Conclusion to Part II 171
In its administration Bern showed itself to be broadly conservative.829 French
remained the language of government, though Bern now subsumed all its acquisi-
tions under the title of Pays de Vaud, whether they had been part of Savoyard Vaud
or not.830 The conquered territory was initially divided into six bailiwicks; not
until 1560 were ten new bailiwicks created.831 The bailiffs (or castellans, or gover-
nors) were all drawn from the Bernese elite (previously they had been Savoyard
noblemen), who were obliged to reside in their bailiwicks, unlike some other Swiss
city-states.832 Nevertheless, the Vaud remained a land of nobles, once described
by Herbert Lüthy as a ‘sorte de parc nobiliaire’ in a Switzerland dominated by
bourgeois oligarchs.833 For their part, the communes of the Vaud retained much of
their autonomy (except in religion), though the bonnes villes of the Vaud, which
had once numbered fourteen,834 were in Bern’s territory reduced to four (Morges,
Moudon, Nyon, and Yverdon).835 Bern’s one radical act (though it merely aligned
the Vaud to the rest of Bern’s territory) was to abolish the Estates of the Vaud. In
1570, when the city imposed a new excise to clear all outstanding debts from
before 1536, it convoked an assembly dubbed the ‘Estates of our land of Savoy’,
though in reality those summoned were chosen from the bailiwicks, rather than
being members of Estates as social corporations.836 In the end, Bern’s aggression
yielded to accommodation—with Fribourg, with the communes of the Vaud, and
even, albeit through gritted teeth, with the pattern of Reformed Protestantism
which Calvin introduced in Geneva.
829 See François Flouck, Patrick-R. Monbaron, Marianne Stubenvoll, and Danièle Tosato-Rigo
(eds), De l’ours à la cocarde. Régime bernois et révolution en Pays de Vaud (1536–1798) (Lausanne,
1998).
830 The ecclesiastical lands of the bishopric of Lausanne, and the Chablais bailiwicks of Vevey,
Gex, Ternier, and Évian, that is, stretching round to the south shore of Lake Geneva. Denis Tappy, ‘Les
États de Vaud: De l’assemblée savoyarde au mythe révolutionnaire’, in Agostino Paravicini Bagliani
and Jean-François Poudret (eds), La Maison de Savoie et le Pays de Vaud (Bibliothèque Historique
Vaudoise, 97) (Lausanne, 1989), 245–96, here at 250.
831 Barbara Katharina Studer Immenhauser, Verwaltung zwischen Innovation und Tradition.
Die Stadt Bern und ihr Untertanengebiet 1250–1550 (Mittelalter-Forschungen, 19) (Ostfildern, 2006),
- The new districts were Avenches, Haut-Crêt, Lausanne, Morges, Moudon, Nyon, Payerne,
Romainmôtier, Vevey, and Yverdon.
832 Studer Immenhauser, Verwaltung, 398, 415, 428.
833 Quoted in Marianne Stubenvoll, ‘La noblesse vaudoise: jalons d’une recherche’, in Flouck et al.,
De l’ours à la coquarde, 311–23, here at 311. It is notable that after 1536 the nobility of the Vaud did
not follow the duke of Savoy into exile.
834 Bruening, Calvinism’s First Battleground, 19.
835 Tappy, États, 138. Payerne was allowed to choose its own magistrate, not a Bernese bailiff.
836 Denis Tappy, ‘La conquête bernoise et les États de Vaud’, in Holenstein, Berns mächtige Zeit,
76–9, here at 77.