Roman Empire & Christianization

Roman conquest, provincial integration and the classical imperial order.

1 chapter

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.

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.

1536 - 1798

The Protestant Reformation split Romandie along a confessional line that remains the primary explanation for its festival-pattern variation—more important than the French-German linguistic divide. When Bern conquered Vaud in 1536, it imposed both the Reformation and the suppression of popular traditions: the 1597 Bernese ordinance condemned the Brandons as 'feux de mars à la façon des payens' (March fires in the pagan manner), and the 1640 Consistory Laws forbade 'feux et masquerades payennes.' Geneva chose its own Reformation under Calvin, and the 1602 Savoyard attack—commemorated as the Escalade—became the city's Protestant-civic founding myth, absorbing winter-hearth and solstice ritual patterns into a commemorative frame. Meanwhile, Catholic Fribourg and Valais kept their carnival traditions, saint's-day processions, and liturgical calendar. This era created two distinct festival cultures within Romandie: Reformed cantons with civic commemorations and agricultural celebrations, and Catholic cantons with liturgical-calendar festivals and masked carnival figures.

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.