The Romandie Reconfigured 165
Valromey, and the Pays de Gex (the latter having recently come under Genevan
administration). That gave Charles Emmanuel the excuse he needed to seize
Geneva’s mandement of Gaillard, along with Faucigny and the Genevois.807 With
that any lingering hopes of Genevan territorial expansion were extinguished.
Not content with these gains, in 1602 the duke then launched an assault on
Geneva itself. The city—not least its womenfolk—offered heroic resistance in
what became known as the Escalade, and the duke’s forces were beaten off.808 Only
in 1603 in the Treaty of St-Julien in 1603 did Savoy finally recognize Geneva’s
independence. Geneva survived as a small city-state until 1815, governed by an
oligarchy, the sixteen hundred men who made up the Conseil Général, of whom a
later citizen of Geneva was to remark: ‘Le Conseil Général n’est pas un ordre dans
l’État; il est l’État même.’809
807 HLS, s.v. Lyon, Vertrag von.
808 Olivier Fatio and Béatrice Nicollier, Comprendre l’Escalade. Essai de géopolitique genevoise
(Geneva, 2002).
809 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Political Writings, 2, 217. Cited in Alfred Cobban, Rousseau and the
Modern State, 2nd rev edn (London, 1964), 45.