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The Zurich Model
In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
Harry Lime (Orson Welles), The Third Man, 1949
A Very Civil War
Actually, it wasn’t all brotherly love. The Swiss even fought a civil war in 1847.
The saga started in Zurich, where the liberal government appointed a controversial German freethinker called Strauss to the chair in theology at the local university. This scandalized pious Protestants – Zurich had been the birthplace of the Swiss Reformation – and a militant clergyman led thousands ...
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