Switzerland Switzerland Switzerland, officially the Swiss Confederation, is a country in Europe. It consists of 26 cantons, and the city of Bern is the seat of the federal authorities. The sovereign state is a federal republic situated in western, central and southern Europe, and is bordered by Italy to the south, France to the west, Germany to the north, and Austria and Liechtenstein to the east. Switzerland is a landlocked country geographically divided between the Alps, the Swiss Plateau and the Jura, spanning a total area of (land area ). While the Alps occupy the greater part of the territory, the
Historiography of Switzerland methods, and, following European trends, on the medieval period and the Reformation. The conservative Roman Catholic cantons – who had been defeated in the 1847 Sonderbund war – also received little attention from scholars situated in the liberal Protestant mainstream of the time. The early 20th century saw the publication of great topical histories of Switzerland, including Eugen Huber's legal history ("Geschichte und System des schweizerischen Privatrechts", 1893), Andreas Heusler's constitutional history ("Schweizer Verfassungsgeschichte", 1920; supplanted by Hans Conrad Peyer's "Verfassungsgeschichte" of 1978) and Paul Schweizer's diplomatic history ("Geschichte der schweizerischen Neutralität", 1895; continued by Edgar Bonjour from 1946 on).