The most famous people from Switzerland are the tennis player Roger Federer, winner of 20 Grand Slam singles titles; Henri Dunant, the Geneva businessman who founded the Red Cross and won the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901; the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, author of The Social Contract; the psychiatrist Carl Jung, founder of analytical psychology; the sculptor Alberto Giacometti; and Albert Einstein, who took Swiss citizenship in 1901 and wrote his 1905 papers on relativity while working at the patent office in Bern. Switzerland's famous people fall into three quite different groups. There are the names known all over the world; there are the reformers, generals and politicians every Swiss schoolchild learns but few foreigners could place; and there is a long line of emigrants who made their names in Russia, France and the United States.
Geneva, Kesswil and Basel: the Swiss the whole world knows
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was born in Geneva, then an independent Calvinist republic allied to the Swiss Confederation rather than a canton, and he signed some of his books "citizen of Geneva". His Discourse on Inequality argued that private property was the root of inequality, and The Social Contract, which set out the basis for a legitimate political order, and the education treatise Émile were both published in 1762, and his ideas influenced aspects of the French Revolution. Geneva banned both books in the year they appeared, his books were burned in Paris and warrants were issued for his arrest, and he spent years moving between refuges. His autobiographical Confessions appeared only after his death.
Henri Dunant (1828–1910) was also born in Geneva, into a devout Calvinist family. In 1859, travelling on business, he saw the aftermath of the Battle of Solferino in northern Italy, where he organised local people to care for wounded soldiers left untended. His book A Memory of Solferino called for a neutral relief organisation, and in February 1863 he joined the five-man Geneva committee that became the International Committee of the Red Cross. A business scandal bankrupted him in 1867 and forced him off the committee, and he spent decades in poverty and obscurity before he was awarded the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901. In 2014 a summit on Monte Rosa, just 2 metres lower than the Dufourspitze, was renamed the Dunantspitze in his honour.
Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) was born in Kesswil, a village on Lake Constance in the canton of Thurgau, and worked at the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital in Zurich. A close collaborator of Sigmund Freud before the two men broke apart, he went on to develop analytical psychology, with its ideas of the collective unconscious, archetypes, and the introvert and extravert personality types.
Roger Federer (born 1981) was born in Basel and learned the game at local clubs there. Between 2003 and 2018 he won 20 major singles titles, including a record eight at Wimbledon, and spent 310 weeks as world number one, including a record 237 consecutive weeks. He won 103 singles titles on the ATP Tour in all, the second-highest total of the Open Era. His one French Open title, in 2009, completed a career Grand Slam.
Kramgasse 49, Borgonovo and Hirzel: Einstein, Giacometti and the author of Heidi
Albert Einstein (1879–1955) was born in Ulm in Germany, so he belongs on this list by choice rather than birth. He finished school in Aarau, graduated from the federal polytechnic in Zurich in 1900, and became a Swiss citizen in 1901, a nationality he kept for the rest of his life. From 1902 he worked as a technical examiner at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. In the flat at Kramgasse 49 in Bern's old town, where he lived from 1903 to 1905, and in the patent office, he wrote the four papers of 1905 on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity and the equivalence of mass and energy. The photoelectric work won him the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) was born in Borgonovo, in the Italian-speaking Val Bregaglia of Graubünden, the son of the painter Giovanni Giacometti. From 1922 he worked mainly in Paris, but kept returning to the family home in the valley. His tall, thin bronze figures of walking men and standing women are among the most recognised sculptures of the 20th century. Johanna Spyri (1827–1901), born in Hirzel in the canton of Zurich, spent childhood summers near Chur in Graubünden, the landscape she later used for Heidi (1880–1881), the story of an orphan girl sent to live with her grandfather in the Alps. Ursula Andress (born 1936), from Ostermundigen near Bern, became internationally known as Honey Ryder in the first James Bond film, Dr. No (1962).
Zwingli, Pestalozzi and General Dufour: names every Swiss school teaches
Some Swiss figures are household names at home and much less familiar abroad. Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531), born in Wildhaus in the Toggenburg valley, became people's priest at the Grossmünster in Zurich in 1519 and led the Reformation in the city, starting with a public dispute over Lenten fasting in 1522. He was killed fighting for Zurich at the Battle of Kappel in 1531. The divide between Protestant and Catholic cantons that his reform opened broke out in war again as late as 1847, in the Sonderbund War described below.
Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827), born in Zurich, was an educational reformer whose method of learning "by head, hand and heart" was tried out at a string of schools, the longest-lasting being his institute at Yverdon from 1805 to 1825. Illiteracy in Switzerland was almost eliminated by 1830, a change widely credited to his influence.
Guillaume Henri Dufour (1787–1875) was born in Konstanz to exiled Genevan parents, served as an engineer in Napoleon's army and then became the founding head of the Swiss Federal Office of Topography from 1838 to 1865. The Topographic Map of Switzerland produced under him, published in 25 sheets between 1842 and 1865, is still called the Dufour map, and the country's highest summit, the Dufourspitze (4,634 m), is named after him. In 1847 he commanded the federal army that defeated the Catholic Sonderbund in a war of less than a month, clearing the way for the federal constitution of 1848, and in 1864 he presided over the conference that adopted the first Geneva Convention.
Guisan, Dürrenmatt, Kopp and Dreifuss: modern Switzerland's own heroes
Henri Guisan (1874–1960), born in Mézières in Vaud, was elected General of the Swiss Army on 30 August 1939, by 204 votes of the 231 members of the Federal Assembly; Switzerland appoints a general only in wartime or a national emergency. On 25 July 1940, with Switzerland surrounded by the Axis powers, he gathered the officer corps on the Rütli meadow above Lake Lucerne, by tradition the birthplace of the Confederation, and told them the army would resist any invasion. In a 2010 poll he was voted the fourth-greatest Swiss of all time.
Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990), a pastor's son from Konolfingen in the canton of Bern, wrote The Visit (1956), a black comedy about a rich woman who offers a poor town a fortune to kill the man who wronged her. It is his most performed play. Swiss women won the federal vote only in 1971, and politics moved quickly afterwards: Elisabeth Kopp (1936–2023) became the first woman on the seven-member Federal Council in 1984, though she resigned in January 1989 after a scandal, and Ruth Dreifuss (born 1940), from St. Gallen, whose father's family was among the oldest Jewish families in Switzerland, settled in Endingen in Aargau, became the first woman President of the Confederation in 1999. For how that seven-member collective presidency works, see our guide to the government of Switzerland.
Euler in Saint Petersburg and Gallatin in Washington: Swiss minds abroad
Switzerland has long exported talent. Leonhard Euler (1707–1783), born in Basel, spent most of his adult life in Saint Petersburg and Berlin, where he became one of the most productive mathematicians in history; he popularised the symbol π, introduced much of modern mathematical notation including the idea of a function, and appeared on two series of the Swiss 10-franc banknote. Albert Gallatin (1761–1849), born in Geneva, emigrated to the United States and served as Secretary of the Treasury from 1801 to 1814, the longest anyone has held the post. He later founded New York University and co-founded the American Ethnological Society, and was often described as America's Swiss founding father.
Ritz, Chevrolet, Le Corbusier and Ammann: Swiss names on hotels, cars and bridges
César Ritz (1850–1918), the thirteenth child of a farming family in Niederwald in Valais, opened the Hôtel Ritz on the Place Vendôme in Paris in 1898, and his name gave English the word "ritzy". Louis Chevrolet (1878–1941), born in the watchmaking town of La Chaux-de-Fonds, became a racing driver in America and co-founded the Chevrolet Motor Car Company in 1911. The architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (1887–1965), better known as Le Corbusier, was born in the same town, moved to Paris and took French nationality in 1930. Othmar Ammann (1879–1965), born near Schaffhausen and trained in Zurich, designed New York's George Washington Bridge, whose 1,067-metre main span was the longest in the world from 1931 until 1937, and later the Bayonne Bridge and the Verrazzano–Narrows Bridge; he also directed the planning of the Lincoln Tunnel under the Hudson.
Many of the people above passed through Bern, the federal city; our guide to Bern, the capital of Switzerland covers the old town where Einstein wrote his 1905 papers.