Historical Dictionary of Switzerland different from Dictionnaire historique et biographique de la Suisse
Genesis of the project
As early as the 1950s, several personal initiatives - including those of Federal Councillors Philipp Etter in 1958 and Hans Peter Tschudi a few years later - were launched with the aim of creating a successor to the DHBS, whose financial failure, which had by then caused the bankruptcy of its publishing company, was holding back various publishers and historians from embarking on a new adventure, according to historian Marco Jorio, editor-in-chief of DHS, quoted by newspaper Le Temps. However, the idea was taken up by two publishers in the early 1980s, and in 1983 the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences (ASSH) commissioned two professors, Carl Pfaff from the University of Fribourg and Alain Dubois from the University of Lausanne. Together with the archivist of the Canton of Lucerne , they initiated the DHS project, which was soon supported by the Swiss Historical Society.In 1987, the Federal Assembly approved funds to launch the project, as part of the celebrations marking the 700th anniversary of the Swiss Confederation in 1991, and in parallel with several historical or historiographical publications, such as the six-volume Schweizer Lexikon (Swiss Lexicon). The following year, the "Foundation Historical Dictionary of Switzerland" was created, with the dual aim of publishing a multi-volume historical dictionary that would reflect recent historical research while remaining accessible to a wide audience, and of publishing this dictionary in the form of an electronic database.