The Tauredunum event, a mountain landslide into the Rhone river, destroys a fort and two villages and creates a tsunami in Lake Geneva.

The wave that reaches Lausanne is thirteen meters high, and …

A bishopric is established at Lausanne, the site of a former Roman camp on Lake Geneva, in 590.

The Waldenses, who had withdrawn into Alpine valleys in northern Italy after the burning of eighty of their number at Strasbourg in 1211, have continued to lead a marginal existence.

When the news of the Reformation reached the Waldensian Valleys, the Tavola Valdese decided to seek fellowship with the nascent Protestantism.

A meeting held in 1526 in Laus, a town in the Chisone valley, and decided to send envoys to examine the new movement.

In 1532 they met with German and Swiss Protestants and ultimately adapted their beliefs to those of the Reformed Church.

The Swiss and French Reformed churches had sent William Farel and Anthony Saunier to attend the meeting of Chanforan, which convened on October 12, 1532.

Farel had invited them to join the Reformation and to emerge from secrecy.

A Confession of Faith, with Reformed doctrines, is formulated and the Waldensians decide to worship openly in French.

The city of Lausanne, ruled for centuries by the Dukes of Savoy and the Bishop of Lausanne, comes under Bernese rule in 1536 and the Reformation is introduced.

Hans Franz Nägeli had in 1531 been captain of the Bernese forces in the campaign against the adventurer-robber baron Giangiacomo Medici, lord of Musso, and during the occupation of the frontier of the canton of Valais in the intercantonal religious struggle known as the second Kappel War.

In 1536, he commands a Bernese contingent of six thousand men in the liberation of the Duchy of Vaud from Savoyard control and leads an expedition against the Bishop of Lausanne that frees François Bonivard from the castle of Chillon.

A Protestant theological school, The Academy, the forerunner of today’s University of Lausanne, is founded in 1537 to train ministers for the church.

It is the only French language Protestant school of theology.

The Vaud, annexed by Bern in 1536 and having had the Reformation imposed on them by force, has long chafed under the administration of Bernese bailiffs when in 1723 Jean-Abraham-Daniel Davel becomes the focus of discontent.

Claiming divine inspiration and envisioning a Christian revival, he leads a contingent of followers upon Lausanne, the administrative capital of the Vaud (March 31, 1723), where he urges the declaration of Vaudois independence.

The city's councilors refuse compliance with his demands and deliver him to the Bernese authorities.

Within three weeks, the movement is crushed and Davel executed, but his heroic manner on the execution block wins him the admiration of many, and he is to became a continuing symbol of the Vaudois struggle for independence, occupying a significant place in local tradition well into the twentieth century.

The French Republican armies have expanded eastward, enveloping Switzerland on the grounds of "liberating" the Swiss people, whose own system of government is deemed as feudal, especially for annexed territories such as Vaud.

Some Swiss nationals, including Frédéric-César de La Harpe of Vaud, have called for French intervention on these grounds.

French troops on March 5, 1798, enter the independent Swiss confederation’s territory from the west.

The invasion proceeds largely peacefully, since the Swiss people fail to respond to the calls of their politicians to take up arms.

The Old Swiss Confederation collapses after the French troops completely overrun Switzerland.

Instability in the Helvetic Republic reaches its peak in 1802–03—including the Bourla-Papey revolt and the Stecklikrieg civil war of 1802.

The Republic, having started with a treasury of six million francs, is by now twelve million francs in debt.

This, together with local resistance, cause the Helvetic Republic to collapse, and its government takes refuge in Lausanne.

Adam Mickiewicz is appointed professor of Latin literature at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) in 1839.

He had arrived in France in 1832 as a Polish refugee in Paris, where his life had for some time been spent in poverty and unhappiness.

He had married a Polish lady, Celina Szymanowska (her parents came from Jewish Frankist families), who has become mentally ill.

Marital discord and Celina's mental illness had driven Mickiewicz to attempt suicide on December 17 or 18, 1838, by jumping out a window.

Mickiewicz’s masterpiece, the great epic poem Pan Tadeusz (1834), describes the life of the Polish gentry in the early nineteenth century through a fictional account of the feud between two families of Polish nobles.

The poem conveys perfectly the ethos of an archaic society in which the ideals of chivalry are still alive and shows the effect of the Napoleonic myth on the minds of Poles for whom the French emperor and the Polish troops under his command represented the only hope for liberation from Russian rule.