Slow Train to Switzerland
Page 6
The living-museum atmosphere makes it very easy to follow Miss Jemima’s walk around town, knowing that little has changed since she saw it. First to Calvin’s house, these days marked by an engraved stone plaque, from which we learn that his actual house was demolished in 1706 and replaced with this one. So much for him being revered as the father and saviour of Geneva. It might be a very extreme case of the Swiss not idolising anyone (statues of the great and good are few and far between); or more likely, the citizens of Geneva got fed up with his restrictions on having a good time. Calvin believed that people should work, rest and pray, and Murray takes great delight in listing some of the more severe pronouncements from the “dictator of the republic”:
a dinner for ten persons was limited to five dishes; plush breeches were laid under interdict; violations of the sabbath were followed by a public admonition from the pulpit; adultery was punished with death; and the gamester was exposed in the pillory, with a pack of cards tied round his neck.
Not much fun for anyone. But once you see Calvin’s chair in the cathedral, it all makes sense. No one who had to sit on that hard wood for hour after hour would be willing to tolerate anyone else having a good time, or indeed a life. As for the building that rang to the sound of his sermons, it’s not Switzerland’s finest specimen of religious architecture, externally at least. Prince Charles would no doubt have something carbuncular to say about St Pierre Cathedral, which has a strange Roman temple meets Bank of England look going on. Or, as Miss Jemima so succinctly puts it, “a fine old building it is, only barbarously disfigured by a mask of Corinthian columns on the West Front”. The best view is from the top of the north tower, where all you can see is the city rooftops, the lake and the mountains; definitely worth climbing up the 157 steps. Inside the cathedral, it’s stark and bare; beautiful in its way, but a typically puritanical Swiss Protestant church.
Souvenir of Geneva, including the English church (centre right)
After that we need sustenance. Our lunch is positively Calvinist in its frugality, but we make up for only managing two courses not ten by eating them in the most atmospheric square in the old town. In fact, it’s about the only one that has any signs of real life, all the others being strangely empty and soulless. Even though it’s more triangular in shape, Place du Bourg-de-Four is the sort of square that would be visited by every tourist if it were in France; it would probably star in countless Hollywood films that involved buckles being swashed or chocolate shops being opened. For me, it’s enough that it has big umbrellas over the outdoor tables, more than two affordable cafés and a clutch of pretty houses round the edge. All that’s missing is some men playing boules beside the fountain.
Then it’s on past the birthplace of Geneva’s most famous son, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to the sombre Hôtel de Ville, where a metal plaque marks the birth of something altogether different: the signing of a convention that took the city’s name. It’s cited so often in war films and news reports that we probably all think we know what the Geneva Convention is about: helping the victims of battle and the fair treatment of prisoners of war. In fact, there are four separate conventions covering wounded soldiers, wounded sailors, prisoners of war and civilians in wartime. And they all began here in 1863.
Geneva has always been Switzerland’s world city, partly because of its position, partly because of its politics. Foreigners came to trade and to be saved, meaning that for centuries the city was a meeting place for half of Europe, particularly the Protestant half. These days it’s no longer French Huguenots or Scottish preachers who come here in exile, but international diplomats and English bankers. Geneva is now a city where almost half the population is not Swiss, largely thanks to its role as a centre for diplomacy and home to over 250 international bodies and non-governmental organisations. All that is down to one man, for whom 1863 was a very important year: Henry Dunant, local banker turned hero. There aren’t many of those around in any century.
Dunant is one of those historical figures who wouldn’t be credible if he were in a novel. Because his story is true and led to such a remarkable legacy, he deserves a mention, not least because at the time Miss Jemima visited Geneva, the wheels that would change the world were already rolling. The good idea that would become the Red Cross began four years earlier, with a battle between the French and the Austrians at Solferino in northern Italy. Dunant was stalking Napoleon III at the time, trying to get an audience with the supreme ruler of France, and he arrived as the fighting stopped. His efforts to help the 40,000 dead and dying changed his life, and ours. He wrote and then self-published a book in 1862, Un Souvenir de Solferino, in which he floated the idea of having qualified volunteers to care for the wounded in times of war. Humanitarian aid had arrived, at least in theory.
In practice, it took a while longer. Under the auspices of a local charity, the Geneva Society for Public Welfare, a committee was created on 9 February 1863, consisting of Dunant plus two doctors, a lawyer and a general. Its composition is not the cue for a bad joke but for good deeds in the shape of the International Committee for Relief to the Wounded, the forerunner of what we know as the International Committee of the Red Cross, ICRC for short – or simply the Red Cross. That first committee organised an international conference on 26 October 1863, oddly enough exactly the same day as the Football Association first met in London. Three days later the conference adopted Dunant’s proposals and declared that voluntary medical personnel “shall wear in all countries, as a uniform distinctive sign, a white armlet with a red cross” (Article 8, Resolution of the Geneva International Conference). The following year the Conference became a Convention, the original Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field. Twelve states signed the Red Cross into being on 22 August 1864 in the Alabama Room of Geneva’s Hôtel de Ville.
This was the high point of Dunant’s life, which was downhill after that. In 1867 he bankrupted his bank with a disastrous venture in Algeria and was one of the few to have to leave Geneva in exile, having been kicked out of the Red Cross. He was officially persona non grata and never saw the city again. Wandering around Europe, penniless and hungry, he ended up a hermit in Heiden, eastern Switzerland. Shortly before his death, he was at last remembered by the world for his act of humanity, being awarded the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901. He gave the prize money to charity.
In his home town there are a few reminders of the greatest Genevan since Rousseau. There is no grave, as that is in Zurich’s Sihlfeld Cemetery, but there is, of course, a city street named after him and a small bust, discreetly placed at the end of Rue de la Croix Rouge, which runs beneath the old city ramparts. Up above, in the old town, there’s a second plaque, this one on the sombre grey walls of Rue du Puits-Saint-Pierre 4, near the Hôtel de Ville:
This house saw the birth of the Red Cross, editing of Un Souvenir de Solferino by Henri Dunant, first meeting of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Nothing too ostentatious, as befits the man, his Swiss heritage and the organisation he helped to found. Geneva is still the world headquarters for the Red Cross, and many of the international bodies that came after it.
In June 1863, all that was in the future. It was an event in the past that led Miss Jemima to a leafy terrace on the city ramparts, overlooking an even leafier park, once the Botanic Gardens and now the Parc des Bastions. It was here that a crucial piece of Geneva’s history took place. I’m not talking about the installation of what is claimed to be the world’s longest wooden park bench, which has been there since 1767; at 120m it’s certainly long, although it is of course many armless benches linked together one after the other. No, this historic moment was the Escalade of 1602.
At 2am on the longest night of the year (12 December, old-style calendar), the Duke of Savoy’s army sneakily tried to scale the city walls with ladders, thinking that everyone in Geneva was asleep. They hadn’t counted on Mère Royaume being up early to make vegetable soup. She
threw her marmite, or cauldron, of boiling soup over the invaders, killing one (presumably with the pot, not the carrots) and raising the alarm. Soldiers and citizens ran to the walls and Geneva was saved, although 18 locals died. The event is still celebrated every December with chocolate cauldrons full of sweets and a weekend of costumed processions.
If that all sounds rather bellicose for the famously neutral Swiss, you have to remember that Geneva has only been part of Switzerland since 1815. Before that it was an independent city-state that suffered from being sandwiched between Burgundy, France and Savoy, so it often ended up on the wrong side of one or other of them. Independence from Savoy in 1536 led to the Republic of Geneva being allied with, but not part of, the Swiss Confederation, a situation the Escalade invasion tried and failed to reverse. After that victory, the lowest point came when Geneva disappeared as a separate entity in 1798, having been conquered by Napoleon and reduced to a département in his empire. His defeat in 1815 restored Geneva’s sovereignty in its newest incarnation, as the 22nd canton of Switzerland, although the past remains in its official title: the Republic and Canton of Geneva.
Once free from the strictures of the old town, Miss Jemima’s sightseeing tour that afternoon was soon sidetracked by the very frivolous pastimes of concert booths and merry-go-rounds. And on a Sunday, if you please. No doubt it was the wrath of God that cut short all the fun with a storm:
“a peal of thunder, not of British mildness, but of mountainous volume arrested us. … We rushed to our hotel just in time to escape the fury of the storm.”
Lake Geneva is famous for its cold wind, the Bise, which cuts through you all year round but is particularly harsh in winter, when it can whip up the water and then freeze the spray as it lands. The thunderstorms, which roll across the vast expanse of water that is western Europe’s largest lake, can be as dramatic. It was such a storm in 1816 that produced one of the greatest Gothic novels in English literature, although the main character is a local boy.
The poet Lord Byron spent that summer beside the lake at Cologny, near Geneva, with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Shelley’s soon-to-be wife. On a dark and stormy night (and for once that tired cliché actually applies), they scared each other with ghost stories. Shelley ran screaming from the room and the 18-year-old Mary had nightmares, although maybe that was the wine – or the opium. Whatever the trigger, her bad dream became a great novel, published in 1818 with the subtitle The Modern Prometheus. Its hero is one Victor Frankenstein, who introduces himself with “I am by birth a Genevese, and my family is one the most distinguished in that republic.” Cue Boris Karloff and endless Halloween costumes.
Getting up at 4am in the rain – that was how Miss Jemima & Co. made up for lost time and finished their city tour before leaving town. I can sense that my mother would prefer her first visit to Geneva not to be coloured by memories of pre-dawn expeditions and, given the price of our hotel room, I’m keen to milk every possible hour of sleep from it. So after breakfast at a normal hour, we trot off under a cloudless sky to see something very few of today’s tourists visit and indeed few modern guidebooks to Switzerland even mention.
From the point where the lake meets the river, we skirt around the old town to the base of the ramparts, then it’s a leisurely half-hour walk through a part of Geneva that barely existed in 1863. Boulevard de Saint-Georges isn’t as pretty as the old town, but it’s more lived in, with traffic and trams, pan-Asian restaurants and modest cafés. Above the street-level tabacs and coiffures, almost every building is an apartment block, few taller than six storeys but most with curly iron balconies stacked up across the façade. The further west we go, the earthier the area becomes, and the more prolific the graffiti: this is definitely no longer the Geneva of private banks and luxury shops. There’s no sign of the lake or the mountains, just people and their daily lives.
As we pass the walls of Plainpalais cemetery, I can’t resist popping in to see its most famous resident. After 23 years of being a curmudgeonly killjoy, Calvin died in 1564, aged 55, although he still managed to control things after he’d gone. Geneva was forbidden from building any monument to him, which probably suited a fair few of the locals, and could only mark his grave with nothing more than “J.C.” – instead of being super-modest, that smacks of him having delusions of grandeur. Perhaps that’s why Grave No. 707 now has simple iron railings and a small plaque saying that Jean Calvin “wanted to make this town a model city and established a religious discipline here”. Nevertheless, his legacy isn’t this unadorned grave or the Calvinist churches across the world, it’s something far more important to Switzerland today. In his quest for puritan perfection he banned jewellery, prompting Geneva’s craftsmen to turn to a new, acceptable product. Almost 500 years later, and the Swiss watch industry he kick-started now creates adornments far more ostentatious, indulgent and expensive than anything to which Calvin objected.
We walk on, past the bus depot and run-down warehouses where once meadows and country houses stood, then down to “the blue waters of the arrowy Rhone”, as Byron described it. The canoe clubhouse can barely be seen beneath the weight of multicolour graffiti, but the wooden platforms punctuating the riverbank are pristine, waiting for a hot summer day and locals seeking a cool dip in the river. Urban swimming is a popular pastime in every Swiss city, with Geneva, like Zurich, having both river and lake options. The lake-less Bernese like nothing better than to jump in the fast-flowing Aare after a long day at work; it beats a pint in the pub, that’s for sure. Some are even crazy enough to do it in winter.
Finally we reach our goal, the tip of a tongue of land between two rivers. You may be wondering why on earth anyone ever visited here, but it all becomes clear once you arrive; or actually half-clear, half-cloudy. On the right is the Rhone, a deep turquoise stream of crystal water gently flowing ever onward; on the left is the Arve, a swirling mass of murky grey that tries to invade its neighbour’s purity. Whereas the Rhone dumps its sediment as it flows through Lake Geneva, the Arve carries tons of it straight from the Alpine glaciers. It’s a struggle for supremacy that both refuse to lose. For a long time after they meet the two don’t merge, so a wiggly battle line stretches far beyond the high-arched railway bridge, and on downstream from where we are standing.
It’s a strangely mesmerising sight and one you rarely see in a city, one where the sole visitors are locals – or people who have read a 150-year-old diary. I’m only here because of Miss Jemima, and I’m rather glad that she came all this way at 5am in the rain. Maybe the past can show us things we’d otherwise overlook, although she does admit that some of her group were more satisfied “from the feeling of having ‘done it’ than in the wonder of the sight thereof” – seeing sights merely to tick them off really is nothing new at all.
These days the meeting of watery ways fails to compete with Geneva’s museums, shops and 140m fountain for attention. No tour buses stop here and no clicking cameras can be heard, although that may well soon change. The bus depot will close in 2016 and this whole neighbourhood should get a new lease of life as a trendy urban space. That’s the plan, anyway. Whatever happens the rivers will carry on their battle, one the Arve eventually wins in terms of water clarity, although it’s the Rhone whose name flows all the way down to the Mediterranean.
That was pretty much it for the first Cook’s Tour to Geneva. The visitors arrived at midnight on Saturday and left at 8am on Monday: 32 hours in Switzerland’s largest city, almost like the kind of trip at which the Japanese now excel. That first Cook’s Tour was noticeable for its pre-dawn starts, 18-hour days and the place-a-day itinerary. It would exhaust most modern British tourists, who wouldn’t pay to go home more tired than when they left; unless they’re on a party holiday to Ibiza or a camping trip to Scotland.
To be fair, the group did see the main sights Geneva had to offer in those days, particularly as no Red Cross meant no Red Cross Museum, one of my favourite museums in Switzerland. It could be hard to get a
n idea of how the city looked back then, how compact it really was without the international quarter, modern shopping districts and airport. Luckily, there is a way of looking into the past, thanks to a very committed model maker.
Before leaving Geneva, we pop back to the old town to visit Maison Tavel, a fortified mansion that is the oldest private dwelling in Geneva and home to the city history museum. Filling the top floor is an intricate scale model built by Auguste Magnin between 1880 and 1896. It shows the whole of Geneva in miniature, although the model is definitely not small: its oval base is 7.2m by 5.65m, with a horizontal scale of 1:250 and a vertical one of 1:200. The mini buildings are fronted with zinc and the roofs with copper, making it startlingly realistic and unbelievably heavy, at 800kg. What is interesting for us is that Magnin built the model to represent the city at the beginning of 1850, only 13 years before Cook & Co. came to visit.
Those were a crucial 13 years, nevertheless. Much of Geneva would have looked exactly as it does in the model, particularly the old town, but with one huge difference. The impressive snowflake-shaped city walls, with their mighty triangular bastions, which surround the city and dominate the model were pulled down in 1850. Their demolition led to rapid urban expansion, with new streets and residential districts and, as we’ve seen, an English church where the walls used to stand. More importantly, a modern transport system was created: the train station opened to great fanfare in March 1858 and the Pont du Mont-Blanc, the vital road bridge across the mouth of the Rhone, followed in December 1862. Until then, Rousseau’s statue had an uninterrupted view of lake and mountains from its island in the stream; today its view is still blocked by the bridge, itself spoiled by the volume of traffic flowing over it. Those few years witnessed the birth of modern Geneva, so it’s fascinating to see the city frozen at the moment before it all started.