A Clash with Democracy 103
pared to the Declaratory Act of 1766 in which the British Parliament affirmed its
sovereignty over America. Or to the legally less explicit Declaration of Indepen-
dence, by which the American colonies took sovereign power to themselves. Or to
the theory of those Frenchmen who in June 1789 repudiated the three Estates and
called the National Assembly into being: “the Nation, when assembled, cannot be
given orders.” Matters in many quarters were reaching the point where someone
had to arrogate sovereignty. In the clash of claims and counterclaims, affirmations
and denials, appeals to ancient statutes and enactments made in contrary direc-
tions by contending parties, there had to be some power to decide.
At Geneva, at this time, no decision came from France, which did uphold the
ruling of the Guarantors by economic sanctions, but refused to follow them with
military force. A quick visit from Necker, who left his banking business in Paris,
purely in his private capacity as a Genevese citizen, failed like all other such at-
tempts to bring the parties together.
January 1768 came; it was again time for the annual election of Syndics. The
General Council again three times refused to elect any. Spokesmen for the Gen-
eral Council and for the Two Hundred came together desperately to seek a way
out. During the very night of their conference the new theater burned down; how,
is not known, but it could be made to look like a Burgher outrage. The Two Hun-
dred refused the proposals for conciliation. Burghers began carrying arms. Half the
circles declared themselves en permanence. It was beginning to look a little like a
real revolution. At this point, J. R. Tronchin, whose conservative integrity was
hardly open to question, prevailed on the more moderate in the Small Council and
in the Two Hundred to agree to terms. The result was the compromise Edict of
- It went through because many Négatifs, unconvinced, abstained from vot-
ing; they called it the Edict of Pistols.
The Edict of 1768 granted the General Council certain rights in election of
members of the Small. It prescribed that the General Council must elect Syndics,
who, however, might come not from the Small Council of Twenty- five but from
the larger Two Hundred if necessary. It added fifty members to the Two Hundred,
and provided for election of new members to it by the General Council. It also
made a limited and cautious provision by which a handful of Natives could be
made Burghers—for a fat fee of four thousand florins, or a little less for Natives
with several generations of residence. Natives were given a few trading rights, and
declared admissible to the professions of doctor, surgeon, and apothecary. The
whole quarrel was patched up with no mention of the case of Rousseau that had
unleashed it. Considering the height to which political argument had risen, the
Edict of 1768 was a compromise indeed.
But the Genevese revolution of 1768 was a bourgeois revolution in an unques-
tionable sense, carried through by men legally defined as bourgeois and citoyens of
Geneva. These men were scarcely conscious of the class below them as a political
force. Rousseau himself, in all the study he made of Geneva politics at Neuchâtel,
showed no interest in the Natives. The Natives, however, the three- quarters of the
population who were not Burghers, were also beginning to agitate. They too
began to hold meetings and discuss programs of action about 1765. When they
submitted a petition in 1766 the Small Council called it “criminal and seditious”;