@laura-a-stern explain :P
Oh, dear I see, why you’re confused. They get a lot of things wrong.
Well, the roots of Swiss negotiation date back to ancient times, when Switzerland wasn’t a thing yet and the Helvetii (the people that would later become the Swiss people) needed to prove that they were tough in order to impress and deal with the Romans.
So whenever the Helvetii needed to negotiate with the Roman occupants, they would dress up the strongest of the tribe in a lion garment. You hear me? A LION! An animal proud and strong and - most importantly - native to ancient Europe. Unlike the tiger.
This tradition is still very much present in coats of arms. For example, the city of Zürich used to show a lion in their coat of arms in order to tell the world that they were especially fierce negotiators.
Anyways, so the proud lion warrior would go to the Romans and declare the Helvetii’s demands and/or oppose the Romans demands. Sometimes the Romans were quite intimidated by the brave Helvetii warrior and gave in immediately, but more often than not that was not the case.
What would follow then can be described as a wrestling match, nowadays known as “Hosenlupf” (literally “Pants lift”).
The machete in the picture, I imagine, might be a nod to medieval times when swordfights were in fashion. Swiss people incorporated them into their traditional method of negotiation after the negotiation of Henniez with the French. Said negotiation ended with Général Paraplui impaling unarmed Heribert the broad of Gurtnellen with his sword, thus ending the negotiation in favour of the French. This wasn’t the first loss due to people bringing swords to an otherwise fair Hosenlupf, but surely the most severe.
The machete is, however, not historically accurate at all. You see, Swiss people were fierce but rather small in stature. Think War-Hobbits. A long sword proved to be rather impractical quickly, so Swiss inventors came up with an intricate mechanism that would allow the negotiator to fold his sword to a more practical size and conveniently place it under his Lion garment. This quickly was adopted by Swiss military. Like mobile phones these fold swords grew smaller over time and involved into what is now known as the Swiss Army Knife.
In the late 18th century, swordfights were kind of frowned upon as a method of negotiation, so the foldsword grew into more of a status symbol then an actual tool for negotiation. They became bigger again and where often very delicately decorated.
Also wrestling had gone out of fashion for the fancy and posh upper crust which of course had an impact on negotiation techniques. Instead of wrestling your opponent to the ground to claim your demands as rightful, fancy young man would show of a series of step sequences and figures as some sort of intricate dance. In winter this would also be done on ice skates and nowadays is even an Olympic discipline as “figure skating”.
Furthermore this was very popular for marriage proposals.
The men in the background of the pictures are probably meant to be the backup negotiators, which evolved in early 19th century. If the negotiations were very important, the main negotiator would bring a group of backup negotiators in matching costumes. More often than not they also represented animals of prey but of lesser nobility than the lion. These supported the main demand the negotiator made with correlating dance figures in the background.
So, yeah, there you have it: A brief history of Swiss negotiation.
It’s been a while that I was in a history class, so maybe @kate-is-drunk-at-comic-con can add a few bits and bobs here and there, but I think, it’s a pretty good over view.
This is fascinating…but everything that will stick is that from now on I will refer to all Swiss as ‘War Hobbits’
As a Swiss person I am EXTRA fine with that.
Reblogging this because I still occasionally think about this.
This is probably the best nonsense I ever nonsensed. Please apprechiate.
