The inaugural meeting of the Swiss Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (SSECS) took place in Zürich on 15 November 1991 in the former home of Johann Jakob Bodmer (1698-1783): Zum oberen Schönenberg.


J. J. Bodmer’s home in Zürich, “Zum oberen Schönenberg”.
Engraving by J. J. Meyer, mid 18th century

The initiative to form the society was taken by Helmut Holzhey, then Professor of Philosophy at Zürich University. He became the Society’s first President. Working together with Ulrich Im Hof, the late doyen of Swiss-German eighteenth-century specialists, he built the internal structures of the Society, and sought to connect it firmly to relevant existing national and international institutions.

In August 1992 the first number of the Bulletin was published; since then it has appeared twice a year. At first Simone Zurbuchen, the founding Secretary for the Society, shared editorial responsibility with the President. In 1996 an Editorial Committee was formed, composed of two or three Society members from the German and French language areas of Switzerland, together with the Committee Secretary. On 29 July 1995 the Society was included in the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ISECS) at its general meeting in Münster. In 1998 the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences (SAHS) established a Kommission für die Erforschung des 18. Jahrhunderts und der Aufklärung in der Schweiz, which works together with the SSECS in furthering the interdisciplinary study of this epoch through meetings and scholarly publication.

During the period in which Helmut Holzhey was President (1991-1996) Urs Boschung, Director of the Bernese Haller Project, organised the first major conference on “Health and Sickness in the Eighteenth Century” (1-2 October 1993, Bern). Helmut Holzhey then organised jointly with Martin Fontius, then President of the German Society for the Study of the Eighteenth Century, an international conference on “The Swiss in Eighteenth-century Berlin”, which took place from 25 to 28 May 1994. Together with Simone Zurbuchen he then organised a conference on “Zürich in the Eighteenth-century: Domestic and Foreign Perspectives” that was held in Zürich on 14-16 December 1995. In 1992, supported by the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences (SHAS), the Society proposed “Switzerland in the Eighteenth Century and the Genesis of Modernity” as a national research programme. This application failed to gain the necessary approval, but it played a significant role in the formulation of later projects developed together with the Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles during the Presidency of Etienne Hofmann.

Besides a number of smaller events, this project included two larger meetings. The first took place in Los Angeles from 27 February to 2 March 1997, and the second on Monte Verità, Ascona from 7 to 11 September 1998. The Proceedings of these meetings were published by Slatkine in Geneva as the first two volumes in the new series Travaux sur la Suisse des Lumières. The Society had already staged a conference in 1992 on the Encyclopédie d’Yverdon and its editor, F.-B. de Félice. Study of this encyclopaedia was continued under the direction of Etienne Hofmann, Professor at the University of Lausanne, and Alain Cernuschi, who was from 1996 to 2001 Secretary of the Society. In 1998 the Fondation de Félice was founded, which was one of the initiators of the international conference on the Encyclopédie d’Yverdon held at the Research Centre for the European Enlightenment in Potsdam from 7 to 9 September 2001. The proceedings of this conference appeared in 2005 as Volume 7 in the series Travaux sur la Suisse des Lumières. In 2000 Etienne Hofmann invited the Committee of ISECS to his annual meeting in Lausanne, alongside which as usual a scholarly conference took place.

In 2001 the office of President shifted in turn from Romandy to the Swiss German region. Fritz Nagel, Director of the Research Centre for the Bernoulli edition in Basel assumed the presidency, having been a member of the Society’s committee since 1991. During his tenure he was supported by Karin Althaus as Secretary, and saw two major conferences take place in Basel, the second shortly after his presidency ended. Benno Schubinger organised a conference on “Collecting and Collections during the Eighteenth Century in Switzerland” (16 to 18 October 2003) and the international specialist conference on “The Future of Scholarly Editions” (7 to 9 October 2006), Fritz Nagel being responsible for both the original idea and the composition of the conference. He thereby not only lent new impulse to discussion of central problems, such as the application of electronic media to the analysis and presentation of editions, the financing of research as well as the marketing of editions, but also created a forum for the national and international linkage of editorial projects into a network, extending and supporting an initiative that the Society had already pursued in the context of smaller meetings on the editing of correspondence. In addition to this the SSECS, in collaboration with the German society, staged from 12 to 17 September 2004 the ISECS seminar for young scholars, in which Fritz Nagel assumed responsibility for the local organisation. The Seminar had as a theme “Multilinguisme et multiculturalité au siècle des lumières“, and was directed by Prof. Andreas Kristol (Neuchâtel) and Prof. Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink (Saarbrücken).

During the members’ meeting of 2006 Simone Zurbuchen, Associate Professor at the Interdisciplinary Institute for Ethics and Human Rights at the University of Fribourg, was elected President. She is supported by François Rosset (Professor of French Literature and Culture, University of Lausanne) as Vice President; Annett Lütteken (University of Bern) as Secretary; and Barbara Braun (Burgerbibliothek, Bern) as Treasurer.