The Helvetic Republic 673
inside and outside the governing group, were convinced that the existing order in
Switzerland was no longer viable and that the rural areas and subject districts must
somehow be allowed to participate in a common life along with the old ruling
cantons. They too were annoyed at Bern, where the council tried to use its influ-
ence with the other cantons to prevent discussion of the French Revolution and of
new ideas for Switzerland.
The situation at Zurich was explosive, thanks to what the Swiss call the Stäfa
affair. Stäfa is a village about a dozen miles from Zurich, to which it was then
subject. It had a reading society, four of whose members drew up a memorial in
1794 addressed to the city, requesting an equalization of rights between town and
country, more freedom of entrance into occupations and schools, and the buying
up of certain seigneurial dues. Against the appeals for moderation by various no-
tables of the city, such as Pestalozzi, Usteri, and the physiognomist Lavater, the
Zurich government dispatched 2,000 troops to Stäfa, and punished no fewer than
260 persons by fine or imprisonment. The ruling elements, to quote a modern
Swiss, proved immovable to the point “where even contact with their subject peo-
ple had been entirely lost.”^10 As with Bern and the Lausanne banquet of 1791, so
with Zurich and Stäfa, the obstinacy of the authorities, and the extreme dispro-
portion between the punishment and the offence, left a great many people pro-
foundly disaffected. They were to prove in 1798, not essentially pro- French, but in
favor of some kind of radical change and unwilling to defend their own govern-
ments against French intervention.
Bonaparte, returning to Paris from Italy, was determined to secure the commu-
nications of France with the Cisalpine Republic, through control of the upper
Rhone valley and the Simplon pass. This meant extending French influence in
Vaud and Valais, the very heart of French- speaking Switzerland in which discon-
tent with the Bern oligarchy was so strong. La Harpe, the chief spokesman for the
discontented French Swiss, had been established as an exile in Paris for some
years, and now began to work closely with Bonaparte. At the moment he was not
eager to merge his countrymen with the German Swiss, to be swallowed up in a
“German ocean,” as he put it, and he proposed to the French Directory, in Septem-
ber 1797, that France intervene to obtain the independence, under French protec-
tion, of the Pays de Vaud and adjoining areas. He entered also into correspondence
with Peter Ochs, who, though himself bilingual, was the recognized leader among
German Swiss who desired a transformation of their country. For both Ochs and
La Harpe the main problem was to overcome the resistance of the conservative
oligarchies at Bern, Zurich, and elsewhere.
Ochs feared also that the city of Basel was in danger of being annexed to France,
as the territory of the bishopric of Basel had been annexed already; and one of his
reasons for desiring a quick revolution was that the overthrow of conservative and
pro- Austrian elements would remove the excuses for French intervention. Ochs
and La Harpe, at the end of 1797, while remaining for two years the principal
10 The reviewer in Schweizerische Zeitsehrijt für Geschiehte (1957), 400, commenting on W. von
Wartburg, Zürich und die französischen Revolution (Basel, 1956).