Category: Swiss Alps

Telescoping Distance and Time

1/5/2025

If you’ve lived in a place with sweeping, wide vistas, you understand that objects can appear much closer than they actually are. Here in New Mexico, where the air is thin and dry, it’s not uncommon to see mountain peaks that are well over a hundred miles distant. From my living room, South Mountain looks like an easy walk, when it is really a good twenty miles away.

Charles Dickens experienced this when he visited the Alps in September of 1846. The individual mountain peaks were so large that they fooled the eye into believing they were much closer than they actually were. In his novel Little Dorrit, he begins Chapter 1 of Book 2 by describing this phenomena:

In the autumn of the year, Darkness and Night were creeping up to the highest ridges of the Alps. . . . The air had been warm and transparent through the whole of the bright day. Shining metal spires and church-roofs, distant and rarely seen, had sparkled in the view; and the snowy mountain-tops had been so clear that unaccustomed eyes, cancelling the intervening country, and slighting their rugged height for something fabulous, would have measured them as within a few hours’ easy reach. Mountain-peaks of great celebrity in the valleys, whence no trace of their existence was visible sometimes for months together, had been since morning plain and near in the blue sky. And now, when it was dark below, though they seemed solemnly to recede, like specters who were going to vanish, as the red dye of the sunset faded out of them and left them coldly white, they were yet distinctly defined in their loneliness, above the mists and shadows.

I think reading historical fiction can do the same thing for events long distant. As we read what it was like in long ago times, the events draw nearer to us, the people more real. We live and breathe the experience as if it were in our own time, and we realize that we are much closer to these ancient peoples than we believed.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is a former middle school and high school history and language arts teacher. She lives in the mountains of central New Mexico and write historical and contemporary fiction for middle grade through adult readers. She is available to lecture on the history behind her stories.

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Crossing the Alps: Reality vs. Propaganda

11/30/2022

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When Napoleon Bonaparte crossed the Alps to push the Austrians out of Italy in the spring of 1800, he was determined that the world know that this crossing put him on a footing with the world’s most renowned generals. Hannibal Barca, the great Carthaginian general, had crossed in 218 BC to attack the Romans. Charlemagne, the great Frankish king who became the first Holy Roman Emperor, did so in 772 AD. Now that Napoleon was to add this accomplishment to his list, he commissioned his favorite painted, Jacques-Louis David, to commemorate the event. David did so in his five versions of Napoleon Crossing the Alps, paintings that remains instantly recognizable the world over.

But what Napoleon wanted and what David provided, was not in any way historically accurate. Instead, it is propaganda, more representative of Napoleon’s character and goals. David didn't paint what Napoleon looked like as he cross the Alps. He painted what Napoleon wanted everyone to think he looked like: a man who could control France and the world as easily as he could control -- with just one hand. -- a rearing horse.

In the original version, which is hung at Malmaison, a very young-looking Bonaparte wears an orange cloak and rides a black and white piebald horse. The Charlottenburg shows Napoleon with a slight smile, wearing a red cloak and mounted on a chestnut horse. There are two versions hung at Versailles, the first shows a stern-looking Napoleon riding a dappled grey horse, while the second shows an older Napoleon, with shorter hair wearing an orangy-red cloak and mounted on a black and white horse. A final version, from the Belvedere, is almost identical to the first Versailles version. In all versions, the horse is rearing and Napoleon is pointing, guiding his men over difficult pass. Behind the horse and rider, there is a small view of soldiers struggling to get their cannons over the pass. The sky is stormy and dark.

What Napoleon wanted and what David provided, was not in any way historically accurate. Instead, it is propaganda, more representative of Napoleon’s character and goals. Not even the face in David’s portraits was drawn from life because the fidgety and impatient Bonaparte had refused to sit still for the painter.

In one account, David asks Napoleon to pose and he answers “Sit? For what good? Do you think that the great men of Antiquity for whom we have images sat?”

“But Citizen First Consul,” David responded, “I am painting you for your century, for the men who have seen you, who know you, they will want to find a resemblance.”

“A resemblance? It isn't the exactness of the features, a wart on the nose which gives the resemblance. It is the character that dictates what must be painted...Nobody knows if the portraits of the great men resemble them, it is enough that their genius lives there.”

After failing to persuade Napoleon to sit still, David copied the features of a bust of the First Consul. To get the posture correctly, David had his son perch on top a ladder.

Look in the lower right hand corner, where men are pulling a cannon barrel.

But it is not just Napoleon’s face that is inaccurate. The trail over the Grand Saint Bernard Pass is so narrow, steep, and rocky that wheeled conveyances, including cannons, could not negotiate it. The army took apart the cannon and their carriage in Bourg-Saint-Pierre, the highest village up the northern side of the pass. Tree trunks were hollowed out, the cannon barrels placed inside them, then slings were made so that 100 men could carry each cannon barrel. Other men carried the disassembled carriages, and other men carried the wheels.
Records indicate that Napoleon did not lead his men over the pass. Instead, General Maréscot led the army while Bonaparte followed after them by several days. By the time he crossed, the sky was sunny and the weather calm, although it remained cold and the ground covered with snow.

Finally, Napoleon Bonaparte was not riding any of the horses depicted in the various versions of David’s paintings. Because of the treacherous conditions, he was riding a much mor surefooted mule, and the mule was being led by an alpine guide named Pierre-Nicolas Dorsaz.
Dorsaz later related that the mule slipped during the ascent into the mountains. Napoleon would have fallen over a precipice had Dorsaz not been walking between the mule and the edge of the track. Although Napoleon showed no emotion at the time, he began questioning his guide about his life in the village of Bourg-Saint-Pierre. Dorsaz told Napoleon that his dream was to have a small farm, a field and cow. When the First Consul asked about the normal fee for alpine guides, Dorsaz told him that guides were usually paid three francs. Napoleon then ordered that Dorsaz be paid 60 Louis, or 1200 francs for his "zeal and devotion to his task" during the crossing of the Alps. Local legend says that Dorsaz used the money to buy his farm and marry Eléonore Genoud, the girl he loved.

In 1848 Arthur George, the 3rd Earl of Onslow, was visiting the Louvre with Paul Delaroche, the painter who had painted Charlemagne Crossing the Alps. George commissioned Delaroche to produce a more accurate version of Napoleon crossing the Alps, which was completed in 1850. While much more historically accurate, this depiction is nowhere as heroic or romantic.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is currently working on a novel set in the Great Saint Bernard Pass in the years 1799 and 1800. Napoleon has a tiny cameo appearance in her story, but Dorsaz the mountain guide shows up in three different scenes. For more information about her and her other books, see her website.

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Crossing the Alps: Napoleon and his Predecessors

11/23/2022

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The Alps are intimidating mountains. Steep and rocky, they are such a difficult place through which to transport the heavy equipment of war, and such a dangerous place for armies, that they’ve been considered nigh well impenetrable. Few generals have tried to maneuver their troops through the Alps. Those who have done so are famous for it.

Hannibal Barca, the great Carthaginian general, did it in 218 BC. He managed to not only bring his soldiers through, but what at the time was the ultimate war weapon: elephants. Credited as saying “We will find a way, and if there is no way, we will make a way,” Hannibal left behind a bronze stele that stated he brought 20,000 infantry, 6,000 cavalry, and 37 elephants over the Alps when he arrived in Italy during the Second Punic War. Although pro-Roman writers including Polybius and Livy claimed that Hannibal lost half of his men while coming through Great Saint Bernard Pass, modern historians think otherwise. They suggest that a little as 500 men succumbed to the cold, the hazards of avalanches, and from attacks by local tribes. They also believe that the general passed through the Lesser Saint Bernard Pass, which is further to the west

Charlemagne, the great Frankish king who united Europe, also crossed the Alps. In 772 AD, Pope Adrian I begged Charlemagne to chase the Lombards out of Papal towns in Northern Italy. Charlemagne crossed through the Alps using the Great Saint Bernard Pass. Although he brought nothing so big as an elephant, he did have an army of between 10,000 and 40,000 troops. The chroniclers of the time hailed Charlemagne as the new Hannibal. He besieged the Lombards in Pavia, eventually destroying their control of Italy and giving power back to the papacy. This earned him the title of King of the Lombards.

Charlemagne Crossing the Alps to Defeat the Lombards, by Paul Delaroche

Napoleon Bonaparte crossed the Alps in 1800. He had just returned from his military campaign in Egypt when he found that the Austrians had retaken Italy. He decided to launch a surprise assault on the Austrian army and chose the shortest route, which went through Great Saint Bernard Pass, so that his army of over forty thousand men, his heavy field artillery, and his baggage trains could reach Italy before his enemy knew they were coming.

Since the pass was too steep and rocky for wheeled vehicles, the artillery was dismantled at Bourg St. Pierre, the last settlement on the Swiss side of the pass. Chests, specially made in the nearby villages of Villeneuve and Orsires were packed with the ammunition and iron fittings and loaded on to mules. Teams of soldiers carried the disassembled caissons and the gun barrels. The Army began their passage on May 15. The passage took five days to reach the hospice at the top of the pass, where the prior, father Berenfaller, offered Napoleon a meal in the great reception hall while the monks distributed food to his troops.

On the other side of the St. Bernard Pass, the artillery was reassembled in the village of Etroubles then moved with the Army into the Aosta valley, where they had to lay siege to Fort de Bard, losing the element of surprise. Eventually, the French beat the Austrians at Marengo on June 14.

Napoleon was determined that people made the connection between himself, Hannibal and Charlemagne. The painting that Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon’s favorite painter, created to commemorate the event features the names of Napoleon’s two famous predecessors carved into the rocks beneath Napoleon’s horse’s hooves. David wanted to make it clear that Napoleon was not just following in the footsteps of his predecessors, but joining them on the list of generals who had conquered the Alpine crossing. The painting, which remains so popular and recognizable today that it is an important icon in popular culture, was reproduced several times, with variations in color and detail, but all of the versions show the French general astride a rearing horse, with the artillery struggling uphill in the background. And while the image is a noble one, it is not at all historically accurate, an explanation of which must wait for another blog post.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is a writer who lives high in the mountains of central New Mexico. This summer she hiked around Mont Blanc, crossing the French, Swiss, and Italian borders, and rode a bus through Saint Bernard Pass. The scenery inspired her, and she's now writing a first draft of an historical novel for middle grade readers set in the year that Napoleon crossed the Alps. You can read more about her and her books on her website..

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The Great and Little Passes of Saint Bernard

11/15/2022

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There are two passes in the southern Alps which bear the name Saint. Bernard, and they are often confused with each other.

The Great Saint Bernard Pass is the lowest pass lying on the ridge between the two highest mountains of the Alps, Mont Blanc and Monte Rosa. At 8,100 ft high, it connects Martigny in the Swiss canton of Valais, with Aosta, Italy. The Little Saint Bernard Pass, 7,178 ft high, straddles the French–Italian border and connects Savoie, France to the Aosta Valley.

Both passes have been used since prehistoric times. At the summit, the road through Little St Bernard Pass bisects a stone circle that might have been a ceremonial site for the Tarentaisians, a Celtic tribe, during the period from c. 725 BC to 450 BC. The road has taken the place of a standing stone that stood in its center. While there are indications that the Great St Bernard Pass has been used since at least the bronze age, the first historical reference to it refers to its use by Boii and Lingones, Celtic tribes who crossed it during their invasion of Italy in 390 BC.

The stone ring at the top of Little Saint Bernard Pass. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Publisher New York Ward, Lock, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Writers in the 1st century BC called the Great St Bernard Pass the Punic Pass. It may be that they misinterpreted the Celtic word pen, meaning head or summit, and wrongly believed that it was the pass that the Carthaginian general Hannibal used while crossing with his elephants into Italy in 218 BC.

While no one is sure of the exact route that Hannibal used, based on the limited descriptions written by classical authors, many a full century after the event, most historians now believe that Hannibal used the Little Saint Bernard Pass.

Wanting to find a shorter route between Italy and Gaul than the commonly used coastal route, Julius Caesar tried to secure the Great Saint Bernard Pass, but it remained insecurely held until Augustus’s time when Aosta was founded on the southern edge of the pass. By 43 AD, when the emperor Claudius reigned, both the Great and Little Passes had Roman roads and mansios, rest places maintained by the central government for the use of those traveling on official business. Both also had a temple to Jupiter at their summit.

At the Great St. Bernard Pass, a cross inscribed with Deo optimo maximo, to the best and greatest god was placed where the temple had been. The bronze statue of St Bernard stands where the mansio was. Coins dating back to the reign of Theodosius II, in the 1st half of the 5th century are now on display in the museum of the nearby hospice, while some of the buildings in the village of Bourg-Saint-Pierre 7 1/2 miles north, on the Swiss side of the pass, contain fragments of the marble temple.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, the mountain passes became haunts of brigands and outlaws who preyed on travelers. The first hospice, built to provide travelers a safe place to stop, was built in Bourg-Saint-Pierre during the 9th century and is first mentioned in a manuscript dated between 812 and 820 AD. Saracens destroyed this building when they invaded the area in the mid-10th century. It was refounded at the highest point on the Great St Bernard Pass in 1049, by Bernard of Menthon, the archdeacon of Aosta. Today, the hospice straddles both sides of the modern road and the old Roman road, which continues to see service as hiking path, goes around its northern edge, just uphill from the modern road..

Soumei Baba, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

This past summer, my husband, two friends, and I walked most of the way around Mont Blanc. Because we had some difficulty finding room in the hiking huts, we took a detour, traveling by bus through the Great Saint Bernard Pass. The Swiss bus took us up to the hospice, but would go no farther. We got off, then, unsure of when or even if a bus would be coming to the Italian side, we scurried past the hospice and its lake, and over the border into Italy. Fortunately, we learn that an Italian bus was coming soon and we would not be stranded at the top of the pass. Unfortunately, that mean we did not get to tour the hospice or the museum. However, the short time I spent there was inspiration enough to get a story started in my head. I am working on that story now.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is the author of several contemporary and historical novels for middle grade and adult readers. You can learn more about her books on her website.

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Bedbugs!

11/3/2022

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This summer my husband and I joined another couple on a grand adventure: the four of us walked around Mont Blanc, the largest mountain in the Alps. Mont Blanc straddles the borders of France, Switzerland and Italy, so I had a lot to think about as I walked. It was an interesting and exciting, and it inspired me to begin thinking of how I could turn what I saw and experienced, both the good and the bad, into a book.

I won’t sugarcoat it: I did experience both good and bad. The scenery was beautiful, the food fantastic, the people friendly and kind. But there was also some parts of the trip that I wouldn’t want to repeat. The bedbugs fall into the later category.

We stayed in a wide variety of lodgings during our trip. One night, we stayed in a hostel that looked like it had been used as a barn before being converted into a place for hikers. The inside was furnished with rows of bunkbeds. The bathroom area, which had many narrow rooms with outfitted with toilets and others with showerheads, also had a long, trough-like sink. Our own beds were up in what had been the hayloft. It looked nice enough. But then we turned out the lights and went to sleep.

No sooner than it grew dark than I felt something strange. The feeling, a tingling, began on my hands. I began to itch. Soon the feeling way everywhere: my back, my legs, my face, my neck.

But no one else in my party seemed affected. They slept soundly while I thrashed and scratched. I believed that I was the only one affected. Sometime during the night, I got out of my bed and moved to another one, believing that I could leave my tormenters behind.

When morning came, I discovered that I was not the only victim of the bedbugs. My skin reacted the most strongly: I had itchy welts for several weeks afterwards. That shouldn’t have been a surprise, since I react very strongly to mosquito bites too, but everyone had been bitten. I felt awful that I hadn't roused everyone in the middle of the night.

We walked down to the nearest town and found a laundromat, where we boiled, drowned our clothes (and, we hoped, the bugs) in the washer, and baked them in the dryer. We turned our sleeping bags, our jackets and our backpacks inside out searching for the devious little bugs. We must have been successful in eliminating them, for they tormented us no more. But the welts, and the emotional trauma of the attack, stayed with us.

Bedbugs have been around since the time of the dinosaurs, so it’s likely that they have been bothering people for as long as there have been people to bug. There are mentions of them in ancient Greek manuscripts dating from 400 BC. Aristotle wrote about bedbugs, and they are mentioned in Pliny's Natural History, first published in Rome around AD 77. They are aggravating, but fortunately are not a vector for any serious diseases.

People have been trying to find ways to eliminate bedbugs, or at least alleviate the itching, for as long as they’ve been plagued by the little critters. One old folk remedy that housewives in Eastern Europe have been using for generations used the leaves from bean plants. These leaves were spread on the floor. In the morning, they were covered with bedbugs and were taken out and burned. It wasn’t until recently that scientists were able to determine that bean leaves have microscopic hooks that impale the insects, capturing them. You can bet I’m using bean leaf bed bug traps in my book about the Alps!

I went into a French pharmacy looking for relief from the itching. I discovered that the French are not fans of cortisone creams. Instead, I got a tube filled with herbal oil that was dispensed through a top that had a metal roll-on ball. The oil smelled like eucalyptus or Vics Formula 44. It did little to stop the itching, but it gave me something to do.

People in the Alps have been using various herbal remedies for their ailments for a long time. A website dedicated to Alpine plants with medicinal uses stated that a bruised leaf from a plantain weed presents the itching caused by insect bites and nettles. I wish I had known this while I was still up on the trail. It certainly would have worked as well as the little roll-on bottle did.

Am I glad I experienced bedbugs during my trip to the Alps? Absolutely not! But I can use the experience to make my writing more interesting and more informed. Writers have a great reason to appreciate even the worst of experiences.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is the author of several works of historical fiction written for middle grade through adult readers. She is participating in National Novel Writing Month by working on a first draft of a novel set in the Alps in 1799-1800. The first chapter begins with bedbugs!

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Halloween-Worthy Horror in the Alps

10/27/2022

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November is National Novel Writing Month, and I’m participating again this year. I’ll be working on a middle grade historical novel inspired by, but not in any way based on my summer hike, the Tour du Mont Blanc. As I researched the scenes of my story, I discovered that Charles Dickens toured Switzerland in the summer of 1846. One of the places that both Dickens and I went to was the hospice at the top of the Great Saint Bernard Pass.

This Hospice is the highest winter habitation in the Alps. It is also the place where the eponymous dog breed got its start. Run by Augustinian monks, it has been sheltering and protecting travelers since its founding, nearly a thousand years ago, by Bernard of Menthon. Etchings from Dicken’s time demonstrate that little has changed in the past two hundred years.

One thing that has changed is access to one of the hospice’s more morbid rooms: the mortuary. In Dickens’ time, the mortuary that still stands beside the Hospice was a great curiosity to travelers. Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Switzerland, published in 1843 included it among the must-see sites. It is known that Dickens took a copy of this travel guide with him. He describes the room in a letter he wrote to John Forster on September 6, 1846:

Beside the convent, in a little outhouse with a grated iron door which you may unbolt for yourself, are the bodies of people found in the snow who have never been claimed and are withering away – not laid down, or stretched out, but standing up, in corners and against walls; some erect and horribly human, with distinct expression on the faces; some sunk down on their knees; some dropping over one on side; some tumbled down altogether, and presenting a heap of skulls and fibrous dust.

The door to the mortuary is closed now. I do not know whether I could have pleaded to gain access, and I suspect that the bodies that had remained there are now long gone.

One set of bodies in particular fascinated both Dickens, who included her in his novel Little Dorrit, and Murray, who includes a description in his travel guide. She is a mother who Dickens describes as “storm-belated many winters ago, still standing in the corner with er baby at her breast.” Dickens pities the mother and gives her voice: “Surrounded by so many and such companions upon whom I never looked, and shall never look, I and my child will dwell together inseparable, on the Great Saint Bernard, outlasting generations who will come to see us, and will never know our name, or one word of our story but the end.” Dickens did not care to create a backstory for the poor, frozen woman and her child. Neither shall I. But his words continue to keep her alive in the hearts of readers some two hundred years after her death.

Jennifer Bohnhoff writes novels for middle grade and adult readers. Many of them are historical in nature.

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Following in the Footsteps of Another, Greater Author

10/13/2022

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November is National Novel Writing Month, and I’m participating again this year. I’ll be working on a middle grade historical novel inspired by, but not in any way based on my recent hike around the Mont Blanc massif. I don’t have a title for this work as of yet; perhaps you, dear readers can help me determine a good title sometime during November.

What I do know thus far is that my novel will be set in 1799-1800 and will take place in Great Saint Bernard Pass, a route through the Alps that travels up the Rhone Valley from Martigny, Switzerland to Aosta, Italy. Great Saint Bernard pass is not the prettiest of passes, but it is convenient and offers the additional attraction of the Saint Bernard Hospice, the highest winter habitation in the Alps, at the top of the pass. The Hospice is also the place where the eponymous dog breed got its start.

When I went through the Great Saint Bernard Pass this past September, I traveled by bus: not a city bus or a school bus, but the kind of tour bus that holds perhaps fifty passengers, with two big upholstered seats on each side of a central aisle. The road itself, which is now called highway E27, was paved, but it had only two lanes, one in each direction, and it had more hairpin turns than a roller coaster. More than once, I was convinced that the bus wasn’t going to be able to negotiate a turn. A few times I was right, and the bus driver had to throw the bus into reverse and make an extra cut in order to make it around a tight bend.

I’ve been doing a lot of research this past month, and I’ve discovered that Charles Dickens went through the Great Saint Bernard Pass (and yes, there is a Lesser Saint Bernard Pass.) in September of 1846 when he was touring Switzerland. Dickens did not ride in a tour bus. In his day, the path was so rocky that the only way to travel along what was then called the Chemin des Chanoines, or the pathway taken by the canons of the hospice, was on foot or astride a donkey or horse. Even carriages could not make the journey; they were disassembled at Bourg-Saint-Pierre, the highest village on the Swiss side, then carried over the pass by porters and reassembled on the Italian side.

Dickens includes his perception of traveling Great Saint Bernard Pass in his novel Little Dorrit. In Book 2, chapter 1, his travelers ride through “the searching old of the frosty rarefied night air at a great height,” through a landscape marked by “barrenness and desolation. A craggy track, up which the mules, in single file, scrambled and turned from block to block, as through they were ascending the broken staircase of a gigantic ruin.” In these upper reaches of the pass, “no trees were to be seen, nor any vegetable growth, save a poor brown scrubby moss, freezing in the chinks of rock.” At the front of the mules is “a guide on foot, in his broad-brimmed had and round jacket, carrying a mountain staff or two upon his shoulder.”

I’ve seen a painting of another rider on a mule, guided by another man who knew the trail, but that is a story best saved for another blog.

Jennifer Bohnhoff writes for middle grade and adult readers. Most of her books are works of historical fiction. You can read more about her and her book on her website.

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Telescoping Distance and Time

Crossing the Alps: Reality vs. Propaganda

Crossing the Alps: Napoleon and his Predecessors

The Great and Little Passes of Saint Bernard

Bedbugs!

Halloween-Worthy Horror in the Alps

Following in the Footsteps of Another, Greater Author

ABout Jennifer Bohnhoff

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