**Auguste Forel depicted on the thousand-franc note (front) that came into circulation in 1978.** Swiss National Museum

Knocked off his pedestal

In the last-but-one series of Swiss banknotes, the thousand-franc note depicted Auguste Forel as a wise researcher turning his alert gaze on the world, as an icon of science and Helvetic national symbol. But this stylised heroic image failed to stand up to closer investigation. A story illustrating the pitfalls of the culture of commemoration.

Peter Egloff

The folklorist Peter Egloff is a publicist in Zurich.

Website: Werke von Peter Egloff beim Limmat Verlag

For decades, Professor Auguste Forel (1848-1931), holder of academic titles in medicine, philosophy and law, was seen as the personification of the ideal researcher and celebrated as one of Switzerland’s last true polymaths. In the year of his death, a street in Zurich was named after him. In 1932, just eight months after his demise, a portrait bust of him was unveiled at the University of Zurich’s Dies academicus open day, standing on a marble pedestal at the main entrance. On 1 September 1948, the centenary of his birth, the Auguste Forel fountain was inaugurated in front of the University Hospital in Zurich. In 1971, he featured on a postage stamp issued by Swiss Post forerunner PTT. And it was Forel’s likeness that graced the Swiss National Bank’s thousand-franc note, which was in circulation from 1978 to 2000 – lest we forget, one of the highest-value bank notes in the world, lovingly referred to by the populace as the ‘Ameisli’ or ‘ant’. In 1986 and 1988, the universities of Zurich and Bern held major exhibitions in honour of Forel. But in the autumn of 2007, the memorial to the “father of Swiss psychiatry” quietly vanished from the University of Zurich’s main entrance. What had happened?

Auguste Forel, fourth director of the Burghölzli clinic and Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Zurich. — **Auguste Forel, fourth director of the u003cemu003eBurghölzliu003c/emu003e clinic and Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Zurich from 1879 to 1898, pictured in 1899...** Wikimedia / Clark University

Auguste Forel on a special stamp issued by the PTT in 1971. — **... and on a special stamp issued by the PTT in 1971.** Museum of Communication, Berne

Born in 1848 in Morges in the canton of Vaud, his father was a geometer and land owner and his mother the daughter of a French industrialist. Forel studied medicine in Zurich, then spent several years as a clinical assistant in Munich before becoming director of the Burghölzli ‘lunatic asylum’ – as it was called in those days – in 1879, a position that went hand in hand with his appointment as Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Zurich. He stepped down from both posts at the age of just 50 and returned to the shores of Lake Geneva, where he devoted himself, as an independent scholar, to his scientific and publishing activities.

Forel’s activities reflected his wide-ranging interests. In numerous publications, he tackled a broad spectrum of topics ranging from neuroanatomy to hypnosis, penal reform, alcoholism, sexual mores, genetics, criminal psychology, pacifism and social philosophy through to questions of international policy. He was vehement in his support for full gender equality, free access to contraceptives and the legal recognition of cohabitation, as well as in his opposition to discrimination of homosexuals. His book “The sexual question” became a long-running best seller, was translated into 16 languages and had a lasting influence on 20th-century attitudes to sexuality. Forel also gained fame for his important research on insects, especially ants and termites. He went on extensive research trips throughout Europe and overseas that enabled him to describe some 3,500 species. His two main works in this field are still considered seminal classics to this day.

Homage to the great myrmecologist and the objects of his life-long passion for collecting: the back of the ‘ant’ note with Formica rufa and Strongylonathus Huberi (both Swiss) and Polyrhachis caulomna (New Guinea). Swiss National Museum

The Social Darwinist

Forel was very much the product of an age in which the authority of the natural sciences more or less went unchallenged. The laws of development and natural selection formulated by Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin in the mid-19th century (theory of evolution, ‘survival of the fittest’) attracted enormous interest and aroused widespread debate. They were very soon trivialised and even transferred to human society as the basic principle underpinning the coexistence between people and groups of peoples.

This Social Darwinism became the standard ideology of the bourgeois era of high capitalism, which attempted to justify its urge for expansion, its aggressive colonial policy and the negative impact of the concentration of economic power by framing them in terms of an imperative supposedly dictated by the laws of nature. Without questioning or even condoning these objectives (for Forel, a Social Democrat from 1916, the capitalist system was “a disgusting, pestilential swamp”), he adopted large parts of the Social Darwinist mindset and worked on their advancement, proceeding from the basic assumption that, as in the wild, social and historical processes in human society were primarily determined by biological dispositions.

As a doctor and psychiatrist, Forel believed that "man’s hereditary nature, deep-rooted in his brain, makes him an egotistic, individualistic, fierce, domineering, tyrannical, jealous, passionate and revengeful being”. But as a myrmecologist, Forel asserted: “Truly, I believe that the social instincts gradually accumulated and established in an ant are much wiser than those that a Linnean homo sapiens can acquire in spite of all the knowledge and traditions passed down to him and despite the best education.” Forel rated the “socialism” of an ant colony as “far superior” to all human social orders and in 1922, synthesising his two main areas of work – psychiatry and entomology – asked himself: “What can we do, then, to grow nearer to the ants and yet remain men?”

From the collection of the Schweiz. Volksbibliothek: Auguste Forel’s social utopia, in which people lived peacefully “like one giant human ant colony covering the entire Earth”. — From the collection of the u003cemu003eSchweiz. Volksbibliotheku003c/emu003e: Auguste Forel’s social utopia, in which people lived peacefully “like one giant human ant colony covering the entire Earth”. Photo: Peter Egloff

Race hygiene, eugenics, euthanasia

Forel’s “solution for the human social question on the basis of a circumspect scientific consideration” worked on the assumption that, in prehistoric times, in both the animal and human kingdoms, the more intelligent, fertile and stronger individuals had asserted themselves against the weaker and less intelligent ones, and that even at the “middle level of barbaric antiquity” “selective breeding” had worked to achieve the “eradication of those with inferior mental faculties”. In modern warfare on the other hand, he considered “the weak and sickly” to be “best protected”, while the fittest were most at risk. He claimed that alcohol and other intoxicants would also lead to the degeneration of the "germs on which the future of our race rests".

The physician and former director of the Burghölzli clinic saw modern healthcare practices as having a highly deleterious effect on the future of the human race: “As doctors it is our sad duty to preserve the life of idiots, degenerates, born criminals and the insane as long as possible.” And, taking this thought one step further, he considered the question “of whether it is not the best and most humane way to eradicate the most disgusting specimens of the human brain (criminals and the mentally ill) by painless death” to be worthy of consideration. He had himself ordered the use of sterilisation and castration at Burghölzli.

Forel’s place of work for many years. 1890 engraving of the Burghölzli clinic. — **Forel’s place of work for many years. 1890 engraving of the u003cemu003eBurghölzliu003c/emu003e clinic.** Wikimedia / Zentralbibliothek Zurich

Forel considered the most serious problem of the modern age to lie in counter-selection, for which he coined the term cacogenics (as an antonym to eugenics meaning positive selective breeding and race hygiene), and felt that artificial correction was a matter of some urgency: “What is required, is the strong proliferation of the best among us and the artificial sterilisation of the inferior.” However, in Forel’s eyes it was not only the “indolent, those given over to impulsive acts and passionate outbreaks, criminal natures, the mentally abnormal and physically weak”, but also the “lower races” who were inferior. Forel, like many anthropologists and natural scientists of the time, was a racist. He saw the “negroes” as posing a particular threat to civilised society. In his view they were “physically strong and robust, extraordinarily fertile, but mentally inferior, although they have learned to adapt to our culture extremely well. When they have adapted to our culture they corrupt it and our race through sloth, lack of ability and by creating such awful, mixed races as the mulatto”.

Sinister side – long ignored and hushed up

For a long time, the problematic parts of Forel’s thinking and writing (and his work as a doctor at Burghölzli) were ignored, hushed up, deliberately disregarded in the relevant university circles. To mark the 50th anniversary of Forel’s death in 1981, the Zurich Tages-Anzeiger newspaper printed a lengthy appraisal of the man that also delved into his fundamentally racist attitude, his concepts of race hygiene and his eugenic demands. The article suggested that a critical examination of Forel was called for as “an important act of coming to terms with the past for Switzerland’s medical community”. But it went unnoticed at the time. Undeterred, the two university exhibitions previously referred to were purely affirmative celebrations of Auguste Forel as a man who, as rector and neuroscientist Konrad Akert wrote in the catalogue for the 1986 Zurich exhibition, “even today, can act as a role model and whose work still challenges us.”

In 1988, when the exhibition was held again at the University of Bern, protests were staged. But it would not be until some years later, in 1999, that a book by historian and journalist Willi Wottreng on Forel and fellow psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler’s attempts “to save the human race” would reach a wider audience.

“From memorial to historical bind”

A curious incident took place in May 1986, in the run-up to the major Forel exhibition at the University of Zurich. The bronze bust of Forel disappeared from its marble pedestal at the lower entrance to the main university building overnight. It was discovered a few days later on a stand at the flea market in the centre of town and immediately returned to its place of honour. No criminal charges were ever filed.

The Neue Zürcher Nachrichten newspaper reported the bust’s disappearance on 31 May 1986. However, the "signalling" was inaccurate... — **The u003cemu003eNeue Zürcher Nachrichtenu003c/emu003e newspaper reported the bust’s disappearance on 31 May 1986. However, the u0022signallingu0022 was inaccurate...** e-newspaperarchives

Medical historian Iris Ritzmann has written an extremely interesting paper on the Forel bust and the shift in meaning attributed to it. She proposes that we read the theft, a mystery which no-one seemed interested in solving, as a “political act”, as a protest against the veneration of Forel. The message: relegated to the flea market, the academic idol had become a piece of bric-a-brac that could only be sold off cheaply as a curiosity that had outlived its usefulness and “now belonged on the scrap heap of history”. A small stroke of genius by a nameless undergraduate? No matter: 17 years later, the push within the university to demystify Forel came from the students themselves. The protest and subsequent debate crystalised in the question of what best to do with the bust.

In 2003, an article appeared in the Zürcher Studierendenzeitung entitled: “Und täglich grüsst der Eugeniker” [The eugenicist greets us every day]. Irritated after reading the works of Forel, its author Simon Hofmann found it difficult to comprehend the continuing veneration of the man, of which the bronze bust was an expression, ultimately seeing the latter as “a mockery of all the victims of compulsory interventions in Swiss psychiatry”. The Student Council took up the matter, bringing it to the attention of the university management in 2004. They turned to the Ethics Commission for advice on how to deal with Forel’s memory on university premises in light of his “eugenic past”. In 2005, a high-ranking colloquium grappled with the issue. There was consensus that the bust could not simply be left on display without comment. But the members also found that it should not simply “sink into oblivion, but should instead be linked to an exhibition or subjected to some form of artistic alienation and contextualised with additional information”. However, after further debate, the position changed and the bust quietly disappeared into the Canton of Zurich’s collection of artworks, where it still resides today, in storage in a warehouse in Embrach. But not on a marble pedestal.

**Quietly vanished into thin air: the bust of Forel by sculptor Walter Späny, gifted to Zurich University by the Government Council of Zurich.** Art Collection of the Canton of Zurich

Nevertheless, medical historian Ritzmann comes to the conclusion that the debate sparked by the bronze object, which stands 52cm high and weighs 24.5kg, actually proved fruitful. Importantly, she finds, it prompted academics to revisit Forel’s texts and the history of psychiatry in Zurich “at a time in which more and more victims of coercive measures by the authorities and the psychiatric system in Switzerland were speaking out about their experiences and demanding a reckoning with past injustices.”

More of: Modern Age Research Education Article Collection

Further posts

“I’ve become a wandering Scheherazade…”

Peter Erismann 05.09.2023 Lisa Tetzner, who co-authored the famous books for young people ‘The Outsiders of Uskoken Castle’ and ‘The Black Brothers’ earned a living in her younger years as a wandering storyteller.

Lisa Tetzner with a group of children, circa 1919.

Direct democracy in Switzerland

René Roca 13.05.2022 Of all the world’s democracies, Switzerland has the most extensive elements of direct democracy. The historical roots of this political structure lie in the country’s relatively well-developed educational system, and the rural uprisings of the 19th century.

On voting weekends, posters like this one summon voters to the ballot box.

At the cinema thanks to the Fip-Fop Club

Anna Wälli 12.07.2018 Today it is just a memory, but from the 1930s to the 1950s the Fip-Fop Club sparked a small revolution: Thanks to its mobile cinemas, children under 15 years of age were able to visit film screenings in their municipalities.

Poster featuring Fip and Fop, created by commercial artist Hans Tomamichel.