than the preceding one'.
LIONEL GOSSMAN work of the proletariat alone, but of the new middle classes themselves. The 'much touted
civilization' of modern industrialism was anathema to him and he despised the 'demiculture which is being fostered by newspapers and popular lectures'.105
O n the one hand, therefore, he was convinced that 'without chassepots the order and
security of persons and property rests on shaky foundations';lo6 on the other, the society
that is protected by these chassepots is itself vulgar and worthless. In Paris, in 1864, he
relates, he looked up his old friends the legal and social historian Laboulaye, the librarian
Michelant, and Auguste Durant, the publisher of the Revue historique du droit f r a n ~ a i set
itranger. T h e conversation turned to the contrast between the time of their early association under Louis Philippe and the present imperial era. 'The French say openly that the
present situation is a golden age compared to the previous one. May God preserve us, they
say, from a return to freedom'. Their chief worry is about the cost of annuities. 'Not a soul
is interested in political freedoms . . . Spiritual decline, blatant adoration of material
pleasures, vulgar display, conspicuous consumption, and immorality in most social
milieux. . . . That is Paris today. Who will think of freedom there? Such people need
despotism and are happy in it'.lo7 In the end, 'the age of mother-right now seems less
barbarous to me, a golden age, compared with the century of the chassepot'.lo8
The Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars left Bachofen completely disenchanted. 'Europe is devouring itself', he wrote in September of 1870, 'and every one feels that
the former western provinces of the Roman Empire will know no peace but the peace of
total exhaustion'. Now the time of revolution was about to reach its climax. Everything
that had seemed established was going to be put in question, and no matter what the
outcome was, no lasting good could come of it. 'The principles of I 789 are too deeply
rooted now in men's minds for any power to root them out. . . . In Germany, the people
will demand free democratic institutions in return for the blood it has given; as in 1815,
Prussia will not grant them; and hence, disappointed and frustrated, the people will
become dissatisfied and will turn to revolution. Victors and vanquished are about to
experience a hangover from this war, the like of which no one has seen before'.'09
Meanwhile race hatred among the peoples, notably the Germans and the French, will
spawn new wars.'1° The Germans especially will do nothing but thirst for more wars -so
much, Bachofen notes bitterly, for the years of peace the Second German Empire was
supposed to bring. 'For years to come honest Fritz will have nothing to do but Boom!
Boom! Boom! . . . and any other sound coming from him will be pursued as high
treason'. "'
Bachofen's decision to abandon the fight for an active role in the civic life of his native
city after 1844 thus reflected a political disillusionment that subsequent experience did
nothing to alleviate. For most of his life he could accept none of the options effectively
available in the historical world; instead he stood, like Burckhardt but even more so, on
the sidelines, commenting bitterly and sardonically on them all - which in effect meant
that he was almost invariably on the extreme conservative side in all practical
issues?12 History, from which, as a young man carried away by 'the illusions of 1830', he
Brzefe, letter 256, 2 7 December 1868.
Ibid.
lo' Briefe, letter I 88, 29 August I 864.
'Os Briefe, letter 278, 2 December 1870.
'09 Briefe, letter 275, 1j September I 8 70.
110 Ibid., and letter 2 79,5 December 1870. '05
'06
"' Briefe, letter 280, 26 December 1870. T h e Bachofen-Archiv at the University of Basle contains information showing that he subscribed to the most conservative newspapers of the time, Catholic as well as Protestant. BASLE AND BACHOFEN
167
had hoped for much, had failed, and the sense of that failure, not only of his own
ambitions, but of history itself, was one of Bachofen's most enduring experiences. I n his
eulogy of Streuber he evokes it indirectly. Streuber, he said, had known a t Berlin a kind of
passionate idealism: he had seen how learning was honoured and viewed as part of the
State and of life. H e had embraced optimism with enthusiasm and devoted himself to his
studies 'as one new-born'. But on his return to Basle this experience of 'a present full of
contentment and satisfaction and a proud and confident anticipation of the fruits of the
future' withered, and for the rest of his life he suffered 'the double pain of memories full of
melancholy and longing and of a future without help . . . He had girded himself up for life
as for ajoyful festivity, but he had hardly begun to drink from the cup when the last lamps
were extinguished and the last notes fell silent'.'13
Once again, in the account he wrote for some friends ofhis journey to Greece ( I85 I ) published only in the 1920s - Bachofen referred elliptically to the withering of his
optimism and the dashing of his hopes on his return to Basle in the 1840s: 'Can any one
who feels himself called to exercise a certain office be afflicted by anything more deeply
than when it becomes impossible for him to undertake that O n e Thing?' In such
circumstances, he continued, 'when practical activity and effective action in the world
have become impossible, we must assume that the life's task that is being pointed out to us
is that of striving for ever greater personal perfection',l14 I n many passages that recall
Humboldt and Schopenhauer and anticipate the young Nietzsche Bachofen reiterated
again and again the individual's obligation of self-~u1tivation.l~~
I t must be emphasized, however, that, as Bachofen understood it, self-cultivation was
a vocation, not a personal indulgence. One of the persistent themes ofhis autobiographical writing is his scrutiny of his own experience for the signs in it of the will of Providence.
'In the decisive moments of our lives', he once observed, 'we seldom freely determine our
own actions. What appears to be our work has its ultimate origin in a higher design. We
believe we choose our vocation, but in fact we are chosen by it. Therein lies its higher
justification, therein the source ofthejoy with which we carry it out and the blessing that it
brings to us'.l16 The mishaps attending his public career were read by Bachofen as a sign
that Providence had other designs for him and that he was being called to a different
service from that of the state. The acuteness of his disappointment was in itself the best
proof of that. When Providence calls, 'nothing is left to us but the inner core of things.
What was dearest to us is most often the thing that is affected'.l17
The autobiographical letter to Savigny of 1854 offers an account of the evolution of
Bachofen's ideas that is slightly at variance with the one given in the Griechische Reise.
Bachofen implies here that he did not regret the turn taken by his affairs since he had
never truly wanted to play a public role but had always been drawn to a life of study and
above, letter 77, 1 0August 1854: 'In the end, the highest
"3 Streuber. Nekrolog., op. cit. n. 84 above, pp. vi, viii,
xxxvi. Already on his return to Basle from Italy in 1848, goal is to perfect oneself'; letter 82, 18 May 1855: 'In the
he had written to an Italian colleague of his feeling of life of the soul, egoism is justified; indeed, it is an
isolation in a Switzerland torn apart by the Sonderbund obligation'. O n this tradition in Germany, see LV. H.
war: 'Quanta nunc rerum mutatio! Civilibus armis Bruford, The German Tradition of- Self--Cultivation, Campatria absumpta, coelum horridum, terra aspera, sine bridge 1975.
"6 Slreuber. Nekrolog., op. cit. n. 84 above, pp. vi-xii. See
amicis quos longinquos habeo omnes domi ut ita dicam
exul' ( B r i e j , op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 50, 6 June 1848). also Griechische Reise, op. cit. n. I I 4 above, pp. 7-8.
Griechische Reise, pp. 7-8.
114 Johann Jakob Bachofen, Griechische Reise, ed. Georg
Schmidt, Heidelberg 1927, p. 8; see also n. 10.
115 'Autobiography' in M y t h , Religion, and Mother-Right,
op. cit. n. 63 above, p. I 7. See also Brief-e, op. cit. n . 6
"'
LIONEL GOSSMAN reflection. Even when he had been mistakenly pursuing another one, in short, he had
always been obscurely impelled toward a vocation that had now been revealed as his true
one. I t was thus with relief that he turned aside from the narrow and limited opportunities
ofa present that was inadequate to his imagination and his deepest convictions in order to
devote himself to his true calling.
Whether it was accompanied by disappointment or a feeling of relief, Bachofen's
turning away from the day-to-day life of Basle should probably not be read as a defection.
For Bachofen himself it was a duty he had no right to refuse and he may well have seen it
as, paradoxically, the only way left to him of serving the true interests, as he conceived
them, of his community. Such sentiments may well have motivated many of the
champions of modern art and literature in the second half of the nineteenth century. In
Bachofen's case, they appear to have been sustained by an intensely religious sense of
vocation, which bound him to the traditions of his native city even as it obliged him to
estrange himself from it.
The figure of the faithful exile was not unfamiliar at Basle or in Switzerland. There
were emigrt Basle merchants in the chief trading cities of Europe, and large numbers of
Swiss had traditionally supported their families by serving in the armies of foreign
princes. A more striking case from Bachofen's own early years was that of the explorer
Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, a distant relative, Bachofen's paternal aunt Margarethe
having married Burckhardt's half-brother Gedeon. In the early years of the century this
son of one of the wealthiest ribbon manufacturers in the city had left Basle to undertake
various journeys of exploration in Arabia and Upper Egypt on behalf of the London
Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior of Africa. Burckhardt's mission
required him to talk, dress, live and look like an Arab; he was generally taken for one; and
when he died of dysentery in Cairo in 1817, he was buried as a Muslim at the Bab el Nasr
cemeteryjust outside the city gates. In all his letters home, however, 'Sheikh Ibrahim', as
he was called, remained a devoted son and brother, touchingly loyal to his family and to
the city he always said he hoped to return to one day. In one letter he responded with
resignation to his mother's decision to sell the country house at Erndthalden in the Basle
countryside, which more than anywhere else represented the happiness and security of
home and childhood to him. 'It is possible to find contentment in the silence ofthe desert',
he wrote. 'There is no spot on this earth which happiness has marked as its permanent
abode. Every one may find it in his own heart and he can treasure it there whether he finds
himself in the most civilized nation in Europe or among half-savage Arabs'.l18
'ls Letter to his parents, from Aleppo, I 5 Januar) I 8 1 I ,
in Scheik Ibrahim iJohann Ludwig Burckhardt): Briefe an
Eltern und Geschwister, ed. Carl Burckhardt-Sarasin and
Hansrudolf Schwabe-Burckhardt, Basle 1956, p. 127.
Burckhardt's attachment to his family in Basle, his
longing to return to his mother, and his unquestioning
acceptance of the many tasks that providence had given
him to fulfil before that homecoming could be achieved
emerge from the closing lines of a letter to his mother,
dated g J u l ) 1815, from Cairo: ' E n d nun lebe wohl,
liebe Mutter. Moge Dich eine giitige X'orsehung noch
lange J a h r e Deinen treuen Kindern schenken, deren
XTerlust durch den Hinschied ihres Vaters D u allein
ersetzen kannst. hloge es mir vergonnt seyn, Dich noch
einmal zu umarmen. \Vie oft flehe ich um dieses Cluck!
Es ist mein heissester iVunsch, ohne dessen Erfullung
ich mich stets unglucklich schatzen werde. J a , gewiss,
meine heissen Thranen werden dann zeugen, dass
keine, auch nicht die langste Abwesenheit mein Herz je
verandern kann, welches von allen anderen Banden
losgerissen, allein f u r Dich und Dein Gliick, liebe
Mutter, jetzt schlagt. Doch entfernt ist noch jener
Zeitpunkt. hlanche Schwierigkeiten muss ich noch
ubersteigen, um ihn zu erreichen. Froh hoffe ich, dass
mich Standhaftigkeit und M u t h nie verlassen werden.
Zu schon ist mein Ziel, um ihm nicht jedes Opfer zu
bringen, dessen ich fahig bin. Gottes Segen mit Dir,
liebe h l a m a . Ich bin und bleibe zeitlebens unverandert
Dein Dich mit innigster kindlicher Liebe ehrender and
liebender Sohn' ( p . I 50).
BASLE AND BACHOFEN
169
Throughout his correspondence, Burckhardt unaffectedly signalled his submission to the
will of Providence and he appears to have interpreted his own exile as a calling.
I n the eagerness to recognize and respond to the call of Providence that led his
celebrated kinsman from the Eden of Erndthalden to the deserts of Arabia, and in the
intensity with which Burckhardt lived both the Christian experience ofman's rootlessness
in the world and the Baseler's attachment to his native city, it is possible to discern
something of the spirit that later moved Bachofen to abandon the busy life not only of a
citizen but of a professionally successful philologist and to accept the inner exile of a lonely
journey of exploration among peoples knowing nothing of modern ways.
As a philologist, Bachofen expressed his rejection of modern liberal culture and
politics in sustained and violent attacks on the most celebrated and influential modern
philologist ofhis day, Theodor Mommsen. What he objects to most strenuously is what he
calls Mommsen's modernising ofRoman history, which he saw, not altogether incorrectly
perhaps, as a justification of Realpolitik and of the aggressive, bureaucratic modern
nation-state. Mommsen and Bismarck are frequently associated in Bachofen's writing.
T o protest against 'this kind of history', was, he declared, 'an absolute necessity', a
'duty . . . even if I must stand quite alone'.l19
And Bachofen did find himself standing virtually alone against the 'Prussians'.
Though many in Basle were with him - Burckhardt, for instance, was also enraged by
Mommsen's Roman Histor_ylz0- his reports of the isolation to which he had been
condemned because of his attacks on 'Prussian criticism' were not exaggerated. Along
with his old teacher Gerlach, he had discredited himself among academic philologists by
his refusal to accept Niebuhr's critical evaluation of the traditional accounts of early
Roman history and his insistence that all myths contain a kernel of historical truth. As a
result, his work was virtually ignored by the philological profession.12' Moreover, he
himself stopped attending the professional meetings of the German Society of Philologists
and Orientalists, and refused to set foot in the aggressive new Prussia of Bismarck .Iz2
Paradoxically, however, in combatting 'modernisation', it was he, in the end, who proved
to be modern and who pointed classical studies in a new direction. Against the growing
power of the professionals he gradually put together a counter-association of
independent-minded students not simply of antiquity but of all prehistorical cultures,
119 B r i e j , op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 270, 4 April 1870;
also letter 144, 16 March I 862: 'For me, registering my
protest against this kind of history is an absolute
necessity'.
lZ0 T h e testimony is that of Carl Spitteler, op. cit. n. 1 5
above, VI, p. 387.
lZ1 H e himself noted that his work 'had received
absolutely n o attention in Germany' ( B r i e j , op. cit. n. 6
above, letter 288, 1 3 December 1885). See also letter 242
(Alexis Giraud-Teulon, a young professor a t the
University of Geneva, who had become interested in
Bachofen's work, writing to his own former teacher):
' H e hopes that through m e his studies, which have gone
practically unnoticed in the scholarly world, will finally
enter the domain of public discussion. This, he believes,
has been deliberately prevented in Germany by the
calculated silence of the philologists'. Mommsen had
written a devastating review of the Geschichte der Romer
(1851) of Bachofen and Gerlach in the Literarisches
Centralblatt (repr. in Theodor hlonimsen, Gesammeite
Schr~ften,Berlin 1905-13, v ~pp.
. 653-54) and Bachofen's
reputation never recovered from it.
lZ2 H e refused to attend the 25th anniversary meeting
of the \.erein von Altertumsfreunden im Rheinlande at
Bonn in 1866 because 'I ha1.e discovered in myself a
deep inner revulsion against Prussia that ivould make
the sight and the society of that robber people extremely
distasteful to me' (Briefe, op. cit. n . 6 above. letter 225,
September 1866). I n 1871 he told Hornung in Geneva:
'I no longer touch any German newspaper. Nothing is
more loathsome than the cynicism ofs1ai.e~'(letter 283,
9 February I 87 1 ) . T h e only German paper he appears
to have continued to subscribe to was, uncharacteristicall), the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung, no doubt because of
its anti-imperial stance. T h e Bachofen-Archiv at the
Cniversit) of Basle contains a collection of newspaper
articles critical of Prussia and of German imperialism
(item 301).
170
LIONEL GOSShlAN
whether past or present. The circle of correspondents he built up over the years included
few professional or academic philologists. Mostly they were pioneering figures in the still
undefined areas of sociology and anthropology, such as Elie Reclus in Paris, GiraudTeulon in Geneva, Josef Kohler in Berlin and Lewis Morgan at the Smithsonian
Institution in Washington, D.C.
The balm for ~ a c h o f e n ' sisolation and disarmointment was Italv. Where life in Basle
-and Basle stood for the entire modern world -was stunted, cramped and trivial, Italy
still offered the image
., of a life that was whole, of a paradisiac land where man had lived in
innocent union with his physical environment and in harmony with his own nature.
Bachofen's Italy, which he loved in the maternal body of the living Italian landscape, was
not, however, the Italy ofhis own time. Though his descriptions of the Italian countryside
are among the most .powerful parts of his work, he always contrasted its unchanging
beauty and strength with the degradation of its modern human offspring.lZ3 In his
vocabulary Garibaldi was a term of abuse.lZ4 Nor was it the Renaissance Italy that
delighted Burckhardt, or the Italy of Imperial Rome. It was a much earlier, pre-historical
'1talia ieratica e sacerdotale', a; he himself put it, which had its roots not in classical
Greece, but in the world oforigins, the Eternal Orient.125This Italy Bachofen sought and
found, as before him Georg Zoega, the strange Danish friend of Humboldt and Welcker,
had sought and found it, not in the triumphant architecture of Imperial Rome, but in
tombs and burial sites. Here he believed he had come upon the traces and memories of a
way of life corresponding to those Dionysian religions which in his scholarly writings
shared first place in his affections and admiration with early Demetrian religious cults, a
way oflife ii which the contraries of the world and the spirit, life and death,
and
Christianity seemed still almost unformed - 'abandonment without reserve to the most
luxuriant life of the senses and fidelity to that best Hope that reaches beyond the grave' and in which 'no idea of struggle, of self-discipline, of sin and repentance disturbs the
harmony of a life at once sensual and transcending sensuality'.lZ6 'All those necropolises
are beside streams', he wrote in his autobiographical letter to his old teacher Karl von
Savigny. 'The lapping waters seem to intone ;he eternal praise of the dead'. Here, in short,
in the fantasmatic Italy produced by the scholar's imagination, the earth and the waters of
life buried deep inside-i;, the female and the male lifeforces, mother and son, matter and
spirit, vital fluids and tears, are still in harmony with each other. History means nothing
L
12'See especially his contribution to the Geschichte der
Romer, written in collaboration with F. D . Gerlach, op.
cit. n. I 2 I above (Gesammelte Ib'erke, op. cit. n. 29 above, I,
pp. 79-388). especially the description of \vest central
Italy ( p p . 88-roq), of the Campagna (pp. I 18-27), and
of the Alban Hills ( p p . 127-28). I n the early life of a
people, according to Bachofen, man and nature live in
intimate union: 'iVherever we find him, he is a
phenomenon of a specific place, his history being, to a
varying but predetermined degree, the natural history
of his country, while his development is determined at
each step by the totalit) of the geographical conditions
of his existence' ('Die Grundgesetze der Vijlkerentwicklung und der Historiographic', in Gesammelte M'erke, VI,
p. 41 7). M a n , in such circumstances, is truly the child of
his mother nature. Similar views ivere expressed by
other Romantic kvriters; see, for instance, hlichelet's
Tableau de la France, in vol 11 ofhis Histoire de France. Paris 1833. 1 124 'Caribaldi-Literatur' is the uncomplimentary term
with which he describes a commentary on Homer that
he considered mediocre and uninspired (Brtefe, op. cit.,
n. 6 above, letter I 23, 26 September 1860).
'25 Briefe, letter 257% 18 February 1869. Though
Bachofen ivas not attracted by Renaissance Italy. Italy
did mean something similar to the two Baselers. T o both
it was the Saturnian land -magna parensfrugum, Saturnia
tellus, as Burckhardt, citing Virgil, called it (Jacob
Burckhardt, Briefe, op. cit. n. 48 above, ~ I I267.
, letter of
10 August 1 8 8 1 )- the physically present image of an
original harmony of m a n and nature, as well as of a
possible, far off, unforeseeable return of that original
harmony See Heinz Schlaffer, art. cit. n. 55 above,
p. 103.
126 Das Mutterrechl, in Gesammelle Il'erke, op. cit. n. 29 above, 111,p . 593. BASLE AND BACHOFEN here, since these early peoples 'do not work for the day but have eternity in mind in all
their activity'.lZ7
I t seems.likely that Bachofen had projected the ideals that had informed his youthful
experience of Berlin and that subsequent events had revealed to be illusory on to the
culture of these ancient peoples. Now, however, the ideal was not in any historical present
or future ('a present full of contentment. . . and a confident anticipation of the fruits of the
future'), but irrevocably in the past, indeed on the other side of historical time, in
prehistory. I t could be the object of a passionate search and a passionate contemplation,
but no longer of any possible historical experience. Nevertheless, it is still that moment of
confidence and fulfilment that is evoked again and again, as a consolation for the
disappointments and horrors of the present,lZ8in the moving descriptions of Demetrian
or 'matriarchal' cultures - the cultures that, according to Bachofen, lie between the
original unbridled hetaerism on the one hand and repressive patriarchal legalism on the
other - which illuminate the pages of the History of the Romans (1851-52)' the Essay on
Ancient Mortuary Symbolism ( I 85g), Mother-Right ( I 861), and the Legend of Tanaquil ( I 870),
as well as the later accounts of'primitive' societies still surviving in Africa and America. It
is not surprising that these societies, as described by returning travellers, missionaries and
poets, took their place alongside ancient Italy both in Bachofen's imagination and in his
scholarly writing. Making allowance both for the variety of early cultures and for some
poetic licence, he declared, he still found that the account oflife on Nukuheva in Melville's
~ y p e jeustified his admiration for prehistoric societies, and he fully agreed with Melville
that the ties of love and trust binding the fierce inhabitants of the Typee valley, the
unanimity of feeling and judgment among them, and the absence of conflict either
between or within individuals offered the image of a culture that we, who call ourselves
'civilized', are in no position to despise or to condemn as i m r n 0 r a 1 . l ~ ~
Bachofen's 'discovery' of Italy in I 842 was a shattering experience, comparable only
-in his retelling of it at least - to a religious conversion.130As a result of it, he wrote, he
u
lZ7 'Zlyth, Religion, and Mother Right, op. cit. n. 63 above,
p. 12. In the magnificent description of the Campagna
in the Geschichte der Romer Bachofen again emphasizes
the abundance of spring water. This marked the
Campagna as a divine land, sacred to the Gods. 'In the
cool groves, through which the waters flow, the leaders
of the people come together to take counsel, as by the
aqua Ferentina in the Vale of Alba, or beneficent
divinities decipher the secrets of his future to the
troubled mortal' (Gesammelte Werke, I, pp. 102-03).
lZ8 More and more, especially after 1848, the study of
the past came to serve as a refuge, for Bachofen, from a
disturbing and hated present. A long account of the
moral and political decline of France and of its collapse
into despotism ends with the comment: 'I would rather
turn now to the objects of the past' (Briefe, op. cit. n. 6
above, letter 59, 2 1 May 1850) In 1856, after a visit to
Berlin, where he enjoyed some interesting scholarly
discussions: 'On the whole, I conversed more agreeably
with the dead, and I have to confess I would not gladly
exchange them for the living' (letter 84, 2 1 June 1856).
In the brilliant Paris of Napoleon 111, on the eve of
Napoleon 1's birthday, amid the frenzied, milling,
celebrating throngs: 'How wretched all that imperial
glitter seemed to me. But the Campana Museum was
there, and so, in the year 1864, I was able to spend many
a day among the Etruscans' (letter 188, ng August
I 864). In I 869 he acknowledges his extreme pessimism:
'That is why antiquity is so precious to me; because I am
on the worst possible terms with our glorious modernity
- as bad as the Papacy itself!' (letter zjg, l o May
1869). If his melancholy is a little less black than it
might be, it is 'because I concern myself very little with
the present, but spend my life rather among the objects
of the motionless world of historical study' (letter 264,
October 1869).Finally, in the aftermath of the FrancoPrussian war: 'I have never felt as intensely as I do today
the value of an occupation that distracts my thoughts
from day to day events and stills the melancholy
reflections that would otherwise be inspired by the
lugubrious spectacle of contemporary civilized Europe'
(letter 278, 2 December 1870) O n Burckhardt's similar
evasion from an an unappealing present, see Heinz
SchlaKer, op. cit. n . 55 above.
lZ9 Bachofen,
Nachlass, Gesarnn~elte Ctkrke, V I I I ,
pp. 495-96. Cf. .\lelville, Tjpee. London 1846, chapters
'7, 27.
130 .A conversion experience was the common Romantic way of describing the historian's discover>- of his
vocation. Both Augustin Thierry and Jules hlichelrt
describe their coming to history as an illumination.
LIONEL GOSSMAN
was unfitted for ever for the contemporary world, and in his imagination the world of
Italy, full oflight and beauty, limpid with the waters ofits many springs, came to stand for
a longed-for fulfilment, for that transparency, immediacy and presence 'where one feels
everything more deeply, pain and joy and the true meaning of things',131 while Basle and still more 'das eckelhafte Berlin', which had been transformed from a city of
philosophers into the monstrous capital of a domineering and bureaucratic imperialism
- came to represent the obscurity of the Platonic cave, the world of musty book-learning
and physical and spiritual alienation. References to 'the smoke-filled study rooms of the
cold North', to 'smoky study rooms, with their rancid smell of tallow candles and oil
lamps', to Hyperborean fogs, and obscured or artificial light, recur again and again in
Bachofen's writing in connection with Northern scholars and contemporary scholarship
in general,13* and especially in connection with Mommsen who invariably appears, in a
conflation of sexual, political and philosophical imagery, as the booted, cigar-smoking
Prussian, the bad interpreter who is unworthy to wield the historian's pen, since he uses it
not to love the past but to violate it, not to go out towards it respecting its strangeness and
difference, but to pull it roughly to himself in a vain attempt at a p p r ~ p r i a t i o n . ~ ~ ~
Bachofen's entire conception of scholarship and interpretation is structured by this
opposition between the North and Italy, between modern pygmies overreaching themselves in despair a t their estrangement and impotence and that glorious Southern
landscape of the past where 'nature, by the warmth and richness of her sensuous
manifestations, invites mortal man to yield to her charms and to enjoy the life ofthe senses
under the guidance of a religion which hopes to elevate him not by repressing, but on the
contrary by developing and educating his sensuality, to which the law of struggle is
foreign and in which the distinction between this life and the other life is not an absolute
172
I t also recurs in a new version as the opposition between Bachofen himself and
Mommsen. Like so many nineteenth-century scholarly endeavours since the disputes
over the hieroglyphs and the competition between English and French explorers and
archaeologists for the ancient stones and temples of Egypt and Assyria, it often assumes
the aspect of a struggle between rivals for the possession of the female body of the past.
Significantly, Bachofen's attacks on Mommsen, which had come to a head in 1861, the
year the latter's Roman Histov (1854-56) was officially consecrated by the award of the
Bavarian Academy's Gold Medal to the author, reached a second climax in 1870. In the
journal Hermes for that year, shortly after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war,
Mommsen published an article questioning the authenticity of the Coriolanus story, in
which a leading role is played by Valeria, the sister of Publicola. ( I t was she who
organized the Roman matrons to intercede with the general on behalf of the beleaguered
city.) Bachofen appears to have taken Mommsen's criticism not only as a rejection of his
own ideas about the early matriarchal culture of the Italians, of which, in his view, the
13' Selbstbiographie, op. cit. n . 73 above, p. 29. See also
Geschichte der Romer, op. cit. n. 123 above, Gesammelte
Werke, I, p. 104, on 'the relation between man and nature
in the youthful age of peoples . . . so intimate and so
richly woven, as if both were still aware oftheir common
origin'.
See 'Autobiography' in Myth, Religion, and Mother
Right, op. cit. n. 63 above, p. 10; Brie), n. 6 above, letter
18, g June 1844; letter 199, 4 June 1865; letter 264,
October 1869;letter 304, 29 October 1880.
Brie), letter 144, 16 March 1862: 'der Griffel der
Geschichte gehort nicht in seine Hand'.
Mutterrecht, in Gesammelte Werke, n. 29 above, 111,
P. 587.
BASLE AND BACHOFEN Coriolanus story preserved significant traces, and an indirect justification of Prussian
militarism, but as a desecration of his own mother, to whom the Mutterrecht had been
posthumously dedicated, and who, as Valeria Merian, bore the name of the Roman
heroine and was thus indissolubly associated, for Bachofen, both with her and with the
theory of primitive mother right.135
BACHOFEN AND MOMMSEN
Whence, whither, wherefore all this science, ifit
do not lead to culture? Belike to barbarity? And
in this direction we already see the scholar caste
ominously advanced.
-Nietzsche, 'David Strauss'.
Bachofen's opposition to Mommsen concerned three related aspects of his work as a
student of antiquity. T h e first was institutional: the opposition of the private scholar from
the city-republic of Basle, where the leading families were expected to fill University
chairs, to the professional Prussian scholar and Imperial academician, whose influence on
university appointments had begun to extend throughout Germany and into Switzerland,
even to Basle itself. T o Bachofen, study is a vocation and an obligation, not to say a
prerogative, of traditionally distinguished families; its object is Bildung, understood as the
transmission of moral, civic and -in the broadest sense -religious values which, for the
historian and philologist, are associated with ancient societies, that is, with societies less
far removed than our own from man's 'original' condition. T o Mommsen, the organiser of
great collective enterprises, philology is a professional activity, the object of which is
Wissenschaft, or the progress of scientific knowledge, and whose practitioners receive a
rigorous and highly specialised technical training. Compare the following two statements.
Here is Mommsen in I 890, receiving Adolf Harnack into the Prussian Academy: 'Like the
large-scale modern state [der Grossstaat] and large-scale modern industry [die Grossindustrie], so too large-scale modern scholarship [die Grosswissenschaft], carried out by
many but directed by a single commanding mind, is a necessary element of the
development of our culture'.136 And here is Bachofen in his autobiographical letter to
Savigny, written in the mid 50s: 'A time must come when the scholar seriously asks
himselfwhat the relation of his studies is to the highest things'.137
Burckhardt, we may recall, fully shared his compatriot's hostility to the modern state
and to the bureaucratic organisation of Wissenschaft, though he may have had rather less
See Bachofen, Briefe, letter 270, 4 April 1 8 7 0 T h e
attackon Mommsen developed into The M y t h ofTanaqui1
( D i e Sage uon Tanaquil), but Bachofen did write a biting
pamphlet, Theodor Mommsens Kritik der Erzahlung von Cn.
Marcius Coriolanus, 1870, which was also published in a
French translation by his friend and disciple Alexis
Giraud-Teulon a t Geneva in the same year.
136 Theodor
Mommsen, 'Antwort auf Harnacks
Antrittsrede' at the Royal Prussian Academy of
Sciences, 3 July I 890, in Reden und Aufsatze, Berlin 1905,
p. 209. T h e German text is more effective: '\Vie der
Grossstaat und die Grossindustrie. so ist die Grosswissenschaft, die nicht von Einem geleistet, aber von Einem
geleitet \\ird, ein not~vendigesElement unserer Kulturent\\icklung'.
13' 'Autobiography', in A l l ~ t hReligion.
.
and <\lother-Right,
op. cit. n . 63 above. p. I j. .Again I give the original
German text: 'Es muss die Zeit kommen in welcher der
Gelehrte seine Studien iiber ihr 1-erhaltnis zu den
hachsten Dingen ernstlich zur Rede stellt'.
174
LIONEL GOSSMAN
sympathy with Bachofen's idea that learning is not only the responsibility but the
prerogative of a social elite. As is well known, Burckhardt turned down a tentative
invitation to succeed Ranke in the most prestigious chair of history in Europe, at the
University of Berlin, preferring to remain in Basle and to devote himself to his teaching
and his students.138 In the later part of his career he was increasingly indifferent to
scholarly colloquia, publication and all the other institutionalized activities of the world of
professional scholarship, even to writing itself. Instead he chose to reaffirm, by his
emphasis on teaching, the traditional humanist dedication to Bildung that had guided him
since his youth. The one thing about which it is not permitted to doubt, he once said, is the
absolute value of the University of B a ~ 1 e . l ~ ~
Burckhardt's outlook seems to have been characteristic of Basle scholars and
academics. T h e philosopher Karl Steffensen, for instance, had a tremendous reputation
as a teacher and lecturer, but he wrote very little and what remains was put together from
notes after his death.140 O n his arrival in Basle in 1867 to assist the ailing Steffensen,
Dilthey was surprised and dismayed by the indifference of the local scholars to writing
and the enormous importance they attached to their teaching, the loving care they
expended on their lectures.141 Burckhardt's obituary in the National-Zeitung expressed, as
we saw, the appreciation of the citizens of Basle for the civic spirit and dedication shown
by the eminent men at the University. In general, it seems, the notion ofwhat culture and
scholarship mean that prevailed at Basle was different from the one that obtained at
Berlin. T h e Basle scholars apparently wished to serve Bildung not Wissenschaft, the culture
of the individual and the community, not an objective body of knowledge, not 'science',
and to be appreciated and judged by the citizenry of Basle rather than by an anonymous
body of professionals.
In a short essay on Bocklin's preference for classical rather than 'mediocre patriotic'
themes in his painting, Carl Spitteler, who had been a student of Wackernagel's and of
Burckhardt's, recalled the important place the study of classical antiquity occupied in the
general culture of Basle. Students were less well prepared technically and grammatically
in the ancient languages at Basle than at most of the German universities, Spitteler relates
-or so, at least, he has heard it said by professors -but their studies 'produced different
results, results not measurable by examinations, results for living'. Baselers in general
consider the study of antiquity part and parcel of their own civic culture. 'The entire
citizenry, including bankers and rich silk merchants, takes part in it; Latin words have
infiltrated the local dialect, even as it is spoken by the ladies; the richest gentlemen from
the oldest families take pride in being associated with the University, which they all love
and revere, as professors, as occasional lecturers, or as honorary doctors; humanistic
dilettantism is common and every millionaire is proud when he can correct some howler
in his child's Latin exercises. The popularity of classical studies penetrates the entire
educational system, vigorously reinforcing its effect'.142 Again and again, Spitteler
emphasizes the humaneness of the instruction he received from his teachers, the absence
Kaegi, op. cit. n. 6 above, IV,pp. 3-33,
See James Hastings Nichols, 'The Man and his
Mission', in J . Burckhardt, Force and Freedom: ReJections
on History, New York 1943, pp. 13-15, 2-21.
140 Karl SteKensen, Gesammelte Aufsatze, mit einem
Vorwort von Rudolf Eucken, Basle 1890, p. V .
138
139
141 Letter of 1867, quoted by Kaegi, op. cit. n. 6 above,
VII,pp. 198-99.
142 Spitteler, op. cit. n. 15 above, VI, pp. 163-65. See
also Kaegi, op. cit. n. 6 above, IV,pp. 12-26.
BASLE AND BACHOFEN of harsh discipline, the concern with the total education of the person rather than
technical virtuosity. Bachofen's idea of philology was thus by no means unique or even
exceptional. O n the contrary, it appears to have been fairly representative of opinion in
the old humanist city-state.
Even if we must make allowance for the difference in genre between private recollection and anecdote on the one hand and formal public address on the other, the familiar,
witty, self-deprecatory tone of Spitteler's memories of his education and his teachers
forms a striking contrast to the pompous rhetoric ofWilamowitz-Moellendorf's speeches,
around the same time, to the students at the Universities of Greifswald and Gottingen.
T h e talk here is all of dedication to science ('die Wissenschaft'), the glory of the Kaiser,
and the privilege of laying down one's life for 'die Ehre des V a t e r l a n d e ~ ' Mistrustful
.~~~
('misstrauisch') as they were, in Dilthey's words, the Baselers were unlikely to be taken in
by the idols Wilamowitz held up before the young men of Imperial Germany.
Bachofen's position, as we suggested earlier, was more extreme than that of
Burckhardt or Steffensen. In his case, the polis had ceased to have much reality as the
guardian or repository of values threatened everywhere else. These could now be
preserved only through the cultivation of the individual (Bildung) and the collective effort,
not of a polis, but of a handful of dedicated individual scholars scattered throughout many
lands. I t is symptomatic of Bachofen's isolation from the dominant professional currents
and influences of his day that he ceased to attend scholarly meetings and published his
work privately in ridiculously limited editions that made it virtually an intimate communication with a select few. The Unsterblichkeit der orphischen Theologie, for instance, appeared
in 1867 in an edition of fifty ~ 0 p i e s . Equally
l~~
symptomatic is the form of Bachofen's
writing. Arguably the best ofit is in the confessional mode, like the great autobiographical
letter to Savigny of 1854, or the journal of his travels in Greece in 1831- esoteric texts
which were written for close friends or for private circulation. His scholarly work in
general is often marked by a disturbing discontinuity between long arid stretches of
accumulated evidence, quotation and reference - a kind of wandering in the desert - and
sudden irruptions of highly imaginative and poetic prose, moments of illumination or grace.
T h e second ground of opposition to Mommsen concerns substance. Bachofen argued
for the persistence at Rome of primitive Italic religious beliefs throughout the period of the
Republic and the Empire, and subscribed to the theory that the Etruscans had preserved
essential features of the original oriental - and, for him, 'matriarchal' culture - more
faithfully than the Greeks. T h e flowering of otherworldly religions in the Imperial period
was not, therefore, for him, the introduction of an alien element into Roman life; on the
contrary, it marked the re-emergence of an attitude to nature, history, and the state that
had always been there but that the Romans had tried to repress.145Similarly, he believed
that Niebuhr's rejection of the early books of Livy was far too radical. Though legendary,
that early history, properly interpreted, could yield valuable insights into the prehistory of
Rome, the history the patriarchal Roman state had tried to suppress and distort. In
143 Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Reden und
Vortrige, 3rd edn, Berlin 1913, pp. 3-36 ('Von des
attischen Reiches Herrlichkeit', an address marking the
birthday of the Kaiser given on behalfof the University
ofGreifswald, 2 2 March 1877);pp.67-8j ('Basileia', an
address marking the Kaiser's 25th Jubilee given on
behalfofthe University ofGottingen, 5 June 1886);and
pp. 8 6 9 0 (an address to the students at Gottingen on
the 150thanniversary ofthe founding ofthe University).
144 K. Meuli, 'Bachofens Leben', in Bachofen, Gesammelte Werke, op. cit. n. 29 above, 111, p. 1075.
145 Introduction to Mother-Right, in ICf~th,Religion, and
Mother-Right, op. cit. n . 6 3 above, pp. 75-76 .Also
introduction to Tanaquil, ibid., pp. 214-19.
176
LIONEL GOSSMAN
general, Bachofen was strongly critical of the common academic idea ofclassical antiquity
- 'so-called classical antiquity', as he liked to call it - as a privileged, unique, and in
some sense normative moment in human culture. (The notion that classical antiquity had
somehow escaped the common fate of humanity was no doubt unacceptable to him as a
Christian.) Instead, he advocated a radically comparative, anthropological approach to
the Greeks and Romans, using the findings of research into other early peoples and into
contemporary 'non-civilized' peoples to elucidate the character of ancient society and
culture.14'jHis concern, on the whole, was not with the state, but with early cultures, with
myth, with religion, and with the problematical relation of myth to history and of early
prehistorical cultures to historical cultures.
Mommsen, on the other hand, dismissed Livy without discussion, had nothing but
contempt for the Etruscans, considered the Romans an ideally sensible, practical people,
with a correspondingly sensible, practical and rationalist religion, viewed the later
Oriental religious cults, and especially the worship of the various Eastern Mother
Goddesses, as absurd and as corrupting alien influences on Rome, and in general
interpreted Roman history in political, social and economic terms - in terms, one might
say, of Bismarckian Realpolitik. The focus of Bachofen's interest was early Italic culture,
which he believed to be both matrilinear and 'matriarchal', and its remnants in the
patriarchal Roman state; the focus of Mommsen's was the power and well-being of the
state, and hejudged everything in relation to that. Broadly defined, the political ideal that
informs his H i s t o 9 seems to have been something similar to the modern social democratic
state, with an intelligent and productive middle class, an educated, diligent and contented
working class, and a bureaucracy of highly skilled professionals running the show. Rome's
problem, according to Mommsen, was that it did not have such a professional bureaucracy, and could not therefore successfully manage the transition from city state to world
empire within the framework of its republican institutions.14' T o the patrician scholar
from Basle, on the other hand, the absence ofa professional bureaucracy in Rome was one
146 From about I 850 on, Bachofen complained unceasingly of the narrowness and the tyranny of academic
classical philology: 'Independent research has gone
completely out offashion. In order to pass for smart, one
has to blow the horn of the modish scholar-stars of the
day and may not permit oneself the slightest deviation
from the line of the Royal Prussian Academy' (Briefe,
letter 244, 1 2 hfarch 1868). 'Of all worlds the learned
world likes least to be disturbed in its status quo. Oh,
how pleasant it is to sit comfortably in one's armchair
and dream of some edition of an author who has already
been edited and corrected a thousand times over, or of
adding to the Corpus inscriptionum from some newly
discovered stone, whose only value is to be the occasion
of a publication' (Brie), letter 309, 7June I 881; see also
letters 199, 242, 2 5 7 ) Through his association with
Lewis Morgan, Bachofen was encouraged in a comparative, anthropological approach to the study ofantiquity,
by which he anticipated Jane Harrison and the
Cambridge School; see Briefe, letter 304, 29 October
1880, to Morgan: 'I place the phenomena of so-called
classical antiquity alongside corresponding phenomena
in other cultures, be the): those of other vanished
civilizations or those of presently existing barbarian
tribes, and by comparing the two I try to elucidate and
render intelligible what has been found puzzling about
the former'. In classical studies, however, this is a
difficult enterprise, because German scholars, especially classical philologists, are 'sadly one-sided, and
hardly allow their gaze to travel beyond the confines of
the ancient world . . . Greeks and Romans pass for a kind
of elect who can never be compared with uncivilized
tribes'. Similar views are found in a letter to MeyerOchsner of a decade earlier, when he had begun to read
the work of Africanists like Munsinger and Heinrich
Barth (Brie), letter 276, 10 November 1870; also letter
288, 13 December 1875).
14' O n hfommsen's contempt for the Etruscans, see
especially Roman Histov, I, ch. 9, 15; on his view of
Roman religion, ibid., I, ch. 12; on his dislike oforiental
cults, especially that of the magna muter, ibid., 111, ch. 13;
rv, ch. 12; on his conception of the well-run state, ibid.,
111, ch. 9; on the transition to Empire, ibid., v, ch. I I .
The social and economic interpretation of Roman
history is essential to the entire book; see especially,
however, 111, chs I I , 13, and IV,ch. 2.
BASLE AND BACHOFEN
of its positive features.148 If Mommsen was fascinated by the Imperial moment in the
history of Rome, so that his own Histoy was dominated by the passage to the Empire at the
end ofit, Bachofen was drawn to the most ancient ages of Rome- those during which the
various aspects of existence that historical cultures distinguish from each other (cosmology or 'science', religion, law and social relations) are still inextricably entwined. At this
stage in its life Rome, as Bachofen looked on it, was not yet the lawgiving, model state of
the West, but still participated in a common human culture shared with many other early
peoples and races throughout the world.
Finally, the opposition concerned the very character of scholarship. T o Bachofen
himself, his struggle with Mommsen was above all a struggle between two competing
conceptions of scholarship: the priestly and the scientific; and in a larger sense this
involved an opposition between two rival principles: that of hierarchy, or sacred order,
favoured by the patrician, and that of professionalism, favoured by the democrat
Mommsen in every aspect of his work, methodological and institutional as well as
thematic.
Though Bachofen often claimed that his guiding principle was that of empirical
observation, and though he liked to draw a contrast between the cautious sailor hugging
the shoreline, sticking as it were, to the external contour ofthe sea- or, one might want to
say, of the maternal body - and the temerarious adventurer who strikes out into the
unknown,149 he also acknowledged the temptation to vagari, as he put it, in himself, and
thus implicitly, within his own Romantic terms, the potentially transgressive character of
his own scholarly research.lS0 For the prehistoric past, the object of his study and his
desire, is for him none other than the sacred body of the Mother Goddess. Antiquam quaerite
matrem was the motto he himself adopted from Virgil.lS1 The question was: how should
this transgression be carried out? Transgression, as Bachofen sees it, is necessary in order
to rebind the two worlds of the sacred and the profane, to bridge the gulf separating the
original or extra-historical and the historical, the female and the male in his symbolising
view of them - the Roman priest, he liked to recall, is pontzfex maximus- and to reaffirm,
in the face of historical alienation and division, the primitive and essential unity of man
and nature in the cosmos. This is the kind of sacred transgression, he held, that is carried
out by legendary figures such as Oedipus or Orpheus.
Underlying Bachofen's notion of the scholar as pantifex, bridge-builder, mediator, is a
deeply conservative view ofthe world as divided into different orders, each ofwhich has its
proper place. T h e original and ultimate unity of the world, the fact that its various orders
constitute a totality, must not be forgotten, and it is the task ofthe scholar-priest to ensure
that it is not; to show that 'nature is a living temple', in the well-known words of
1 4 I~n his Historische F~agmente,op. cit. n. 59 above,
(p. 24) Burckhardt quotes hfommsen on the absence of
a professional bureaucracy at Rome, but in order to
approve this situation, and in implicit contrast to
Prussia, praise Rome for not having made education
'with the help of an examination system, into a
monopoly, and little more than the foundation of the
state bureaucracy'.
149 T h e image occurs both in the Autobiography and in
Mother-Right; see Myth, Religion, and Mother-Right, op. cit.
n. 63 above, pp. 13, 76. T h e same image is used by
hfichelet (La Mer, 1861, ed. Pierre Loti, Paris 1898,
P P 33 6).
lS0 Bachofen, Brie), op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 85,
3 1 J,uly I 856: 'I cannot bring myselfto leave the harbour
agaln. There is a constant danger, with me, that once
the anchor has been weighed finally, the shoreline very
quickly disappears from view, and the ship moves out
more and more boldly and rashly toward new lands'.
Similarly, letter 144, 16 March 1862: 'I cannot tell you
what a desire to uagari is storming within me'.
IS1 'Das Naturrecht und das geschichtliche Recht'
(inaugural address at Univ. of Basle, 7 hfay 1 8 4 1 ) ~
Gesammelte Werke,op. cit. n. 29 above, I, p. I 8.
178
LIONEL GOSSMAN
Baudelaire's poem, and that the natural, the historical and the spiritual worlds are in
correspondence with each other. But it is also the scholar-priest's task to combat all
attempts to establish a specious unity and totality by overthrowing the orders altogether
and abolishing every distinction. Such attempts invariably involve denial of what to the
Christian Bachofen was the incontrovertible human reality of the Fall and of sin, of
differentiation and alienation, and the reduction, by pure fiat, of the entire universe to
either pure matter or pure spirit.
Bachofen's keen, conservative sense of different orders within the totality of the
universe and the importance he attached to respecting them, even while constantly
reaffirming the unity and totality underlying and sustaining them, led him to define his
goal as a scholar and interpreter in terms that deviate somewhat from those used by many
Romantic historians. In contrast to Michelet, for instance, who contains in himself both
'Mommsen' and 'Bachofen', both the Promethean and the Orphic, Bachofen does not
define his aim as that of giving words and a language to those who had none, or of giving
the past a self-understanding it never had. He sees it rather as that of attending to the way
the past itself understood itself and trying to recover its categories of understanding
The past - woman, nature - is not dumb for Bachofen. O n the contrary, its language
has been suppressed or distorted, he claims, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes
deliberately, by later generations to which it had become unfamiliar, incomprehensible,
even disturbing or frightening.153 The past, correspondingly, is not superseded by the
present, and there is no reason to look with condescension on cultures seemingly more
primitive than our own. He would have subscribed fully to Burckhardt's opinion that the
present may not imagine it can pronounce superior judgement on the past simply
'because at the present moment it is we who have the power to speak'.154
Melville's account of how he came upon a gentler, kinder society than his own among
the cannibals of the Marquesas had struck a responsive chord in Bachofen and he, in turn,
maintained that neither primitive 'promiscuity' nor 'polyandry' could be judged from the
standpoint of our own arrangements for propagating the species. 'When new laws are
introduced, what is virtue comes to be called sin and following the path ofduty is branded
as error'. But 'there is no sin in polyandry, none in promiscuity. Generations of human
beings who saw in one or the other ofthese social arrangements the rule ofconduct of their
lives and in the religious observance of traditional ways the fulfilment of their highest duty
carry no burden of guilt. . . . Depravity does not lie in the principles themselves but in
men's attitude to them'.lS5All cultures, in other words, have ideas ofgood and evil, laws
and moral principles; and morality is a n attribute of human subjects, not of their actions.
It is thus not at all self-evident that 'later' cultures are better than 'earlier' ones. I t may
even be that some 'early' forms of society - societies that are still not yet fully engaged in
the world of history - have retained, amid their seemingly barbarous customs, more of
the original unity of the cosmos, more of its inherent lawfulness, than societies with
elaborate legal codes and developed ethical systems. The scholar's task is not, therefore,
lS2 See Myth, Religion, and Mother-Right, op. cit. n. 63
above, pp. 72-75, 82-83, 2 17, 245 (Introductions to
Mother-Right and Tanaquil); also Briefe, op. cit. n. 6
above, letter 63, 6 October 1850, letter 67, 16January
1851, letter 271, 8 April 1870.
lS3 Myth, Religion, and Mother-Right, p. 230 (Introduction to Tanaquil).
Reported by Carl Spitteler, Gesammelte Werke, op.
cit. n. I 5 above, VI,p. 376.
lSs From the Nachlass, Gesammelte Werke, op. cit. n. 29
above, VIII,pp. 493-94.
BASLE AND BACHOFEN
'79
to interpret the past from his own supposedly privileged position; it is not to grant speech
to something that in itself is dumb, infans; but to discover and attend humbly to the
language in which the past actually did speak.
What Bachofen's priestly mediator and translator communicates, in the end, is closer
to what we might call wisdom (sapientia) or sacred knowledge, than to science (scientia) or
profane knowledge. I t is not something that can be held at arm's length and inspected in a
spirit of detachment. O n the contrary, it is a living voice which is reduced to silence the
moment we attempt to translate its language into our own and to substitute our words for
its. Ifwe would understand it, in short, we must expect to be moved by it and to respond to
it as an I, in Buber's terms, is moved by and responds to a Thou. T o understand it, indeed,
is to be transformed by it. As this is a risk many prefer not to take, it is only a select few who
will ever be able to understand the message of the past. The past for Bachofen, one might
say, is an Other, and to hearken to it is to lay oneself open to it. Historical research thus
acquires something of a religious character, providing illumination or insight in the
manner of divine grace.
Correspondingly, Bachofen's own text is in its deepest nature not a translation of the
ancient myths and symbols it purports to interpret, but rather another version, a renewal of
those myths, a poetic text, requiring for its interpretation skills or talents strictly
analogous to those that the interpreter himself used in the first place.156'TOexpound the
mystery doctrine in words', Bachofen wrote in the Essay on Mortuary Symbolism, 'would be a
sacrilege against the supreme law; it can only be represented in terms ofmyth'.15' I t is not
an object to be possessed, in other words, but an inexhaustible force or energy that calls up
a similar energy in the reader or viewer.
Mommsen, on the other hand - as Bachofen represented him - is the translator1
traitor par excellence. H e kills the living word, the marvellous poetry of ancient symbol
and myth, and transforms them into the dead concept, the modern prose ofeconomics and
class conflict. T h e work he does is scientific, we might say, rather than poetic. I n
Bachofen's eyes, however, what the jackbooted Mommsen 'translates' and delivers over
to his readers is not the lover's knowledge of the 'Goddess herself' - the object of
Bachofen's quest158- but the anatomist's knowledge of a cadaver.
As a mature philologist, Bachofen, it turns out, had remained remarkably faithful to
the Romantic lessons he had learned from his old French teacher at the Basle Piidagogium
in the early 30s of the century. In a passage on historiography in his Chrestomatie,
Alexandre Vinet develops a traditional distinction between two modes of knowledge:
I n every reality, in every factual event, there are two distinct and, so to speak, concentric elements:
the essence of the fact, and its formula. T h e fact can be known by either one. Knowledge by way of
the second is science (savoir);knowledge by way of the first is vision (voir).T o know by science
(savoir) is to know the formula, which is always more general than the fact; to know by science is
thus to classify. T o know by vision (voir) is to penetrate through the envelope of the formula to the
innermost reality of the fact and thus to its individual being. I t is not to classify but to name. O n e of
these acts belongs to the intelligence, the other is the exclusive privilege ofthe soul. T h e intelligence
knows only abstractions and forms; the soul sees beings and substances; the intelligence knows
lS6 See Ernst Howald's highly critical 'Wider Johann
Jakob Bachofen' ( 1 9 2 4 ) in his Humanismus und Europaertum, Ziirich and Stuttgart 1957, p. 70: 'Suddenly one
realizes that Bachofen himself is only a continuator of
the religious syncretism of the Ancients'.
lS7 Myth, Religion, and Mother-Right, op. cit. n. 63 above,
p. 48.
lS8 Selbstbiographie, op. cit. n. 73 above, p. 34.
I 80
LIONEL GOSSMAN
only genera and species, the soul sees individuals; the intelligence knows, the soul sees. Is that not to
say that it is the soul that is the poet? And in as much as the complete historian is also a poet, can
one not say that for him too, as for the poet, to know is to see?
In all this, we understand by the word see that second sight, that superior vision of
which we spoke at the beginning, and which for the historian takes the place of the eyes
and of contact with reality.lS9
BACHOFEN AND T H E THRESHOLD O F HISTORY
Alles gegenwartige Trachten nach religioser
Reaction, nach Wiedereinsetzung des alten
Glaubens in sein fruheres Ansehen ist
vergeblich . . . Der Verrath am Alten, der Abfall
davon ist unsuhnbar . . . Wir stehen eben vor
demselben dt66vatov wie die alten Christen.
Franz Overbeck, Bekenntnisse.
Between the two conceptions of historical scholarship outlined by his former teacher the 'symbolic' and the 'philological', as Croce would later call them - Bachofen never
hesitated. His idea of what was required to achieve understanding seems, however, to
have undergone a change in the course of his career. The aim was always to grasp the
inner being of the object or the Other, but in the early part of his career - the time of his
liberal optimism - he appears to have shared the confidence of the teachers of his
generation, of Humboldt and Schleiermacher and Ranke, in the correspondences uniting
man and nature and men among each other across time. T o look into oneself was at the
same time to discover the Other.
T h e collapse of Bachofen's political confidence along with 'the illusions of I 830' seems
to have had something of the character of an ontological disaster, a second Fall, opening
up an abyss between the present and the past, the Selfand the Other. Just as the present in
its incurable wretchedness now seemed totally cut off from the glorious prehistorical past
of Bachofen's philological imagination and research, so the scholar could no longer count
on discovering the key to that past by examining his own heart and his own experience.
O n the contrary, the reverse was closer to the truth: for the student ofantiquity, as for the
Christian, it was the past that was the key to the present and to the human soul.
Increasingly, in Bachofen's comments on the practice of philology, the accent fell on the
distance between the Other and the Self, the past and the present; increasingly the chief
danger to true understanding was identified as 'modernization', the denial of a rupture
between present and past and the tendency to infer from the former to the latter.160 As
lS9 Alexandre Vinet, Milanges littiraires, ed. Pierre
Kohler, Lausanne 1955, pp. 15C58, quoted from the
2nd edn, Basle 1836, p. 78. The first edition of the
Chrestomatie appeared at Basle in 1 8 2 9 3 0 , and there
were frequent editions and revised editions throughout
the nineteenth century.
160 O n ',modernisation' as 'the handmaiden of current
interests , see M y t h , Religion, and Mother-Right, op. cit.
n. 63 above, pp. 82, 85, 245. (Introductions to MotherRight and Tanaquil); also Brie), op. cit. n. 6 above, letters
63, 67, 150, 271. This was also Nietzsche's objection to
Rlommsen and the burden of Fustel de Coulanges's
argument in L a Citiantique, Paris 1864.
BASLE AND BACHOFEN
181
early as 1850, in a letter to Wilhelm Henzen of the German Instituto di Correspondenza
Archeologica in Rome, he had begun to stress the difJicult3, of reaching the past, the
distance separating it from the present: he is now convinced, he wrote, 'that it is high time
to follow a new path and to set historiography on a different foundation from that on
which it has rested so complacently since Niebuhr. He who would understand a people
must place himself in the position in which it stood and he who would write the history of
that people must write it in its spirit, not in his own. Ways of looking at the world that
belong to the nineteenth century must not be allowed to determine his vision; instead, he
must try to acquire those of the Romans and to see through their eyes'.161
Throughout the polemic against Mommsen this idea was consistently hammered
home. T h e confidence in the possibility of passing with ease from the present to the past,
in the continuity between them, which had been an 'illusion' in 1830, had now, in the age
of the chassepot, become a dangerous deception and an instrument of ideological
manipulation. T h e 'soi-disante [sic] critique allemande', he wrote, discredits whatever
'does not easily enter a head formed on the currently fashionable Berlin model'. He,
however, 'would sooner find something to laugh at in our smug moderns, who are so full of
themselves, than in the ancient writers, to whom we are indebted for the little we do know
of antiquity. . . We study history to know what earlier ages of the human spirit have been,
not to remake them after the ideas of today'.162The pertinence of Bachofen's comments in
the context in which he made them can easily be ascertained by even a casual glance at
some embarrassing essays by Wilamowitz, in which praise of the Kaiser and glorification
of the Empire is justified by implicit and explicit comparison of late nineteenth century
Wilhelminian Germany with ancient Greece.
T h e increasing emphasis in Bachofen's idea of historical research and understanding
on the scholar's need to lose himself in order to find the past, rather than to seek the past
within himself, can be compared with the increasing disenchantment in the circles of the
Basle critics, whether believers or not, with liberal and pietist theology and the legacy of
Schleiermacher. T o Bachofen's idea of understanding in history corresponds the strict
Calvinist doctrine of election and grace. The easy liberal road from man's consciousness
leads in the end not to God, according to the critics of liberal theology, but simply back to
man, and the true way, on the contrary, is from God to man, from the Other to the Self. I t
is not surprising that understanding of the past, for Bachofen, is in large measure a matter
of grace.163I t may, and no doubt should, be preceded by serious empirical investigation,
as grace may be preceded by earnest prayer, but it provides an illumination or insight that
is of a totally different order from any that can be obtained by building outward from our
own experience.
Nevertheless, Bachofen's position is not free of perplexing ambiguities. His own
'priestly' conception of the scholar's task requires that the knower alienate himself from
the contemporary world in order to embrace the criteria and the point ofview ofhis object.
This inner alienation, which places the scholar in a state of receptiveness to the Other in Bachofen's case, equivalent to both the past and the Divine -thus preserves him from
Bachofen, Briefe, letter 63, 6 October 1850.
Niebuhr, as is well-known, claimed that it was the
events of his own age that opened his eyes to the
understanding of the past (see his History o f Rome,
London 1828, I, pp. x, xii-xiii).
162 Bachofen, Briefe, letter 271 (in French), 8 April
1870.
163 In the Selbstbiographie, op. cit. n. 73 above, he
observes of the Duc de Luynes: 'The man has not chosen
his scholarly work; it has chosen him' (p. 29); and in the
eulogy of Streuber: 'What seems to be our doing is
ultimately a higher guidance, We think we choose our
calling and in reality we are chosen by it' (pp. vi-vii).
LIONEL GOSSMAN ever identifying with the world. Bachofen's own loving relation to a prehistorical
'maternal' past placed him in a critical position with respect not only to his own present,
but to any historical world. Yet Bachofen never rejected this world absolutely. O n the
contrary, especially in his later works, he tried to justify the paternal rule of law and
reason as part of a necessary development both in the life of the individual and in that of
the r a c e P 4
Not surprisingly, there are two seemingly contradictory strains in his work: an almost
hymnal praise of the divine prehistorical world of the mothers, and a stoic acceptance of
the historical civilization of reason and law that has succeeded it, provided the latter does
not attempt to deny its origins. Readers have almost invariably emphasized one of these
two strains to the detriment ofthe other. T o Klages, for example, the authentic meaning of
Bachofen's text lay in the love and longing for the old maternal and religious culture, and
he considered the philosophy of cultural history that appealed to a Lewis Morgan merely
superficial, added on, the part of Bachofen's work that is least original and most
In general, it has been Bachofen's evocation of a fuller, richer, bolder and
ide01ogical.l~~
more beautiful life than the cramped and constrained conditions of nineteenth-century
bourgeois society anywhere afforded, of a life in which sublimation occurs without
164 In 1850 Bachofen could write to Wilhem Henzen in
Rome that 'the golden age of Italy' was in his view before
the founding of Rome, and that in his studies of ancient
history, it was 'das machtige albanische Reich' that was
closest to his heart (Briej, op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 65,
I I November 1 8 5 0 ) . 0 n the other hand, the idea that
there is no going back and that it is man's destiny (in the
sense of a telos) to pass from savagery, by way of
barbarism, to civilization - or from hetaerism and the
domination of matter, nature and the female (the world
of the Swamp), to monogamous marriage, the rule of
spirit and the law of the Father (the solar world) informs almost all Bachofen's writing. It is an idea he
shares with many other nineteenth-century writers, a
powerful version of what Adorno and Horkheimer have
identified as the Myth of Enlightenment. It often
receives programmatic expression from Bachofen, most
strikingly in the Introduction to Mother-Right, op. cit.
n. I above, and, with speci'fic reference to the cultural
and historical mission of Rome, in the Introduction to
Tanaquil. The principal themes of the latter text were
given an airing in December 1864in a paper to the Basle
Historical Society, entitled 'Welche Auffassung der
Geschichte ist die richtige? Einleitung zu einer Darstellung Roms' (published in the Gesammelte Werke, op. cit.
n. 29 above, in a later version found in the Nachlass and
entitled 'Die Grundgesetze der Volkerentwicklung und
der Historiographie'). Bachofen argues here that the
movement ofhistory is no less than to elevate 'das kleine
Gemeinwesen des sumpfumflossenen Palatin' to 'die
sittliche Idee des Staates'. In this struggle the role of
Rome is exemplary. First it combats the enemy in itself
- the principle of its own natural religion, which
constantly rises up to oppose the idea of the State and
can never be completely subordinated. This is the
meaning of Rome's struggle against Alba, Carthage,
Corinth and Etruria, in all of which the natural,
'oriental' principle was predominant. Etruria, in
particular, contributed much to Rome, but could not
overcome the deeper 'Asiatic nature principle in itself'.
But while the occidental principle conquers with the
sword, it fails to resist the blandishments of the soft,
luxuriant Orient. T h e Roman idea of the State is
corrupted as oriental nature cults, fertilizing old seeds
anew, poison the sources of life in the West. At this
point, mankind is saved by the incursions of the noble
and pure Northern barbarians ('Die Grundgesetze der
Volkerentwicklung und der Historiographie', Gesammelte Werke, VI, pp.435-37). Despite appearances,
however, Bachofen's law ofdevelopment seems not to be
an evolutionary determinism, but an ethical prescription for the conduct of political societies (see J . Dormann, 'War J .J . Bachofen Evolutionist?' Anthropos,
1965, LX, pp. 1-48), a warning that man must resist the
easy solution of sinking back into conditions of identity
and repose. T o the deeply religious Bachofen, the
resolution of conflict and the end of struggle and
sacrifice could occur only at the end of historical time,
which it is not man's task - or in his power - to bring
about. In the meantime, the law ofour nature in history
is struggle and sacrifice ('Entbehrung'). Rome - the
City ofMan, the World-historical City - was not built,
Bachofen emphasises, in the lush lands of the Campagna or on the heavy, rich soil of Etruria (Gesammelte
Werke, VI, p. 420). 'We see the awakening of life and of
our own consciousness always connected with the
struggles of opposing forces. This is the magical stroke
that breaks the stagnation ofinsular idiocy. Let us hear
no more, then, the foolish complaint about the thousand
interruptions of a happy repose, through which history
took on the aspect of a wildly tossing sea. These are
indispensable for the attainment of our highest ends'
(ibid., pp.411-12).
165 Ludwig Klages, Vom kosmogonischen Eros, 1922, in his
Samtliche Werke, ed. Ernst Frauhiger, Bonn 1974, 111,
PP, 494-97.
83
repression, that has been the single most influential feature of his writing. Through it,
moreover, his work is related not only to that of many other writers and artists closely
associated with Basle -Burckhardt, Bocklin, Nietzsche, the poet Carl Spitteler - but to
the entire artistic and intellectual world of late nineteenth century Europe.
I myself tend to believe, however, that both strains - the longing and the resignation,
the glorification of the mythical origins of humanity and the acceptance of the repressive
ethical order of the present - are essential to the specific meaning of Bachofen's work. As
an ideal, totality must never be forgotten- this is a constantly reiterated lesson- but it is
presumptuous and even sacrilegious to attempt to break down the barriers between the
different orders of existence, between the human and the divine, the historical and the
eternal. History itself is the mark of our alienation from the divine, and to attempt to
restore within the historical world a unity and totality that can only be beyond it is a quixotic,
even dangerous enterprise, a denial of our human - that is, of our historical - nature.
For Bachofen, the attempt to break out of the iron cage of history and destroy
traditional hierarchies was associated above all with the political Messianism, the
popular democratic movements and the wild communism of his time. 'Those who
advocate the abolition of private property and the monogamous family, the two foundations of modern society, certainly do not suspect that their ideal was the real condition of
the human species during ages whose duration we can barely determine', he wrote in
1881. 'To try to bring back such a condition without being able to bring back the
humanity that created it is the most disastrous of all ~ t u p i d i t i e s ' . 'Though
~~
Bachofen
signalled his condemnation of the middle class culture of his own commercial age by
contrasting it with the greatness of early prehistorical cultures, in other words, he at no
time aligned himselfwith the proletariat. Quite the contrary. Nevertheless, he would have
had to reject, as equally ruinous illusions, the right-wing myths of race, blood and soil;
and if he is less explicit about them than about democracy and communism, it may be
only because these myths were still embryonic in his day. I n principle, his conception of
historical existence, which derived no doubt from a variety of sources - the Calvinism of
his family and society; their actual experience of migration and uprootedness, however
remote it may have been by the nineteenth century; his economic and affective dependency on a society he could not approve or admire -was opposed to any idea of a natural
rootedness of historical man or of an unalienated historical community. 'The first
phenomenon of history, the most permanent and the most general', he wrote in 1864in a
paper he read to the Historical Society at Basle, 'is wandering, migration . . . and
wandering will [continue to] be the lot of every thing for as long as life itself endures'.16'
Bachofen's position, in sum, is that it is man's lot, indeed his obligation -like that of
the wandering children of Israel - always to remember a past of wholeness and unity,
prior to history, and to yearn for its restoration beyond history. I t is the sacred task of the
scholar who has reflected -as Bachofen says he must -on the relation of his work 'to the
highest things' to keep alive the memory of this prehistorical past, to dedicate himself, in
the midst of the historical world, to patiently preserving the faint traces of a different,
superseded existence, and to reaffirm the ideal of totality as something never to be
abandoned, even if its recovery can and should never be attempted by alienated man in
BASLE AND BACHOFEN
166
Bachofen, Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 309,
7 June 1881.
16'
'Die Grundgesetze der Volkerentwicklung und der
1
Historiographie', Gesammelte Werke, op. cit. n. 29 above,
vr, p. 4 1 2 .
LIONEL GOSSMAN
the fallen world of history. 'The supreme aim of archaeology. . . I believe', he wrote in the
Foreword to Ancient Mortuary Symbolism, 'consists in communicating the sublimely beautiful ideas of the past to an age that is very much in need of r e g e n e r a t i ~ n ' . ' ~ ~
Ultimately, the prehistorical past does also offer the image of a New Age to come,
beyond the current historical age. There is a muted eschatological strain in Bachofen as
there is in Burckhardt. The transcendence of the historical is not, however, something
historical man himself can or should attempt to bring about. Remembrance of another,
kinder life, of a lost paradise, may and should moderate the rigours of the patriarchal
order, but neither requires nor justifies its overthrow. O n the contrary, far from desiring
or hoping for its overthrow, Bachofen appears to hold that historical man not only must
accept the patriarchal order of law and property, with its limits, boundaries and
prohibitions, as his inevitable lot, but should treasure the protection it affords from the
disorder and chaos that would inevitably follow its destruction.
No one appreciates better the value of the refuge patriarchal societies offer than the
scholar-priest who dwells on the edges of the world of history and risks his physical wellbeing and his sanity by making forays into the lost and forbidden world of origins, of the
sacred, and the Mothers, in order to keep alive among his fellows the memory, which the
present in its pride always tries to obliterate, of another life, other generations, another
humanity. I n one of his letters Bachofen tells of falling deathly ill in Montpellier from
over-exposure to the heat and sun of the South, where he had been investigating ancient
funerary inscriptions, and of getting back to cool, rainy Basle as to a 'liebes . . .
S~hiitzenvaterland'.'~~
Among protective civil societies, the oldest are certainly, in Bachofen's view, the best,
the closest to 'nature'. (This was also a view often expressed by another Swiss Calvinist
Jean-Jacques.) The ancient Swiss republics, it follows, are preferable to the great
centralized and militarist nation states of modern Europe. And though all civil societies
are of necessity temporary, because of the very nature of historical existence, the wise man
will do his utmost to preserve those that are least incompatible with our human nature,
which is - in a famous phrase of Pascal's that Bachofen must often have heard from his
teacher Alexandre Vinet - to be 'ni ange, ni btte'. Historical existence, in sum, will
always be alienated; civil society will always offer only a provisional and precarious
refuge; man will and should always long for something beyond it; but his efforts to satisfy
that longing within history will produce only inhuman tyrannies. Man will not succeed in
becoming an angel, but he may well succeed in outdoing the beasts. The modern nation
state, exemplified for Bachofen by Bismarck's Second Reich, and the socialist Utopia are
thereby jointly rejected.
At best, Bachofen envisages a partial transcendence of history for the individual
capable of withdrawing temporarily out of the historical world in order to worship at the
tomb of a deeply buried past which can not be restored - only longed for, faithfully
remembered, and ecstatically contemplated. T o the individual touched by this transhistorical grace an intimation of redemption may be vouchsafed. The 'estheticism' with
which Baeumler not unfairly charged Bachofen may be not only compatible with but
inseparable from the latter's acknowledged Christian piety.
1 84
'68 Myth, Religion, and Mother-Right, op. cit. n. 63 above,
P. 23,
169 Bachofen,
1 2July
1861.
Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 134,
BASLE AND BACHOFEN
185
A final comment about a work that I have found deeply moving and engaging. The
modern reader may want to ask himselfwhether Bachofen's dichotomies -especially the
traditional dichotomy of sagesse and science that looms so large in all his work - do not
involve two sides of a single coin; whether both the poetic or symbolist historiography of
Bachofen and the scientific or philological historiography of Mommsen do not equally
strain, in the end, to overcome the historicity of the investigator: in Bachofen's case
through a kind of passionate identification and submission that he felt would enable him
to pierce momentarily the shell of the historical world, in Mommsen's through a neutral
but controlling vision of the historical process itself. Our present ideas, on the other hand,
prohibit any thought of transcendence or breaking out, and our conception ofour relation
to the past tends to be constructivist.
I n some remarks on putting on the classics today the contemporary French director
Antoine Vitez, who has been responsible for several remarkable recent productions of
seventeenth-century tragedies, has clearly marked out the distance that separates most
modern scholars from the late Romanticism of Bachofen. '1 am most irritated', Vitez
writes, 'by the term "dusting off" [of classical works] . . . since it conveys something I
reject: the idea that these works are intact, gleaming, polished, beautiful, beneath a layer of
dust, and that if that dust can be removed, they will be discovered in their pristine
integrity. Whereas in fact the works of the past are broken fragments of architecture,
sunken galleons, and we bring them to light, piece by piece, without ever reconstituting
them - for . . . we have lost the use of them, but instead make other things with the
pieces'.170
'Thtorielpratique
XIV,g.
thtztrale', Dialectiques, 1976: