The Helvetic Republic 665
in its shell.”^3 There was religious variety from place to place, but no religious free-
dom for individual persons. There were no uniform coinage, weights, or measures.
Defendants in criminal cases were liable to torture, and newspaper editors to in-
timidation and censorship. Transportation was rudimentary, even in the lowlands.
There were about a hundred “internal” tariffs. Business and labor in the towns were
regulated by conservative gilds, of which there were some thirty in Zurich alone.
In many places the rural people were subject, even more than in more modernized
monarchies, to heavy manorial dues and to seigneurial jurisdiction. There was cer-
tainly none of the equality among language groups for which modern Switzerland
is famed. If the Swiss ruling classes spoke French, as they did, it was because
French was then spoken by all ruling classes of central Europe. The country was
uniformly republican in having no king, nor did it have much of a titled nobility;
but with its burghers and patricians, its gilds and seigneuries and locally estab-
lished churches, it was a picture- book example of what the eighteenth century, still
unused to the word “medieval,” simply called “Gothic.”
That the Swiss remained independent, and had so long managed to stay out of
European wars, was due more to the balance of power between France and the
Hapsburgs, and to the small size of the neighboring German and Italian states,
than to any power or wisdom in the town oligarchs and rural notables of the
thirteen cantons with their allied and subject districts. Swiss independence was
threatened by the French Revolution and the ensuing war. So was the territorial
integrity of the country, especially since the marginal zones on all sides except the
north were only loosely attached, enjoying no equality with the inner centers. In
the Drei Bünde there was always an Austrian influence. In 1797 the Valtellina
went to the new Italy, to which it still belongs. The French occupied the Bishopric
of Basel in 1792, and at the same time took over, from the King of Sardinia, the
region of Savoy which adjoined and resembled French Switzerland. Geneva had
always been separate. Disaffection against Bern was very active in the Vaud and
the Valais.
A partition of Switzerland was a clear possibility in these years. Under pressure
of war and revolution, Switzerland would either fall to pieces or emerge more solid
than before. For the fact that it emerged more solid at least two reasons can be
given. There was, in all the institutional pulverization, a certain consciousness of
common culture and common identity as Swiss, arising from memories of a shared
defense of local liberties against outside powers. Secondly, there was the political
revolution that produced the Helvetic Republic. The borders of this republic, like
those of the Batavian, and unlike those of the Cisalpine or Roman, coincided with
3 E. Chapuisat, La Suisse et la Révolution française (Geneva, c. 1946), 262. This is a popular sum-
mary by a man who devoted many scholarly monographs to the same and related subjects. See also the
book- length article on the Helvetic Republic by Arnold Rufer in Dictionnaire historique et biographique
de la Suisse, 7 vols. (Neuchâtel, 1921–1933); or the same in German, Hist. biog. Lexicon... (Neuren-
burg, 1921–1934). Rufer and Chapuisat are the two outstanding authorities of the past generation on
eighteenth- century Switzerland. The principal source collections are the Ochs correspondence and J.
Strickler, Actensammlung aus der Zeit der helvetischen Republik, 1798–1803, 12 vols. (Bern, 1886–1940),
of which A. Rufer took over the editorship on Stickler’s death. See Rufer’s account in Zeits. für schw.
Gesch. (1952), 261–63. Very full also of information and documents on the subject are several chapters
of J. Godechot, Commissaires aux armées sous le Directoire, 2 vols. (Paris, 1938).