664 Chapter XXVIII
called Switzerland. They were associated for external defense in a perpetual “oath-
fellowship” or Eidgenossenschaft; not until the eighteenth century did the term
come to signify a territory as well as merely a league. All the oath- fellows were
German- speaking. They were bound to certain “allied districts” by arrangements
which varied in each case. The largest of the allied districts were the Bishopric of
Basel (from which the city of Basel had separated when it turned Protestant in
the sixteenth century); the Abbey of St. Gallen; the Valais (or German Wallis),
which was in the upper Rhone valley above Lake Geneva; and the eastern part
of Switzerland which is now the canton of Graubunden, but was then called the
Drei Bünde, or Three Leagues, one of which was in turn composed of the Ten
Jurisdictions. There was a third general category, called the “subject districts.”
These were areas conquered in past centuries from the dukes of Savoy or Bur-
gundy by one, several or all the cantons together. Thus the French- speaking Pays
de Vaud, north and east of Lake Geneva, belonged to the German- speaking
canton and city of Bern. Among the subject districts were also the “common
lordships,” which belonged to the cantons as a group, or to two or more of them,
or to the Drei Bünde. The largest were Thurgau, east of Zurich, and various
Italian- speaking regions, such as the area about Locarno and the part of the Adda
valley called the Valtellina. After a revolt against the Drei Bünde in 1797, the
Valtellina was incorporated into the Cisalpine Republic. To add to the variety, the
present French- speaking cantons of Geneva and Neuchâtel did not belong to the
confederation at all; Neuchâtel was a principality of the King of Prussia, and
Geneva was an independent republic, connected with the cantons only by treaties
of specific import.
Local liberties flourished. In the “democratic” cantons of the high valleys, Uri,
Schwyz, Zug, and Unterwalden—isolated, small, rural, and Catholic—there was a
good deal of local direct democracy, which the inhabitants preferred to keep as
local as possible. (These four democratic cantons, however, despite a popular idea
current even then, accounted for less than a twentieth of the population of Swit-
zerland.) In the city- cantons, Zurich, Bern, and Basel (as in Geneva), which were
busy, Protestant, and fully in touch with Europe, local liberties meant a corporate
independence in the councils and constituted bodies described in the first volume.
Their citizenship was a tightly held privilege. “An inhabitant of Zurich who has
the right of citizenship,” said the Russian traveler Karamzin, “is as proud of this as
a king of his crown.”^1 Certain families enjoyed a hereditary monopoly in the pow-
ers of government. There were local liberties of a kind even in the subject districts,
which, however, were actually governed, taxed and in fact exploited by members of
the ruling families sent out from the dominant cantons. Local liberties and privi-
leges were everywhere, for this or that kind of people, but as Peter Ochs remarked
in 1796: “To be born in Switzerland gives no rights whatsoever.”^2
There was no Swiss state, Swiss citizenship, Swiss law, or even Swiss govern-
ment except for some purposes in foreign relations. Each canton lived “like a snail
1 N. M. Karamzin, Letters of a Russian Traveler, 1789–1790 (New York, 1957), 131.
2 Korrespondenz des Peter Ochs, 3 vols. (Basel, 1927–1937), II, 36.