On this day 717 years ago, the Swiss Confederation was founded.
From Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn's The Intelligent American's Guide to Europe:
As a matter of fact, the critique of democracy has perhaps nowhere been better developed than precisely in the Helvetic Republic.
The Swiss Guards employed by Louis XVI resisted the mob storming the Tuileries until the last man was overpowered, fiendishly tortured, and killed. The monument to these brave soldiers, the "Dying Lion" by Thorvaldsen in Lucerne, testifies to their valor.
The Swiss have an aristocracy but not a nobility, if we except the few ennobled families – some with foreign titles, others with very ancient Swiss ones carrying the von.
It harbored extreme leftist revolutionaries like Herzen, Bakunin, and Lenin, but also accepted royalty in exile and gave the Western world its greatest dynasty – the Habsburgs.
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