The Crossroads of Basel
18 August 2020
The city of Basel represents and confirms, at a micro level, Switzerland’s identity. This crossroads of rivers, roads, and mountain passes connects Italy, Germany, France, and Austria, as well as Northern and Southern, Western, and Eastern Europe.
The Celtic tribe of the Rauraci lived in the region when the Romans arrived in the first century BC. The Roman period was followed by the Burgundian Kingdom (434-534), then the Alemans, the Carolingian Empire, the Holy Roman Empire and, finally, accession to the Swiss Confederation in 1501
The diocese of Basel was the (linguistic) frontier between two archbishoprics: Besançon in France, to which belonged the territory of Grossbasel, and Mainz (Mayence) in Germany, which included the diocese of Constance and Kleinbasel, on the right bank of the Rhine.
Basel hosted the Council (1431-1449), following the Council of Constance (1411-1418). After the university’s foundation in 1460, Basel became an agent of humanism, the publishing and printing industry, ideas, and culture.
The industrial, trading and humanist city hosted Erasmus (1456-1536), buried in the protestant Münster. The city also underwent the fury and rage of the reformers (Basilea reformata, 1529).
Famous artists—such as Holbein the Younger (1497-1543), scholars (Jacob Burckhardt, 1818-1897), or politicians, such as the French socialist Jean Jàures (1859-1914) in 1912—had their finest hours in this city.
The dynamic of economic and social change in Western Europe during the nineteenth century and the outbreak of World War I marks the dissolution of a primarily agricultural and rigidly hierarchical social order that had survived for many centuries.
Basel became an industrial town through its chemical and pharmacy industries. The city has always been committed to introducing modern architecture and presenting non-European cultures (as one of the few non-colonial nations in Western Europe). The Museum of Ethnography was founded by missionaries, Swiss travellers, and collectors in 1849 and was one of the first of its kind in the world.
Wealthy families, such as the Amerbach, Faesch, and Fesch, collected art, displayed it to the public, and founded societies of the arts and museums.
(Source: S. Eisenman, Nineteenth Century Art. A Critical History, London 2011).