After playing a bit of EU IV (I assume about 80% of this subreddit is familiar with this game) I began to wonder - has Switzerland always been a republic? I'm aware that Switzerland hasn't always been quite so neutral, but when did the nation of Switzerland officially declare its existence, and was it a republic at this point? (I mention this latter part, as I expect that the tribes who lived in Switzerland thousands of years ago had some sort of hereditary rule going on.)
A further question, if anybody can answer - if Switzerland has been a republic for so long, has it been a democratic one? By this, I mean, has Switzerland given the right to vote to all (or at least a majority) of its citizens above a certain age? Or did it have a system wherein only the wealthy could vote, making the Swiss republic more akin to the Polish Sejm in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, rather than a modern democracy?
Sorry if this is the wrong subreddit for this - don't really know where else I could put it.
We do know that the first precursor to Switzerland was established some time around 1300. It was a loosely tied federation of states and for the most part acted as a military alliance. There was no common currency, measure of length or weight, not even a common foreign policy to speak of.
The different states which made up Switzerland also had vastly different organisations within themselves. The city states(namely Bern, Basel and Zürich) were ruled mostly by patrician families, while some mountain states preserved their archaic form of democracy called "landsgemeinde". What's worth noting is that de jure the citizens were equal as there was no nobility with special rights to speak of.
This changed in 1415 when an alliance of Swiss troops took the Aargau from the Habsurgs. The newly incorporated lands did not become a new state but was rather a subject territory of Bern, Lucerne or Zürich, with some areas being governed by the whole confederation. The inhabitants of the "Untertanengebiete"(literally "subject territory") didn't have many rights and were governed by revees appointed by the canton they belonged to. This two class system was the cause for a number of unrest and civil wars up to the foundation of modern Switzerland in 1848.
The break up with the holy roman empire came de facto after the Swiss war of 1499, de jure after the treaty of Westphalia in 1648. From then on Switzerland, still politically and culturally heterogenous, was kind of a republic. I say kind of because it was not very united in foreign and domestic affairs and everybody more or less did what they liked. This showed in 1798 with the Napoleonic invasion where Switzerland failed to for a united defense and fell quickly because the French did not face a united Swiss army which could have thrown more than 100'000 soldiers into battle, but merely small troops with a size of 10'000 soldiers at best, a few dozen farmers armed with pitchforks and stones at worst.
The invasion was followed by the Helvetic Republic, which was highly unpopular due to its heavy centralisation and was replaced with the new Swiss confederation in 1803. After the napoleonic wars Switzerland was more or less constantly in turmoil because of conflicts between parties which wanted to go back the the loose "Ancien Régime" of pre 1798 and people who wanted a more centralized government more akin to the Helvetic Republic.
After a short civil war in 1847 the modern Swiss Confedaration was founded which still exists today.