page_title: William Tell
section_title: Historicity debate
hierarchical_section_title: William Tell / Historicity debate
caption_attribution_description: Tellsage, Detail von der Tür eines bemalten Bauernschranks, Ostschweiz, 1782 Schweizerisches Landesmuseum, Zürich
context_page_description: William Tell is a folk hero of Switzerland.
  According to the legend, Tell was an expert marksman with the crossbow who assassinated Albrecht Gessler, a tyrannical reeve of the Austrian dukes of the House of Habsburg positioned in Altdorf, in the canton of Uri. Tell's defiance and tyrannicide encouraged the population to open rebellion and a pact against the foreign rulers with neighbouring Schwyz and Unterwalden, marking the foundation of the Swiss Confederacy.
  Set in the early 14th century, the first written records of the legend date to the latter part of the 15th century, when the Swiss Confederacy was gaining military and political influence.
  Tell is a central figure in Swiss national historiography, along with Arnold von Winkelried the hero of Sempach. He was important as a symbol during the formative stage of modern Switzerland in the 19th century, known as the period of Restoration and Regeneration, as well as in the wider history of 18th- to 19th-century Europe as a symbol of resistance against aristocratic rule, especially in the Revolutions of 1848 against the House of Habsburg which still ruled Austria five hundred years later.
context_section_description: The historicity of William Tell has been subject to debate. François Guillimann, a statesman of Fribourg and later historian and advisor of the Habsburg Emperor Rudolph II, wrote to Melchior Goldast in 1607: "I followed popular belief by reporting certain details in my Swiss antiquities [published in 1598], but when I examine them closely the whole story seems to me to be pure fable."
  In 1760, Simeon Uriel Freudenberger from Luzern anonymously published a tract arguing that the legend of Tell in all likelihood was based on the Danish saga of Palnatoki. A French edition of his book, written by Gottlieb Emanuel von Haller (Guillaume Tell, Fable danoise), was burnt in Altdorf.
  The skeptical view of Tell's existence remained very unpopular, especially after the adoption of Tell as depicted in  Schilller's  1804 play as national hero in the nascent Swiss patriotism of the Restoration and Regeneration period of the Swiss Confederation. In the 1840s, Joseph Eutych Kopp (1793–1866) published skeptical reviews of the folkloristic aspects of the foundational legends of the Old Confederacy, causing "polemical debates" both within and outside of academia. 
  De Capitani (2013) cites the controversy surrounding  Kopp in the 1840s as the turning point after which doubts in Tell's historicity "could no longer be ignored".
  From the second half of the 19th century, it has been largely undisputed among historians that there is no contemporary (14th-century) evidence for Tell as a historical individual, let alone for the apple-shot story.
  Debate in the late 19th to 20th centuries mostly surrounded the extent of the "historical nucleus" in the chronistic traditions surrounding the early Confederacy.
  The desire to defend the historicity of the Befreiungstradition ("liberation tradition") of Swiss history had a political component, as since the 17th century its celebration had become mostly confined to the Catholic cantons, so that the declaration of parts of the tradition as ahistorical was seen as an attack by the urban Protestant cantons on the rural Catholic cantons. 
  The decision, taken in 1891,  to make 1 August the Swiss National Day is to be seen in this context, an ostentative move away from the traditional Befreiungstradition and the celebration of the deed of Tell to the purely documentary evidence of the Federal Charter of 1291. In this context, Wilhelm Oechsli was commissioned by the federal government with publishing a "scientific account" of the foundational period of the Confederacy in order to defend the choice of 1291 over 1307 (the traditional date of Tell's deed and the Rütlischwur) as the foundational date of the Swiss state.
  The canton of Uri, in defiant reaction to this decision taken at the federal level, erected the Tell Monument in Altdorf in 1895, with the date 1307 inscribed prominently on the base of the statue.
  Later proposals for the identification of Tell as a historical individual, such as a 1986 publication deriving the name Tell from the placename Tellikon (modern Dällikon in the Canton of Zürich), are outside of the historiographical mainstream.
caption: A 1782 depiction of Tell in the Schweizerisches Landesmuseum, Zürich.
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