4. Lasting for more than a century, the Alemannic secession movement repeatedly sought to unify their culturally and ethnically similar inhabitants with those residing within the Swiss Confederacy
Divided across the regions of Baden and Württemberg, also including parts of Swabia in modern-day Bavaria, inhabitants of these areas were historically, culturally, and linguistically distinct from the German confederacy of states. Speaking instead varying dialects known as High German, suffering persecution and marginalization within wider Germany for this distinction, Alemannic separatism first emerged during the Napoleonic occupation and reorganization of the region into the Confederation of the Rhine between 1806 and 1813. Reintegrated into Germany following the fall of the Napoleonic Empire, support for self-determination did not cease.
Growing resurgent in the aftermath of the First World War, attempts were made by Alemannic separatists to ride the coat-tails of other new nations. On May 11, 1919, Vorarlberg, part of the short-lived Republic of German-Austria, voted eighty-one percent in favor of secession and joining Switzerland. Denied by Vienna, similar polls were brutally repressed in Baden and Württemberg before elections could be held. Emerging once more upon the conclusion of the Second World War, the French overseeing authorities repeatedly denied any such overtures. Following the forced creation of the German state of Baden-Württemberg within the newly created Federal Republic in 1952, support for separatism diminished and faded into obscurity.