The Savoy Trade of 1860

In 1860, Switzerland watched in strong protest as Sardinia-Piedmont ceded the province of Savoy to France. The former general of the Swiss army, Guillaume-Henri Dufour, lobbied in vain in Paris for the northern Savoy territories of Chablais and Faucigny to be transferred to Switzerland instead of France. In April 1860, a report appeared in various Swiss newspapers stating that Dufour had cried after a conversation with the French Emperor. This incident regarding the alleged "General's tears" forms the starting point of the study on the Savoy trade of 1860. The author subsequently describes fifteen other significant incidents of press coverage, revealing a different history of the Savoy trade. This narrative is particularly distinct because the Swiss public learned everything they knew about this political event from the media, suggesting a media construction of the history of the Savoy trade. The interpretive and event context of the "Savoy trade" was notably influenced by the memory of the Neuchâtel conflict, which had occurred only three years earlier, with the differences between the linguistic-media constructs of the two events playing a significant role. While the Neuchâtel conflict confronted the Swiss public with the Prussian threat of war, portrayed by the press as an "as-if war" experience, the Savoy trade seemed to lack any patriotic elation, caught between the fronts of party and railway politics. Thus, the Savoy trade went down in history as an embarrassing counterpart to the Neuchâtel conflict, which was viewed as a foreign policy success. The study integrates Niklas Luhmann's communication theory approaches and utilizes a total of seventy Swiss and European newspapers. It provides an article on the history of the early federal state and on the history of the press in the 19th century.