A Clash with Democracy 97
of the Syndics, but only as between candidates who belonged to the governing
group. The Burghers were also confirmed by the Act of 1738 in the right of mak-
ing “representations” to the Syndics and Small Council; these were protests or re-
monstrances to be made by groups of interested Burghers, not by the General
Council as such, when they judged “proper for the good of the State.”
Within this constitutional framework great economic changes were taking
place. It was at this time that Switzerland became famous for watch- making.
Where there had been only 680 persons employed at watch- making at Geneva in
1686, the number rose to 6,000 in 1799; it may have been even higher a decade or
two before, before the loss of markets in the Revolutionary wars. The watch-
makers (of whom Rousseau’s father had been one) were a skilled and alert group of
men. The Act of 1738 allowed Natives to enter watch- making and a few other
trades; but Natives were still debarred from most occupations above the artisan
level. There was no absolute occupational difference between Burghers and Na-
tives, but in general the growth of the industry, as watch- making was called (la
fabrique), had enriched many of the Burghers through commercial and managerial
operations in connection with watches, and turned many of the Natives into a
trained, self- conscious, and self- respecting body of workers. “The rapid revolution
which was taking place in commerce and the arts,” wrote the Genevese d’Ivernois
in 1782, “made it necessary for the different classes to have contacts with each
other every day.”^20 But the classes were unable to get together politically.
The Burghers were a politically conscious lot, who felt that Geneva had been
more democratic in former days, sensing the monopolizing of office by the patri-
cians, legalized in 1738, as a recent usurpation. In the 1730’s groups of Burghers
began to meet in cafés or in each other’s homes in informal cercles, in which as the
years passed the conversation became increasingly devoted to politics. There were
twelve such “circles” in the 1760’s. Geneva was not misgoverned by its patricians;
and the grievances of the Burghers were of the liberal kind, concerning taxes or
commercial policies or individual cases of injustice or police action or arrest. The
Natives did not begin to take an interest in public questions until the 1760’s. Their
thinking was then not so much political as economic; they were not so much con-
cerned with who governed or how, but complained of legal exclusion from the
more remunerative or prestige- conveying occupations, for which they rightly
blamed the Burghers as much as the patricians.
The Burghers adopted Rousseau as their hero when he resumed his citizenship
in 1754, and when in 1758 he came to their defense against Voltaire, d’Alembert
and the patricians in the dispute over the theater, which involved, as has been seen,
contradictory ideas of what Geneva ought to be. Their leaders were indignant
when the Small Council ordered Emile and the Social Contract to be lacerated and
burned, and Rousseau himself under arrest should he enter the territory of the re-
public. But they did nothing.
20 F. d’Ivernois, Tableau historique et politique des Révolutions de Genève (Geneva, 1782), 163. The
author, later knighted in England as Sir Francis D’Ivernois, was the son of the D’Ivernois who led the
Burgher party and tried to work with Rousseau after 1762. This book is the main contemporary
narrative.