670 Chapter XXVIII
Protestant pastors who had expressed patriot views at the same banquet were
removed from their churches; one was sentenced to prison for four years. Rosset
was condemned to twenty- five years’ confinement at Chillon. Rescued from the
Château by audacious friends, he fled to America, where he was joined by another
Vaudois patriot, J. J. Cart. John Adams saw them in Philadelphia, and mentioned
them to Jefferson. Adams was amazed that the “canton of Bern could have been
so tyrannical,” but the two Americans thought little more about such matters.^7
Four years later, in the Helvetic Republic, Americans could see nothing but French
aggression.
The Swiss revolutionaries were in truth a mild group of men, the easier to over-
look for that reason. Neither then nor by their historians were they often called
“Jacobins.” Radical tendencies, with adoption of a natural- rights philosophy in
criticism of the old order, were more common in the French- speaking than the
German- speaking wing of the Helvetic movement, as shown for example in F. C.
La Harpe of the Vaud in contrast to Paulus Usteri of Zurich. The fact that before
1798 no French- speaking area enjoyed cantonal status would be enough to explain
the sharper demand for liberty and equality, which in any case the closer ties with
French thought and culture would reinforce. The German Swiss were less differen-
tiated from the Germans than they later became, if only because Germany itself
was not yet the Germany of Bismarck. Valuing their historic traditions, they shared
with the Germans a tendency to historicist theories of law and constitutionalism,
and saw in a Swiss revolution a need mainly to amplify and extend things already
excellent in themselves. Like many Germans, the German Swiss also took a some-
what moralizing view of revolution, deploring all violence as unseemly, believing
that the state existed to make men good rather than happy, and holding that only
men of elevated character and high ideals should have an influence in politics. Like
good Germans, they could look on the French with a certain condescension. The
Swiss republican party, one of them wrote, “would wed what is great and true in
the maxims of the French Revolution to the results of German morality and
higher philosophical culture.”^8
7 L. J. Cappon, ed., The Adams- Jefferson Letters, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), I, 253 ff.; on
Rosset and the Vaudois banquets, C. Burnier, La vie vaudoise et la Révolution (Lausanne, 1902), 212–
38; on the arrest of the pastors, P. Wernle, Der schweizerische Protestantismus im XVIII Jahrhundert, 3
vols. (Tübingen, 1925), III, 517. There is a large specialized literature on the Vaudois revolution, much
of it published by the Société Vaudoise d’histoire et d’archéologie. That Americans saw only French
aggression in the Helvetic Republic seems substantially true, but can be qualified. The American
traveler, Joseph Sansom, who inclined to Federalism in American politics, visited Switzerland in
1801, and, upon learning of the Swiss old regime, remarked: “Yet a free and equal Citizen of the
American Republic, whether naturalized or native born, can see but little to regret in the exchange of
a despotic Oligarchy for a Foreign Dictator—of oppressive prescriptions for forced loans—of National
Independence for Individual emancipation.” Letters from Europe during a Tour through Switzerland and
Italy in the Years 1801 and 1802, Written by a native of Pennsylvania, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1805), I, 106.
8 Quoted by E. His, Geschichte des neuern schweizerischen staatsrechts, 3 vols. (Basel, 1920–1938),
I, 679, n. 13. On Germanic- Kantian and French- natural- rights attitudes in Switzerland see also W.
von Wartburg, “Zur Weltanschauung und Staatslehre des frühen schweizerische Liberalismus” in
Schw. Zeits. f. Gesch. (1959), 1–40, and H. Büchi, “Die politischen Parteien im ersten schweizerischen
Parlament (12 Apr. 1798 to 7 Aug. 1800): Die Begründung des Gegensatzes zwischen deutschen und
welscher Schweitz” in Politisches Jahrbuch der schw. Eidgenossenschaft, X X XI (1917), 153–428.