Switzerland's Old Order: Oligarchs and Enlightenment Before the Storm
After the religious wars settled down, Switzerland entered a long stretch of stability. Sounds good, right? Problem is, this stability was mostly about a small group of rich families locking everyone else out of power. Then getting surprised when people got angry.
Chapter 4 of A Concise History of Switzerland covers 1713 to 1798. The story of how the Swiss old order hardened, cracked, and finally collapsed when the French showed up.
The oligarchs in charge
The Peace of Aarau fixed the religious balance between Protestants and Catholics. Left the patrician oligarchies untouched though. In every canton, a tiny group of families controlled everything. Political offices, mercenary recruitment, land, economic activity.
These families kept shrinking the club. In Fribourg, only three new families joined the patriciate between 1627 and 1782. In Berne, just 68 families ruled 200,000 people. In Lucerne, they reduced ruling families to 29 and said no new ones could join unless an existing one died out. About 10,000 people out of 1.7 million had any political role.
The Bernese lords invested in British shares and government funds. They monopolized lucrative bailiff posts. Barely needed taxes anymore. Built grand mansions and saw themselves as heirs of the ancient Roman republic and of William Tell at the same time.
The Diet was basically useless. There was a joke that it would not agree snow falls in winter without checking with the cantons first. No army, no finances, no real administration.
People push back
Not a system that went unchallenged. Throughout the century, ordinary people and excluded elites kept pushing back. They usually lost, but they kept trying.
In 1723, a Vaudois notary named Abraham Davel marched his militia on Lausanne demanding an end to Bernese domination. He was tricked, captured, and quickly executed. His courage on the scaffold made him a folk hero.
In Berne itself, Samuel Henzi was denied a librarian position because he was not from the right family. He joined a plot to overthrow the regime. The plot was betrayed. Henzi was executed in 1749. The playwright Lessing wrote a play about him.
Geneva was the worst. A tiny elite of “citizens” controlled everything while “habitants” had no rights but paid taxes. By the 1720s, habitants were half the population. Revolts in the 1730s forced Berne, Zurich, and France to send in troops. The oligarchs accepted French domination rather than share power. Classic move.
The Enlightenment changes the conversation
What makes this chapter interesting: the same patricians who crushed dissent were often educated, cultured people. Switzerland produced real intellectual heavyweights. The Bernoulli brothers and Euler in mathematics. Lavater in psychology. Bodmer and Breitinger in literature. Albrecht von Haller wrote a famous poem about the Alps that made mountains fashionable across Europe.
Newspapers appeared. Reading societies spread. Coffee houses and salons opened. Voltaire lived on Geneva’s border. Rousseau was a citizen of Geneva. The Encyclopedie was printed at Yverdon. Edward Gibbon was sent to study in Lausanne. Switzerland became a hub for Enlightenment ideas, and those ideas were corrosive to oligarchic rule.
The Helvetic Society, founded in 1762, tried to build a sense of Swiss national identity across the religious divide. Its members wanted to modernize the country. Isaak Iselin even drafted a model constitution. When the society got too critical of the old order though, the elites forced it to tone down. The Bernese Economic Society was simply shut down.
The economy shifts power
Meanwhile, the economy was changing everything. Population grew past 1.7 million. Cotton spinning and weaving spread through eastern Switzerland using the putting-out system. Watch manufacturing expanded from Geneva into the Jura. By the 1780s, a quarter of the population depended on manufacturing. Some scholars call this the beginning of Switzerland’s industrial take-off.
The catch: all this economic growth was happening in rural areas and small towns, not in the capital cities where the oligarchs sat. New middle classes were rising. Textile entrepreneurs, commercial farmers, skilled workers. They had money and education but zero political rights. Not a stable situation.
The French Revolution arrives
When the French Revolution hit in 1789, the Swiss oligarchs had no flexibility left. Reading societies popped up in small towns. Exiles in Paris created the Club Helvetique. Frederic Cesar de La Harpe, a Vaudois lawyer tutoring the Russian tsar’s grandsons, wrote articles demanding freedom for Vaud from St. Petersburg. Berne proscribed him even though he was in Russia.
The Diet declared neutrality but was too divided to prepare for anything. Cantons made tiny concessions. Berne offered to let a few Vaudois into the political class. All too little, too late.
By late 1797, La Harpe and Peter Ochs of Basle were in Paris talking with the French Directory about invading Switzerland. Napoleon had already crossed Swiss territory and gotten a hero’s welcome from reformers. The French saw Swiss land, money, and alpine routes as strategic prizes.
On January 25, 1798, the Diet broke up without military preparations. The French occupied Vaud days later. In March, Berne fell after a pointless battle at Grauholz. The old order was done.
What went wrong
The oligarchs were too successful for their own good. They crushed every challenge for a century. Never had to compromise. So when a real threat came, they had no allies, no flexibility, and no unified defense. The Catholic cantons refused to coordinate. The Diet could not agree on anything.
As Church and Head put it, Swiss stability proved illusory. The collapse of the old order after 1797 opened the way for a half-century of troubled attempts to create something new.
This post is part of a series retelling A Concise History of Switzerland by Clive H. Church and Randolph C. Head (Cambridge University Press, 2013, ISBN: 978-0-521-14382-0). All facts and interpretations come from the book.