104 Chapter V
the Guarantors told them they were “in the State, but not of it,” since they did
not constitute an Order.^29 Such language only confirmed the grievance that
many Natives were beginning to feel, that they remained outsiders or second-
class citizens, generation after generation. They objected, too, to the discrimina-
tion which kept them out of wholesale business and certain other trades and
professions, for which they blamed the self- protectionism and economic jealousy
of the Burghers. The Natives were therefore divided; some thought that they must
first ally with the Burgher Représentants against the patriciate and the Small
Council; others so distrusted the Burghers that they hoped to gain more by alli-
ance with the patricians. Isaac Cornuaud, for example, a Native leader who was to
favor annexation to France in 1798, and whose poli tical career began thirty years
before in these disputes of the 1760’s, thought very much like a Tronchin or a
Burke that Rousseau was a fanciful and dangerous thinker, that the Small Council
had acted rightly in banning his books, and that the Burgher Représentants were
troublemakers, actuated by pride, whose new “pretensions” would if successful
make the lot of the Natives worse. The Burghers, he said, wanted liberty only for
themselves.^30
Thus a pattern already appeared that was to be repeated many times later in
many countries, of a lower class more interested in its economic welfare than in
constitutional forms, and likely to support either Liberal or Conservative, Whig or
Tory, revolution or counterrevolution as might seem best. In 1768, most of the Na-
tives favored the Représentants, so far as they took sides at all. They received, as
noted, a few concessions in the Edict of 1768, one of which, however, merely en-
abled a few well- to- do natifs to pass into the bourgeoisie. They continued to agitate,
meet in their own “circles,” publish pamphlets, and make various demands. One
who refused to write natif de Genève after his name was banished for ten years.
Some took to wearing swords, which at Geneva was a Burgher right. In 1770 a
great demonstration of the Natives was put down by force, the Burghers camping
in the streets to preserve order. The General Council—that is, the Sovereign Peo-
ple according to advanced Burgher doctrine—voted 1,182 to 99 that anyone seek-
ing to alter the statute of the Natives might be punished even by capital punish-
ment. The Native circles were dissolved as subversive. A number of Native leaders,
including Cornuaud, fled from the city. Enough had happened to show that the
Geneva middle class did not intend to share the fruits of its revolution, and that
the lower class did not intend to accept it.
It is significant also, in all these events, to trace the activities of Voltaire. The
departure of Rousseau left the Lord of Ferney in philosophical domination of the
scene. With Rousseau gone, Voltaire ceased to be an outright partisan of the Ge-
neva patricians. He came to conclude, as their dispute with the Représentants ma-
tured, that the two governing councils at Geneva were mere closed and privileged
bodies, like the Parlement of Paris, whose obstruction to royal reforms in France at
this same time he was watching with a disapproving eye. If in these years Voltaire
proved his attachment to enlightened monarchy by supporting Maupeou against
29 D’Ivernois, Ta bl e a u, 317.
30 Mémoires de Isaac Cornuaud sur Genève et la Revolution de 1770 à 1795 (Geneva, 1912), 1–9.