This 1778 edition brings to a close a publishing history that had begun sixty-four years earlier. In 1714 Abraham Ruchat had published at Leiden, under the scarcely concealed pseudonym Gottlieb Kypseler de Munster, four volumes entitled Les Délices de la Suisse. A Vaudois pastor and professor, and a correspondent of Johann Jakob Scheuchzer among others, Ruchat set out to bring together the history, geography, institutions, customs, and natural curiosities of the Swiss cantons and their allies. The work never remained fixed in this original form; Ruchat himself was to revise, correct, and considerably enlarge it.
The transformation became explicit in 1730 with L'État et les Délices de la Suisse, published at Amsterdam by Wetstein and Smith in four small volumes. More than the title had changed. Ruchat's work was now combined with that of several other authors, foremost among them Abraham Stanyan and Johann Georg Altmann. This composite character would remain one of the defining features of the book through its last major recasting: it was a collective work, expanded and reworked from one edition to the next rather than merely reprinted.
The Basel editions that followed, notably those of 1764 and 1776, continued this process of revision and augmentation. It culminated in 1778 with Fauche's substantial Neuchâtel edition, which reduced the work to two volumes while giving it, for the first time, the physical scale of a quarto. The change of format was significant: conceived originally as a description of Switzerland in compact volumes, the work now assumed the appearance of a substantial illustrated compendium of the Confederation.
Two markedly different perspectives are superimposed within it. Ruchat wrote as a historian formed within the Swiss world itself, attentive to the political, religious, and geographical particularities of the individual cantons; Stanyan, by contrast, observed Switzerland through the eyes of a British diplomat required to understand its alliances and shifting balances of power.
His knowledge of the country had been acquired in circumstances in which observation could hardly remain theoretical. Appointed British envoy to the Swiss cantons in 1705, Abraham Stanyan became directly involved in the Neuchâtel succession following the death of Marie de Nemours in 1707. Together with Jean-Louis Runckel, the representative of the United Provinces, he intervened in favour of the King of Prussia and against the candidates supported by France; the memorials they addressed to the Neuchâtel authorities at the time attest to their direct involvement in the crisis.
The Account of Switzerland, published in London in 1714, was therefore the work of a foreign observer who had himself taken part in the political affairs of the Confederation. Its incorporation into Ruchat's text added to the Vaudois pastor's internal description a diplomatic reading of Swiss institutions, relations between the cantons, and their place within the European balance of power; successive editions were further enriched by historical, geographical, and natural-historical contributions.
The illustrations reveal a similar process of accumulation. Nearly a century and a half after the publication of Matthäus Merian's Topographia Helvetiae, some of his views continued to shape the visual representation of Swiss towns and landscapes. The 1778 edition, however, does not simply reproduce a homogeneous body of seventeenth-century imagery; it juxtaposes and adapts successive iconographic traditions, incorporating compositions and work associated with a number of artists active during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The publishing landscape had itself changed considerably by the time Samuel Fauche undertook this new recasting. In 1765 his name had served as the ostensible imprint for the final ten text volumes of the Encyclopédie, which were in fact printed in Paris; four years later he took part in the foundation of the Société typographique de Neuchâtel. He left the firm in September 1773 and established his own printing house, still a modest concern in its earliest years.
The year 1778 marks a distinct increase in the ambition of this independent enterprise. Fauche was then engaged on the monumental quarto edition of the works of Charles Bonnet, a typographically demanding undertaking requiring considerable resources; L'État et les Délices de la Suisse, with its large format and extensive illustration, reflects the same taste for learned works whose physical presentation was intended to match the importance of their subject.
The provenance of the present copy accords naturally with this documentary character. The stamps of the “Bibliothèque Jules Barotte” refer to François-Jules Barotte (1824-1878), a geologist and agronomist from Haute-Marne and a member of the Société géologique de France; the catalogue of his library, published in 1883, shows a marked interest in geography and the earth sciences.
The first and only quarto edition of this major compendium of Switzerland, representing the culmination of more than sixty years of revision: Ruchat's text enlarged by Stanyan's diplomatic perspective and by an extensive body of illustrations assembled in successive layers. The Neuchâtel recasting of 1778 thus gives its fullest form to a work whose publishing history spans almost the entire Age of Enlightenment.
