Beyond banks and prosperity: Daniel de Roulet tells the story of a rebellious Switzerland

Three boys are born in Davos in 1943, grow up in different circumstances and later share a desire to change the world. In his new novel, Trois garçons, Daniel de Roulet follows Max, Fabio and Wolfgang through almost 80 years of Swiss history. Rather than economic success stories or state institutions, his subjects are friendship, social struggles and the question of what remains of political ideals over a long lifetime.

Max is the son of a French-speaking hotelier, Fabio comes from an Italian family of modest means, and Wolfgang is from German-speaking Switzerland. Their backgrounds bring together linguistic diversity and social differences. They share a birth year and a birthplace, but not the same starting conditions. This is central to the novel: Switzerland is not a country everyone experiences in the same way, even when its inhabitants live through the same decades.

Davos as Switzerland in miniature

The choice of Davos is no incidental detail. For de Roulet, the town in Graubünden concentrates the country's contradictions. As a tourist destination, it represents international openness and economic success. Through the World Economic Forum, or WEF, it also stands for the power of global business. Yet Davos has become a setting for resistance to that order, too. Encounters and exclusion, prosperity and protest sit close together here.

The town also has a literary past. In The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann used the sanatorium world of Davos to portray European society before the First World War. De Roulet takes a different approach: he is interested in Davos as a Swiss microcosm, a contained setting in which broader social tensions become visible. His characters' birthplace is therefore more than a backdrop.

The three friends' origins make those tensions visible in private life as well. A hotelier's household and an Italian family with little money offer different routes to prosperity. The shared desire for change does not erase these differences. It does, however, connect people whose relationship with Switzerland is not identical from the outset, giving political history a personal and social foundation.

A counterpoint to the national success story

The friends' lives intersect with post-war protest movements, feminist struggles, opposition to nuclear power and the movement challenging globalisation. Environmental conflicts follow later. Across the decades, they remain attached to their ideals. The novel asks a question that extends beyond any single political awakening: how does activism change as those involved grow older and the conflicts themselves shift?

De Roulet seeks to tell the stories that can slip to the margins of an account of Switzerland centred on stability and prosperity. His perspective is history from below: social movements and people who have not benefited equally from the country's wealth. Banks and large commodities companies are not to have the final word in this portrait of Switzerland.

It also encompasses conflicts that shook the country's understanding of itself: the secret-files scandal involving state surveillance, the disputes over dormant assets and the demonstrations against the WEF. These concern different spheres — surveillance, historical responsibility and global economic power. Together, they reveal how often the relationship between Switzerland's official image and its inhabitants' experiences has had to be renegotiated.

Political ideals begin at home, too

Social change in de Roulet's novel does not happen only on the streets. Trois garçons also considers how men's relationship with feminism develops. It traces a path from the sharply gender-divided upbringing of the 1950s through the division of housework to #MeToo and contemporary debates about gender. Political convictions have a private dimension, and the novel brings it into view.

For a story about three male friends, this is an important shift in perspective. Anyone seeking a fairer society must also confront the assumptions about gender roles that they themselves carry. Change is therefore not solely a matter of institutions or economic arrangements. It reaches into how people live together and share everyday tasks. Here, political and cultural upheavals are difficult to separate.

After retreat, another spring

De Roulet structures the novel around five seasons. They reflect the changing phases of protest: moments of awakening give way to setbacks or withdrawal, before new movements emerge. The final “spring” leads to more recent climate mobilisations and the occupation of Mormont hill in the canton of Vaud. For the author, these movements show that civic engagement has lost none of its force.

Trois garçons thus connects the life story of one generation with the question of how political commitment passes to the next. Younger generations do not simply take over their predecessors' struggles, but they encounter related questions about power, justice and responsibility. The changing movements give those questions new settings without making the earlier experiences irrelevant.

For readers living in Switzerland, this is a portrait of the country beyond its familiar institutions and economic achievements. It places personal lives alongside the disputes through which Swiss society has changed. De Roulet's guiding idea is that the present cannot be understood without other people's experiences or one's own past. His novel turns towards a Switzerland whose history is also made of persistent dissent.