Officially, Switzerland stayed out of World War I. In practice, the army had been “thoroughly Prussianized”, as Jonathan Steinberg puts it, and its commanders saw no reason not to support Germany. As soon as war broke out in the summer of 1914, Switzerland began passing military intelligence to Berlin. The mood within the country soured, as German and French Swiss retreated from each other, both backing opposite sides in the war. In an echo of the trenches of northern France, a Graben, or trench, opened up along the language border between the two. French Swiss were increasingly outraged by their army’s pro-German bias, and in 1917 the Swiss foreign minister was forced to resign after secretly trying to negotiate a European peace between Germany and the new revolutionary regime in Russia.

Economic conditions were also hard, compounded by the need to maintain hundreds of thousands of soldiers guarding the frontiers, and to support a growing number of refugees and asylum seekers. In 1915 and 1916, Lenin, Trotsky and Zinoviev were all resident in Switzerland, and the influence of their revolutionary socialist agitations, as well as subsequent news of the successful Russian Revolution, spurred impoverished Swiss workers on to a General Strike in November 1918. For three days the Federal Council dithered, then called in the army. The strikers capitulated soon afterwards and went back to work, but had made their point: in a referendum in 1919 on whether to adopt proportional representation in national elections – a major plank of the workers’ concerns, since majority voting had effectively excluded the Socialist Party from real power – the Swiss people voted overwhelmingly in favour. The Federal Council acknowledged the benefits of compromise, and met the strike committee face to face to address their concerns. Soon after, policies on welfare expansion and a 48 hour working week became law.