Reformation & Confessional Divide

The federal union of cantons, from the medieval Eidgenossenschaft through the modern federal state.

1 chapter

1032 - 1536

The Savoyard dynasty and feudal bishops carved Romandie into the territorial units that still define its festival geography. The Counts (later Dukes) of Savoy controlled the Pays de Vaud for over three centuries, founding towns like Morges (1287) and Villeneuve (1214) and building the administrative fortress of Chillon that still dominates the lakeshore. Savoyard heritage is politically ambivalent: it produced the physical infrastructure of many festival sites, yet Geneva's Escalade celebrates Savoy's defeat. Meanwhile, the Prince-Bishops of Sion fortified Valère hill as their secular-spiritual seat, and the Counts of Gruyère presided over the Catholic pastoral communities whose transhumance rhythms would generate the désalpe tradition. Cistercian monks began terracing the Lavaux hillsides between Lutry and Vevey in the 11th century, creating the vineyard landscape that would later produce the Fête des Vignerons. This is the era that built the material world Romandie's festivals inhabit.

1798 - 1979

The French Revolution's arrival in 1798 ended Bernese rule over Vaud and launched Romandie's cantons toward nation-statehood within the Swiss Confederation. Napoleon's Act of Mediation (1803) created the canton of Vaud with Lausanne as its capital; Neuchâtel became a republic in 1848. This political reorganization gave Romandie its modern cantonal structure and the democratic institutions that would later manage heritage inventories. In 1797, the Confrérie des Vignerons staged the first Fête des Vignerons in Vevey's Place du Marché, transforming an agricultural inspection into a once-per-generation spectacle. The Glossaire des patois de la Suisse romande (GPSR), established in Neuchâtel in 1899, began capturing Franco-Provençal festival vocabulary that standard French could not access. The Jura separatism movement, culminating in the creation of the canton of Jura in 1979, gave Francophone Jurassiens their own political identity and carnival traditions. Throughout this period, some traditions declined under modernization and moralist campaigns—the Brandons nearly vanished by the 1960s—while others, like the Carnaval d'Evolène, persisted in Valais valleys where Franco-Provençal remained the language of carnival characters.

500 - 1032

The post-Roman Burgundian Kingdom and the early monastic movement shaped Romandie's first institutional layer, one that still anchors its festival calendar. King Sigismund of Burgundy founded the Abbey of Saint-Maurice d'Agaune in 515 on the Theban Legion's martyrdom site, establishing the oldest continuously operating monastery in the West and its Laus Perennis (perpetual chant) tradition. Romainmôtier Priory, founded by Romanus of Condat and later absorbed into the Cluniac network, connected Romandie to the broader European monastic reform. The Kingdom of Arles (Second Kingdom of Burgundy, 933–1032) governed the region until its incorporation into the Holy Roman Empire. Throughout this period, the Catholic liturgical calendar became the organizing principle for festival life—a rhythm that Catholic cantons maintain to this day and Reformed cantons deliberately broke.

From 1979

A heritage revival movement beginning in the 1970s transformed suppressed, declining, or working traditions into recognized cultural monuments—a process that has both preserved and altered them. The Brandons carnival was revived in Payerne, Moudon, and Yverdon after near-extinction in the 1960s, with fire torches and Bonhomme Hiver effigies reappearing on the Dimanche des Brandons. Switzerland acceded to the UNESCO Convention for Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2008 and published the first Lebendige Traditionen inventory in 2012; the Fête des Vignerons received UNESCO inscription in 2016. The 2019 Fête des Vignerons, directed by Daniele Finzi Pasca with 6,000 performers, showed how an agricultural inspection has become a professionally staged once-per-generation spectacle. The désalpe—anchored in the economic necessity of Alpine transhumance and Gruyère AOC cheese production—remains Romandie's most robust continuity mechanism: as long as cattle must descend from Alpine pastures, the festival's agricultural core survives, even as tourism adds craft markets and coordinated procession schedules. The Combat de Reines (Valais cow fighting, formalized in the 1920s) now draws 50,000 spectators to a tradition rooted in working herd-hierarchy behavior. Today, you experience a Romandie where Catholic cantons still anchor festivals to the liturgical calendar, Reformed cantons celebrate civic commemorations, and Alpine pastoral communities maintain transhumance rhythms—all now refracted through heritage recognition and tourism demand.