30 Chapter II
the whole of the last century the history of Geneva affords little more than an
account of the struggles between the aristocratical and popular parties.”
The most famous of all citizens of Geneva, Jean- Jacques Rousseau, was of one of
the lesser families whose members never held office. Albert Gallatin, Jefferson’s
Secretary of the Treasury, was born a Geneva patrician in 1761. We have observed
how his grandfather mixed with the French nobility. Gallatin himself tells in his
memoirs, as a good Jeffersonian democrat, how he chafed at the aristocratic sur-
roundings of his boyhood, spurned his grandmother’s offer to get him a commis-
sion in a Hessian regiment bound for America, and emigrated to the New World
on his own initiative instead.^12
The free cities of Germany, some fifty in number, were in some ways like the
more urban of the Swiss cantons and are of interest for the light they throw on the
German middle class. Like the Swiss towns, they varied. Nuremberg, for example,
was highly aristocratic—”the very El Dorado of family rule right down to our own
days,” as a writer in the time of Bismarck said. Its governing council and higher
offices were filled by members of twenty families. These patricians permitted no
one but themselves to wear swords or hats with plumes. Their sons studied and
traveled at public expense. Their daughters received dowries from the city treasury.
Cologne was more democratic in that, as at Basel, the gilds had in principle a good
deal of influence. The Cologne gilds elected the members of the town council. But
here, too, the same tendency toward self- perpetuating magistracy was apparent.
Resistance of the citizens to these usurpations, sporadic since 1680, began in ear-
nest in 1774, and lasted until the arrival of the French armies in the war of the
French Revolution. Similarly at Speier the gild rule of the fourteenth century be-
came the rule of the Thirteen in the seventeenth century and of the Five in the
eighteenth—and the French in 1792 were at first regarded by many as liberators.^13
Frankfurt was a commercial and governmental city, with a population very
mixed in religion. A proverb had it that at Frankfurt the Lutherans spent their
time in government, the Catholics in prayer, and the Calvinists in making money.
There was also a large Jewish community. The governing council chose its own
members, who served for life. Any citizen, if a Lutheran and the son of a citizen,
might legally be chosen, but in fact the usual family monopolies developed in the
council and the offices, of which there were no less than 500 for a town of 30,000.
The citizenry had a keen sense of group identity as contrasted to the Beisassen, or
permanent non- citizen residents. Office- holding and the ownership of real estate
were privileges of the citizens, who also enjoyed more freedom in their business or
occupations than the Beisassen. Calvinists could not belong to gilds, and Catholics
only under certain restrictions. Affluent merchants yearned for nobility, and thirty-
four of them in the eighteenth century obtained it by patent from the Holy Roman
Empire. The uncle of Goethe, the city’s most famous son, even wrote a book in the
1740’s recommending creation of a merchant nobility in which a man might enjoy
noble status without having to withdraw from trade. An ordinance of 1731 divided
12 Dict... de la Suisse, “Genève”; G. Vallette, Jean- Jacques Rousseau Genevois (Geneva and Paris,
1911).
13 Von Maurer, op. cit., IV, 146–47, 160.