666 Chapter XXVIII
the borders of a group of people who had some sense of identity as a nation. The
idea of a Swiss people was in the realm of the possible. Much that was durable was
accomplished in the Helvetic Republic, whose main features were confirmed in
the Napoleonic Act of Mediation of 1803, and reconfirmed at the Congress of
Vienna. It is universally agreed that modern Switzerland dates from 1798.
Geneva: Revolution and Annexation
Although it never belonged either to the old confederation or to the Helvetic Re-
public, it is well to say something first of Geneva, because its fate, annexation to
France in 1798, pointed up the dangers to which much of Switzerland was
exposed.
At Geneva, when the Revolution broke out in France, there were still at least
four different levels of persons: the citoyens, the bourgeois and the natifs of the city,
and the sujets who lived in the few square miles of its rural territory. The natifs,
“natives” for several generations, had no political rights, but could live and work in
the city. A few were well- to- do, but mostly they formed the lowest economic class.
The sujets were an inert peasantry. As already related, the preceding quarter- century
had re- echoed to the clashes of citoyens and bourgeois, with the natifs playing a
minor role and occasionally receiving a few concessions. Since 1763 there had
been two opposed parties, one called the Négatifs, representing the old principle of
government by a closed corporation of self- co- opting governing families, the other
called the Représentants, not because they favored “representative” government
(which was still unknown at Geneva) but because, by making “representations” or
complaints against the government, they had come to espouse a democratic or at
least anti- aristocratic position. There had been an abrupt counter- revolution in
1782, followed by an “aristocratic resurgence.” The patrician Négatifs, supported by
the intervention of France, Zurich, and Bern, had managed to undo the changes
made since the 1760’s. Their Edict of Pacification, guaranteed by France, Zurich,
and Bern, was called the Black Code by the defeated Représentant or democratic
party, some of whom were banished from the city, while others went into voluntary
exile, mostly in France.^4
The Revolution in France radically transformed the state of affairs in Geneva.^5
For one thing, the aristocratic party had repeatedly depended on intervention by
the French monarchy, along with Zurich and Bern, to protect itself against Gene-
vese opposition. From no government in France after 1789 could the Geneva pa-
tricians expect so much sympathy. On the contrary, French official action was now
more likely to favor the Genevese democrats. The exiles favored such pressure, and
one of them, the banker Etienne Clavière, was even thought to favor the annexa-
tion of Geneva to France as early as 1789. The fact that Protestants and Catholics
in France now had the same rights, and that the French state no longer defined
4 Above, pp. 391–99, 476–77.
5 For the following paragraphs see Histoire de Genève des origines à 1798 publiée per la Société
d ’ histoire et d ’archéologie de Genève (Geneva, c. 1950), in which the pages by E. Chapuisat and F. Bar-
bey, 495–538, review the years from 1789 to 1798. There is a large literature.