The Helvetic Republic 671
The revolution of 1798 was for most of the Helvetic republicans a brief and not
even especially memorable episode in their lives. In no sense did the revolution
represent the intrusion and subsequent overthrow of new or unknown persons.
Most of the leaders were men of standing before 1798, though only Peter Ochs,
the most patrician of all, was at the head of a cantonal government. La Harpe
came from the aristocracy of the Vaud, but the Vaudois aristocracy was excluded
from the ruling oligarchies of Switzerland. Generally the innovators were men
who had traveled widely or developed extensive contacts outside Switzerland, so
that, while remaining well aware of the advantages of their own country, they were
free from the provincialism of self- adulation. Usteri, a medical doctor of Zurich,
was active also as a journalist in Leipzig and Augsburg. La Harpe had been tutor
to the Russian grand- dukes Alexander and Constantine, until ejected from Russia
for sympathy with the French Revolution. His fellow Vaudois, P. M. Glayre (who
like La Harpe and Ochs became a Director of the Helvetic Republic), had served
as adviser to the King of Poland during the Four Years’ Diet, and had long been
active in international Freemasonry. Peter Ochs owned property in France; his sis-
ter had married the man who became the first Revolutionary mayor of Strasbourg.
It was in his sister’s house that the music of the Marseillaise had been composed,
and in his own house that the treaties of Basel of 1795, by which France made
peace with Prussia and Spain, had been signed.^9
Most of the leaders enjoyed long and successful later careers, not discredited by
their experiment with revolution in 1798. Peter Ochs emerged the most stigma-
tized as a collaborator with the French (so much so that his two sons changed their
name to His in 1818); but even Ochs was respected by many persons in the Swit-
zerland set up by Napoleon’s Act of Mediation, and served as vice- burgomaster of
his native Basel in 1816. La Harpe, the most nearly “Jacobin” of the leaders, went
into retirement under Napoleon, but came forward in 1814 to defend the liberty of
Vaud against the claims of Bern at the Congress of Vienna, and spent another two
decades as leader of the Swiss liberal party until his death in 1838. Usteri, being a
doctor, served as a federal sanitary commissioner after 1800, and then, after 1814,
was active in the liberal party and press until he died in 1831. J. J. Cart, the fugitive
of 1794 in Philadelphia, served for fifteen years after 1798 as senator and appellate
judge in the Helvetic Republic. The Zurich educator, Heinrich Pestalozzi, who
received his first opportunity to try out his ideas when given charge of war orphans
by the Helvetic Directory in 1798, and who played a role as a republican journalist
at that time, went on writing, teaching, and observing child development until
- Pestalozzi’s benefactor among the Directors of 1798, J. L. Legrand from
Basel, lived on as a cotton spinner and philanthropist until 1836 in Alsace, where
he worked on religious and school problems with the pastor J. F. Oberlin, after
whom Oberlin, Ohio, was named.
The Helvetic revolution had its similarities and its differences to those that pro-
duced the other sister republics. Dutch and Italian revolutionaries, to advance their
aims, had relied on the war between France and its enemies; the Swiss thought
9 On Ochs before 1798 see 663–64; on the careers of all persons mentioned here, Dict. hist. et biog.
de la Suisse.