Aristocracy: The Constituted Bodies 29
zens who qualified to sit in the governing councils were designated as “patricians”
in 1651. Eighty families held the offices in 1651, sixty- eight in 1787. The town had
only about 11,000 inhabitants; its importance, and the value of its offices, lay in the
fact that the town governed the country, i.e., the rural parts of the canton of Bern,
as well as various “subject districts” in other parts of Switzerland. Government is
said to have been honest and efficient, but it could also be profitable; a young Bern
patrician could make enough to live on for life in about six years through govern-
ing one of the subject districts, such as the Vaud, the region about Lausanne.^10
Basel was more of a middle- class or merchant aristo- democracy. Trade did not
derogate, as at Milan; nor did its upper class earn a living by government, as at
Bern. Half its people were citizens, half non- citizens, or Hintersässen, but no one
received citizenship between 1763 and 1781, and in 1781 it was decided to admit
no new citizens until 1790. Since the middle of the seventeenth century power
had come into the hands of a few families, including the Burckhardts, to which
the famous nineteenth- century historian belonged. Government was through a
council which chose the magistrates and filled vacancies in its own ranks; politics
within this council were dominated by the trade gilds. Of all magistrates chosen
between 1529 and 1798 almost half belonged to the gild of big merchants known
as the Key.^11
Geneva, the city of Calvin and Rousseau, renowned among European intellec-
tuals as the model republic, was an independent little place of 25,000 people, in
most ways not yet really united with the Swiss confederation. The much- traveled
William Coxe thought it halfway between the aristocratic and popular cantons.
Five orders of persons lived under its laws; at the top, the “citizens,” who had the
legal right to hold office, and of whom Rousseau was one; next, the “burghers,”
who had the right to vote but not to hold office; next the habitants, who had cer-
tain rights to carry on trades in the city, but no political rights; then the natifs, born
in the city but not of citizen or burgher parentage; and finally the sujets, the rural
people outside the city, and governed by it. Government was by a Small Council
(of twenty- five members) and a large Council of Two Hundred. The latter elected,
or in fact confirmed in office from year to year, the members of the Small Council,
which in turn designated the membership of the Two Hundred. By this system of
mutual co- optation a few families had come to monopolize office, and so to create
what was in effect a sixth order of patricians. The remaining citizens, who had the
right to hold office but never did so, became indistinguishable in practice from the
burghers. Burghers and citizens, some 1,500 in number, met in a kind of town-
meeting along the lines of direct democracy in a General Council, and there pro-
ceeded to elect four syndics or executive officers of the city; but they elected from
a slate proposed by the Small Council of twenty- five, which always put up its own
members as candidates. Democracy was thus held in a tight leash at Geneva, but
it never submitted entirely. As the Encyclopedia Britannica put it in 1797, “during
10 Ibid., “Berne”; G. L. von Maurer, Geschichte der Städteverjassung in Deutschland (Erlangen, 1871),
III, 760. Larger figures for the number of families qualified to hold office were given by a contempo-
rary in 1785 (see below, p. 273); but the matter was uncertain at best, and “family” may of course mean
either a household or a larger group of related persons.
11 Dict.... de la Suisse, “Bâle.”