Swiss Hero William Tell—Myth or Historic Figure

                                    This illustration gives William Tell the full 19th Century Romantic treatment.

On November 18, 1307 Wilhelm Tell, who may or may not have existed, allegedly shot an apple off of the head off his trembling son with his trusty crossbow on the orders of a tyrannical local Austrian official or Bailiff who may, or may not, have existed.  Subsequently Tell may, or may not, have assassinated the villain and led a rebellion that led to the creation of the Old Swiss Confederacy.  Or so the story goes.

Known to the English speaking world as William Tell and to Napoleonic Era European romantics as Guillaume Tell, he became a heroic symbol of Swiss independence, revolutionary resistance to oppression and tyranny, and a blank page various political ideologies claimed for their own. 

Americans know him mostly as a motif in countless comedy sketches going back to vaudeville and animated cartoons, built around gags of the boy and the apple stripped of any context.  They also may remember the Overture of an opera by Gioachino Rossini became the theme song for another mythical hero—The Lone Ranger.

In the early 1950's Errol Flynn bankrupted himself trying to revive his sagging career by producing an William Tell film which was aborted and never released. 

Most modern scholars believe Tell is a mythical figure, analogous to the English Robin Hood.  They can find no evidence that or his son ever existed or that Albrecht (sometimes Herman) Gessler ever oppressed the people of Altdorf in the Canton of Uri.  The Swiss tend not to take kindly to these scholars and have been known to burn them in effigy in the streets.  Some Swiss scholars still make a living producing tomes that make historical claims for the truth of at least a nugget of the folk tale.  And like Englishmen love and believe in a rebellious Saxon noble, the Swiss, no matter which of four languages they speak, swear by the reality of William Tell.

Here is the story in its most familiar form.  

Gessler arrived in Altdorf to assume his duties as Landvogt, a local tax collector/enforcer for an Austrian feudal prince—very analogous to the authority of the Sheriff of Nottingham in the Robin Hood tales—already drunk with his new power.  He erected a pole in the market place and demanded that the locals bow down to his hat which he perched on it.  He stationed troops to enforce the order and often sat watching the locals grovel in fear.  Enter Tell and his ten year old son Walter.  Tell was by all accounts a large and powerful man—a hunter, mountain climber, and boatman in early accounts was a local gentleman of wide repute and respect and in later accounts a rustic peasant leader.  He happened to be carrying his crossbow.

One of the earliest graphic depictions--a woodcut illustration from Ein Schönes Spiel…von Wilhelm Tell.
 

Tell proudly refused to bow down to a hat and was seized by Gessler’s troops.  The cruel tyrant had already filled the jails and local dungeons and had recently blinded an elderly man for some trivial or imagined offense.  Gessler, aware of Tell’s reputation with his weapon, offered his prisoner a choice—immediate death or a reprieve if he can shoot an apple off of the head of his son’s head at several paces with a single shot.

Tell comforted his son and then with unerring calm split the apple with a bolt from his crossbow.  Gessler noticed that Tell had a second bolt.  He demanded to know what he intended to do with it.  Tell demurred until he was assured that no matter his answer his pardon would be honored.  Then he told Gessler that the second bolt was meant to kill him should the first have gone astray and wounded the boy.  Infuriated Gessler had Tell and his son seized.

The Tells were put on a boat to transport them across Lake Lucerne to Küssnacht to a dungeon in Gessler’s new castle.  But a terrible storm erupted and the boat was nearly lost.  The oarsmen, in fear for their lives, unbound the powerful Tell who took the rudder and brought the boat to shore—where he leapt to safety on a rocky point now known as Tellsplatte.  He also somehow still had his famous crossbow and that second bolt.

 

An American take on the embellished legend--William Tell Escapes the Tyrant by Nathaniel Currier.

He ran cross country to Küssnacht where he laid in wait at a narrow point in the route he knew Gessler must take from Altdorf.  There from hiding he ambushed the official, assassinating Gessler with a single shot.

Escaping into the mountains Tell joined existing bands of rebels and/or raises a guerilla army  against the Austrians.  The successful revolt that followed united most of the Swiss Cantons into the Old Confederacy and thus began the history of the Swiss as a nation.  

Tell was said to have died heroically 40 years later as an old man when he tried to rescue a child from a raging river.

None of this was corroborated in contemporary annals.

The first mention of Tell in relationship to the rebellion seems to be in the White Book of Sarnen by a country scribe named Hans Schreiber in 1475.  Shortly thereafter a song called the Tellenlied first appearance in a manuscript was in 1501 although it was clearly already widely sung.  In neither of these accounts was Gessler named or is there mention of his assassination.  The Tellenlied called Tell the “First Confederate.”

The first printed version of the story appeared in 1507 in Chronicle of the Swiss Confederation by Petermann Etterlin, a soldier/scholar who wrote in German but supported the French factions ruling Lucerne.  Around 1570 Aegidius Tschudi from Glarus compiled his monumental Chronicon Helveticum which in turn was the main source for Johannes von Müller’s History of the Swiss Confederation in 1780—written under the ideological influence of rising French radicalism—and for Friedrich Schiller’s play William Tell in1804.

In each of these versions the story of Tell became more elaborate with details filled in, names and dates supplied and a mantel of historical verisimilitude draped around it.  The story also adapted to more modern political developments—there really was a Gessler family, for instance, that administered a fiefdom of a Hapsburg prince around Zurich in the late 14th Century.  He became a stand-in for imperial Austrian designs on Switzerland three hundred years later.

Tell inspired The Three Tells—heroes of the 1653 Swiss Peasants’ War who dressed as Tell attempted to assassinate Ulrich Dullike, Schultheiss (Mayor) of Lucerne for the Hapsburgs in 1653.  In the writings of early 19th Century Romantics they became similar to certain Nordic myths and King Arthur in English folklore, sleeping under the mountains and waiting to be resurrected and come to the salvation of the nation in a time of peril. 

Napoleon's puppet Helvetic Republic sought legitimacy by draping itself in the mantle of William Tell as an anti-Austrian patriot.  The  short lived Republic incorporated Tell into its official seal. 

During the French Revolution Tell was adopted as a model for rebellion against authority.  He was re-cast as a peasant leader and his role as a revolutionary elevated over earlier versions which emphasized his individual defiance.  In the Napoleonic Era Gessler became a tool of an unseen—and not even historically accurate—Austrian Emperor.  In the post-Napoleonic era Tell became the symbol to resistance against all oppression—including that inflicted in the false hope that Bonaparte would be a liberating force in Europe.  

When Napoleon invaded western Switzerland and imposed the Helvetic Republic in 1798, the new central government sought legitimacy by making Tell and his son the central device in their official seal.  When the Republic was overthrown in 1803 and the Confederacy of Cantons restore Tell became a symbol for resistance to all foreign meddling in Swiss affairs.  This is the Tell of Schiller’s play and Rossini’s opera.

                            Mattua Battistini as the Swiss hero in an early 20th Century production of Rossini's opera Guillaume  Tell.
 

 Since then he has been schizophrenic—simultaneously hailed as a hero of left populism and of right-wing Swiss nationalism.  He has been cited as the inspiration for Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plotters in England in 1604, along with Brutus by John Wilkes Booth for his assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and by late 19th Century anarchist assassins and attempted assassins of European rulers. Adolph Hitler in Mein Kampf praised Tell as the prototype of a Germanic hero and man of action.  He sang a different song after young Swiss Francophone patriot Maurice Bavaud—dubbed the “New William Tell” by his admirers—attempted to assassinate him in 1938.  He subsequently banned all performances of both Schiller’s play and the Rossini opera.  At a banquet in 1942 he complained, “Why did Schiller have to immortalize that Swiss sniper!”

Myth or Man—Swiss Hero William Tell

                                  This illustration gives William Tell the full 19th Century Romantic treatment.

On November 18, 1307 Wilhelm Tell, who may or may not have existed, allegedly shot an apple off the head off his trembling son with his trusty crossbow on the orders of a tyrannical local Austrian official or Bailiff who may, or may not, have existed.  Subsequently Tell may, or may not, have assassinated the villain and led a rebellion that led to the creation of the Old Swiss Confederacy.  Or so the story goes.

Known to the English speaking world as William Tell and Napoleonic Era European romantics as Guillaume Tell, he became a heroic symbol of Swiss independence, revolutionary resistance to oppression and tyranny, and a blank page various political ideologies claimed for their own. 

In the early 1950's Errol Flynn bankrupted himself trying to revive his sagging career by producing a William Tell film which was aborted and never released.

Americans know him mostly as a motif in countless comedy sketches going back to vaudeville and animated cartoons, built around gags of the boy and the apple stripped of any context.  They also may remember the Overture of an opera by Gioachino Rossini became the theme song for another mythical hero—The Lone Ranger.

Most modern scholars believe Tell is a mythical figure, analogous to the English Robin Hood.  They can find no evidence that he or his son ever existed or that Albrecht (sometimes Herman) Gessler ever oppressed the people of Altdorf in the Canton of Uri.  The Swiss tend not to take kindly to these scholars and have been known to burn them in effigy in the streets.  Some Swiss scholars still make a living producing tomes that make historical claims for the truth of at least a nugget of the folk tale.  And like Englishmen love and believe in a rebellious Saxon noble, the Swiss, no matter which of four languages they speak, swear by the reality of William Tell.

Here is the story in its most familiar form. 

Gessler arrived in Altdorf to assume his duties as Landvogt, a local tax collector/enforcer for an Austrian feudal prince—very analogous to the authority of the Sheriff of Nottingham in the Robin Hood tales—already drunk with his new power.  He erected a pole in the marketplace and demanded that the locals bow down to his hat which he perched on it.  He stationed troops to enforce the order and often sat watching the locals grovel in fear.  Enter Tell and his ten year old son Walter.  Tell was by all accounts a large and powerful man—a hunter, mountain climber, and boatman in early accounts—was a local gentleman of wide repute and respect and in later accounts a rustic peasant leader.  He happened to be carrying his crossbow.

One of the earliest graphic depictions--a woodcut illustration from Ein Schönes Spiel…von Wilhelm Tell.

Tell haughtily refused to bow down to a hat and was seized by Gessler’s troops.  The cruel tyrant had already filled the jails and local dungeons and had recently blinded an elderly man for some trivial or imagined offence.  Gessler, aware of Tell’s reputation with his weapon, offered his prisoner a choice—immediate death or a reprieve if he can shoot an apple off of the head of his son’s head at several paces with a single shot.

Tell comforted his son and then with unerring calm split the apple with a bolt from his crossbow.  Gessler noticed that Tell had a second bolt.  He demanded to know what he intended to do with it.  Tell demurred until he was assured that no matter his answer his pardon would be honored.  Then he told Gessler that the second bolt was meant to kill him should the first have gone astray and wounded the boy.  Infuriated Gessler had Tell and his son seized.

The Tells were put on a boat to transport them across Lake Lucerne to Küssnacht to a dungeon in Gessler’s new castle.  But a terrible storm erupted, and the boat was nearly lost.  The oarsmen, in fear for their lives, unbound the powerful Tell who took the rudder and brought the boat to shore—where he leapt to safety on a rocky point now known as Tellsplatte.  He also somehow still had his famous crossbow and that second bolt. 

An American take on the embellished legend--William Tell Escapes the Tyrant by Nathaniel Currier.

He ran cross country to Küssnacht where he laid in wait at a narrow point in the route he knew Gessler must take from Altdorf.  There from hiding he ambushed the official, assassinating Gessler with a single shot.

Escaping into the mountains Tell joined existing bands of rebels and/or raised a guerilla army to rise up against the Austrians.  The successful revolt that followed united most of the Swiss Cantons into the Old Confederacy and thus began the history of the Swiss as a nation. 

Tell was said to have died heroically 40 years later as an old man when he tried to rescue a child from a raging river.

None of this is corroborated in contemporary annals.

The first mention of Tell in relationship to the rebellion seems to be in the White Book of Sarnen by a country scribe named Hans Schreiber in 1475.  Shortly thereafter was a song called the Tellenlied first appeared in a manuscript in 1501 although it was clearly already widely sung.  In neither of these accounts was Gessler named or is there mention of his assassination.  The Tellenlied called Tell the “First Confederate.”

The first printed version of the story appeared in 1507 in Chronicle of the Swiss Confederation by Petermann Etterlin, a soldier/scholar who wrote in German but supported the French factions ruling Lucerne.  Around 1570 Aegidius Tschudi from Glarus compiled his monumental Chronicon Helveticum which in turn was the main source for Johannes von Müller’s History of the Swiss Confederation in 1780—written under the ideological influence of rising French radicalism—and inspiration for Friedrich Schiller’s play William Tell in1804.

In each of these versions the story of Tell became more elaborate with details filled in, names and dates supplied, and a mantel of historical verisimilitude draped around it.  The story also adapted to more modern political developments—there really was a Gessler family, for instance, which administered a fiefdom of a Hapsburg prince around Zurich in the late 14th Century.  He became a stand-in for imperial Austrian designs on Switzerland three hundred years later.

Tell inspired The Three Tells—heroes of the 1653 Swiss Peasants’ War who dressed as Tell attempted to assassinate Ulrich Dullike, Schultheiss (Mayor) of Lucerne for the Hapsburgs in 1653.  In the writings of early 19th Century Romantics, they became similar to certain Nordic myths and King Arthur in English folklore, sleeping under the mountains and waiting to be resurrected and come to the salvation of the nation in a time of peril.

Napoleon's puppet Helvetic Republic sought legitimacy by draping itself in the mantle of William Tell as an anti-Austrian patriot.  The  short lived Republic incorporated Tell into its official seal.

During the French Revolution Tell was adopted as a model for rebellion against authority.  He was re-cast as a peasant leader and his role as a revolutionary elevated over earlier versions which emphasized his individual defiance.  In the Napoleonic Era Gessler became a tool of an unseen—and not even historically accurate—Austrian Emperor.  In the post-Napoleonic era Tell became the symbol of resistance against all oppression—including that inflicted in the false hope that Bonaparte would be a liberating force in Europe. 

When Napoleon invaded western Switzerland and imposed the Helvetic Republic in 1798, the new central government sought legitimacy by making Tell and his son the central device in their official seal.  When the Republic was overthrown in 1803 and the Confederacy of Cantons restored in the period known in Swiss history as the Restoration, Tell became a symbol for resistance to all foreign meddling in Swiss affairs.  This is the Tell of Schiller’s play and Rossini’s opera.

Mattua Battistini as the Swiss hero in an early 20th Century production of Rossini's opera Guillaume  Tell.

Since then, he has been schizophrenic—simultaneously hailed as a hero of left populism and of right-wing Swiss nationalism.  He has been cited as the inspiration for Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plotters in England in 1604, along with Brutus as played by John Wilkes Booth for his assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and by late 19th Century anarchist assassins and attempted assassins of European rulers.

Adolph Hitler in Mein Kampf praised Tell as the prototype of a Germanic hero and man of action.  He sang a different song after young Swiss Francophone patriot Maurice Bavaud—dubbed the “New William Tell” by his admirers—attempted to assassinate him in 1938.  He subsequently banned all performances of both Schiller’s play and the Rossini opera.  At a banquet in 1942 he complained, “Why did Schiller have to immortalize that Swiss sniper!”

 

 

Maybe, Maybe Not—Swiss Hero William Tell

This illustration gives William Tell the full 19th Century Romantic treatment.

On November 18, 1307 Wilhelm Tell, who may or may not have existed, allegedly shot an apple off of the head off his trembling son with his trusty crossbow on the orders of a tyrannical local Austrian official or Bailiff who may, or may not, have existed.  Subsequently Tell may, or may not, have assassinated the villain and led a rebellion that led to the creation of the Old Swiss Confederacy.  Or so the story goes.

Known to the English speaking world as William Tell and to Napoleonic Era European romantics as Guillaume Tell, he became a heroic symbol of Swiss independence, revolutionary resistance to oppression and tyranny, and a blank page various political ideologies claimed for their own.  Americans know him mostly as a motif in countless comedy sketches going back to vaudeville and animated cartoons, built around gags of the boy and the apple stripped of any context.  They also may remember the Overture of an opera by Gioachino Rossini became the theme song for another mythical hero—The Lone Ranger.

In the early 1950's Errol Flynn bankrupted himself trying to revive his sagging career by producing an William Tell film which was aborted and never released.

Most modern scholars believe Tell is a mythical figure, analogous to the English Robin Hood.  They can find no evidence that or his son ever existed or that Albrecht (sometimes Herman) Gessler ever oppressed the people of Altdorf in the Canton of Uri.  The Swiss tend not to take kindly to these scholars and have been known to burn them in effigy in the streets.  Some Swiss scholars still make a living producing tomes that make historical claims for the truth of at least a nugget of the folk tale.  And like Englishmen love and believe in a rebellious Saxon noble, the Swiss, no matter which of four languages they speak, swear by the reality of William Tell.

Here is the story in its most familiar form.  

Gessler arrived in Altdorf to assume his duties as Landvogt, a local tax collector/enforcer for an Austrian feudal prince—very analogous to the authority of the Sheriff of Nottingham in the Robin Hood tales—already drunk with his new power.  He erected a pole in the market place and demanded that the locals bow down to his hat which he perched on it.  He stationed troops to enforce the order and often sat watching the locals grovel in fear.  Enter Tell and his ten year old son Walter.  Tell was by all accounts a large and powerful man—a hunter, mountain climber, and boatman in early accounts was a local gentleman of wide repute and respect and in later accounts a rustic peasant leader.  He happened to be carrying his crossbow.

One of the earliest graphic depictions--a woodcut illustration from Ein Schönes Spiel…von Wilhelm Tell.

Tell haughtily refused to bow down to a hat and was seized by Gessler’s troops.  The cruel tyrant had already filled the jails and local dungeons and had recently blinded an elderly man for some trivial or imagined offence.  Gessler, aware of Tell’s reputation with his weapon, offered his prisoner a choice—immediate death or a reprieve if he can shoot an apple off of the head of his son’s head at several paces with a single shot.

Tell comforted his son and then with unerring calm splits the apple with a bolt from his crossbow.  Gessler noticed that Tell had a second bolt.  He demanded to know what he intended to do with it.  Tell demurred until he was assured that no matter his answer his pardon would be honored.  Then he told Gessler that the second bolt was meant to kill him should the first have gone astray and wounded the boy.  Infuriated Gessler had Tell and his son seized.

The Tells were put on a boat to transport them across Lake Lucerne to Küssnacht to a dungeon in Gessler’s new castle.  But a terrible storm erupted and the boat was nearly lost.  The oarsmen, in fear for their lives, unbound the powerful Tell who took the rudder and brought the boat to shore—where he leapt to safety on a rocky point now known as Tellsplatte.  He also somehow still had his famous crossbow and that second bolt.

  

An American take on the embellished legend--William Tell Escapes the Tyrant by Nathaniel Currier.

He ran cross country to Küssnacht where he laid in wait at a narrow point in the route he knew Gessler must take from Altdorf.  There from hiding he ambushed the official, assassinating Gessler with a single shot.

Escaping into the mountains Tell joined existing bands of rebels and/or raises a guerilla army to rise up against the Austrians.  The successful revolt that followed united most of the Swiss Cantons into the Old Confederacy and thus began the history of the Swiss as a nation.  

Tell was said to have died heroically 40 years later as an old man when he tried to rescue a child from a raging river.

None of this is corroborated in contemporary annals.

The first mention of Tell in relationship to the rebellion seems to be in the White Book of Sarnen by a country scribe named Hans Schreiber in 1475.  Shortly thereafter a song called the Tellenlied first appearance in a manuscript was in 1501 although it was clearly already widely sung.  In neither of these accounts was Gessler named or is there mention of his assassination.  The Tellenlied called Tell the “First Confederate.”

The first printed version of the story appeared in 1507 in Chronicle of the Swiss Confederation by Petermann Etterlin, a soldier/scholar who wrote in German but supported the French factions ruling Lucerne.  Around 1570 Aegidius Tschudi from Glarus compiled his monumental Chronicon Helveticum which in turn was the main source for Johannes von Müller’s History of the Swiss Confederation in 1780—written under the ideological influence of rising French radicalism—and for Friedrich Schiller’s play William Tell in1804.

In each of these versions the story of Tell became more elaborate with details filled in, names and dates supplied and a mantel of historical verisimilitude draped around it.  The story also adapted to more modern political developments—there really was a Gessler family, for instance, that administered a fiefdom of a Hapsburg prince around Zurich in the late 14th Century.  He became a stand-in for imperial Austrian designs on Switzerland three hundred years later.

Tell inspired The Three Tells—heroes of the 1653 Swiss Peasants’ War who dressed as Tell attempted to assassinate Ulrich Dullike, Schultheiss (Mayor) of Lucerne for the Hapsburgs in 1653.  In the writings of early 19th Century Romantics they became similar to certain Nordic myths and King Arthur in English folklore, sleeping under the mountains and waiting to be resurrected and come to the salvation of the nation in a time of peril. 

Napoleon's puppet Helvetic Republic sought legitimacy by draping itself in the mantle of William Tell as an anti-Austrian patriot.  The  short lived Republic incorporated Tell into its official seal. 

During the French Revolution Tell was adopted as a model for rebellion against authority.  He was re-cast as a peasant leader and his role as a revolutionary elevated over earlier versions which emphasized his individual defiance.  In the Napoleonic Era Gessler became a tool of an unseen—and not even historically accurate—Austrian Emperor.  In the post-Napoleonic era Tell became the symbol to resistance against all oppression—including that inflicted in the false hope that Bonaparte would be a liberating force in Europe.  

When Napoleon invaded western Switzerland and imposed the Helvetic Republic in 1798, the new central government sought legitimacy by making Tell and his son the central device in their official seal.  When the Republic was overthrown in 1803 and the Confederacy of Cantons restored in the period known in Swiss history as the Restoration, Tell became a symbol for resistance to all foreign meddling in Swiss affairs.  This is the Tell of Schiller’s play and Rossini’s opera.

Mattua Battistini as the Swiss hero in an early 20th Century production of Rossini's opera Guillaume  Tell.

Since then he has been schizophrenic—simultaneously hailed as a hero of left populism and of right-wing Swiss nationalism.  He has been cited as the inspiration for Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plotters in England in 1604, along with Brutus by John Wilkes Booth for his assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and by late 19th Century anarchist assassins and attempted assassins of European rulers.

Adolph Hitler in Mein Kampf praised Tell as the prototype of a Germanic hero and man of action.  He sang a different song after young Swiss Francophone patriot Maurice Bavaud—dubbed the “New William Tell” by his admirers—attempted to assassinate him in 1938.  He subsequently banned all performances of both Schiller’s play and the Rossini opera.  At a banquet in 1942 he complained, “Why did Schiller have to immortalize that Swiss sniper!”

And a Child Shall Lead Them—Youth Climate Strike March 15

The spark to a wold-wide movement--Greta Thunberg's on child strike for the climate in Stockholm.

Beware the Ides of March ye plutocrats, oligarchs, planet rapers, and thumb-twiddlers!  The Children are marching on your gates around the world and they are plenty pissed off that you are stealing their future and dooming the world.  And it all began with a simple act of defiance by one 15 year old girl.

On August 20, 2018,  Greta Thunberg,  a ninth grade student, decided to not attend school until the 2018 Swedish general election on September 9 after a brutal summer of  heat waves and wildfires in Sweden.  Instead she sat outside the Riksdag in Stockholm every day during school hours with a sign reading Skolstrejk för klimatet (school strike for the climate).  Her demands were that the Swedish government reduce carbon emissions in accordance with the Paris Agreement.  After the general elections, she continued to strike only on Fridays, as more students joined her and her cause gained worldwide attention.

Although Greta was a privileged child from a well-known family—her mother is Swedish opera singer Malena Ernman, her father is actor Svante Thunberg and her grandfather is actor and director Olof Thunberg—she plunged into activism despite disabilities.  She has been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), and selective mutism, an anxiety disorder in which a person who is normally capable of speech cannot speak in specific situations or to specific people.  Yet she has become an exceptional voice for her generation and has spoken eloquently before international gatherings of the high and the mighty.

Greta says that she was inspired by the self-organized teen activists of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, who organized the March for our Lives events in March 2018.

 

Student's in London joined the Friday strikes.

As Greta’s story spread across Europe, so did student climate strikes that she inspired.  Within weeks small actions were taking place across Europe.  These ballooned from a handful of participants in the beginning to tens of thousands of young people were in the streets in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, Finland, Denmark, Japan, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States by January 2019 There were even actions in third world countries like Uganda where such challenges to government authority can be dangerous.

Like Greta youth leaders of the spreading movement were steadfast against being absorbed, co-opted, or otherwise taken over by political parties, unions, existing radical groups, state operatives and even existing environmental organizations.  They insisted on being in charge of their own agenda and being beholden to none.

A massive Climate Strike action in Berlin on January 15.

As the face of the burgeoning movement but not its leader, Greta was invited to speak at critical international forums.

In October, she and her family drove in an electric car to London, where she addressed the Declaration of Rebellion organized by Extinction Rebellion outside Parliament.

On November 24, she spoke at TEDxStockholm about realizing, when she was eight years old, that climate change existed and wondering why it was not headline news on every channel, as if there was a world war going on. She said she did not go to school to become a climate scientist, as some suggested, because the science was done and only denial, ignorance and inaction was remaining. Speculating that her children and grandchildren would ask her why they had not taken action in 2018 when there was still time, she concluded with “we can’t change the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.”

Greta addressed the COP24 United Nations climate change summit on December 4 and also spoke before the plenary assembly on December 12.

Perhaps most famously, Greta and her family took 32-hour train journey to Davos, Switzerland in contrast to the many delegates who arrived by up to 1,500 individual private jet flights for the World Economic Forum on January 23, 2019.  She minced no words speaking to perhaps the most powerful men and women in the world.  She said upon arrival:

Some people, some companies, some decision makers in particular have known exactly what priceless values they have been sacrificing to continue making unimaginable amounts of money. I think many of you here today belong to that group of people.

YouTube videos of her speech to the Forum two days later became viral sensations.  She bluntly told her audience:

Our house is on fire… I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. 

A float featuring Greta holding politician by the ears was featured in a German parade in February.

Time magazine named Greta one of the 25 most influential teens of 2018.  Her home country topped that on International Women’s Day when she was proclaimed the most important woman of the year in Sweden in 2019.

Now the movement Greta started is moving to a coordinated international protest on March 15—Global Strike for Future also called Student Strike for Climate.  Local events are still registering but organizer report:

On March 15, tens of thousands of high-school and middle-school students in more than 30 [now 60] countries plan to skip school to demand that politicians treat the global climate crisis as the emergency it is. Shakespeare made the Ides of March famous with his soothsayer’s warning in Julius Caesar, but ancient Romans actually saw it as a day for settling debts. What bigger debt is there than the theft of a livable future?

A call for the Climate strike in Washington, DC.

In the United States United States strikes are planned in 135 cities and towns, organized under the leadership of three girls—Alexandria Villasenor, Haven Coleman, and Isra Hirsi, daughter of the headline-making first-term Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN).

Major actions are expected in Washington, New York City and other major cities.  You can find one close to you here.  The Chicago Youth Climate Strike is slated for Friday, March 15 and will begin in Grant Park at 11 am with a march to the Federal Plaza around 11:20 where there will be another Rally.  

Get out of the way!  Here come the kids!