676 Chapter XXVIII
lutionaries said they wanted the Paris constitution, which provided for “represen-
tative democracy” in a unitary republic.
In March General Brune, upon orders from Paris, proclaimed a Rhodanic or
Rhone Republic under the Paris constitution, and a Helvetic Republic under the
Basel constitution, with a third entity, the Tellgau, named for William Tell, where
the regime was yet to be determined. The Rhone Republic, in this plan, was to
embrace the non- German parts of the old confederation, in general from Laus-
anne to Locarno.^15 The Helvetic would be essentially the northern region of the
German- speaking cities. The Tellgau would be the region of the “primitive” and
old- fashioned democratic and Catholic cantons of the high mountains. Since the
whole eastern area of the Grisons (Dreibünde or Graubunden) was not occupied
by the French, and might fall to Austria, and since Neuchâtel and Geneva were at
no time under consideration, it is evident that by this plan what the world thinks
of as Switzerland would have been dissolved. Nevertheless, there were forces in
Switzerland to which the plan might appeal, or at least seem preferable to any al-
ternative then in sight. The conservative old cantons might prefer to be let alone in
an Alpine Tellgau, and the Latin and Germanic peoples of Switzerland had never
yet lived together on a plane of equality.
La Harpe, overcoming his fears of a German majority, now threw his influence
in Paris against such a partition and in favor of a unified Switzerland. Swiss patri-
ots and revolutionaries generally took the same view, even if the new order had to
be imposed on the conservative cantons by force, through the action of a far more
centralized government than Switzerland had ever known. For the French, there
was an obvious advantage in a unified Switzerland in which their influence might
exclude that of other outside powers. The Directory therefore sent new instruc-
tions to Brune, who on March 22 proclaimed a single unitary Helvetic Republic
under the Paris constitution. This was the constitution which Ochs had drafted,
which the French had amended, which the Swiss now accepted as the price of
preserving their territorial integrity, and which, being unitary and consolidationist,
gave the Swiss revolutionary leaders, and the French commissioners sent to work
with them, the means to restrain aristocratic, oligarchical, counter- revolutionary,
federalist, and secessionist tendencies. A Helvetic legislature began to sit at Aarau,
with Peter Ochs as president of the Senate; and a Helvetic Directory of five mem-
bers, chosen by this legislature, assumed the executive power.
The new constitution introduced a legal homogeneity, or equality of rights be-
tween town and country and between region and region. The entire territory was
laid out in legally equal cantons. To the thirteen already existing, among which
Bern and Zurich were reduced in size, were now added a number of others: the
German- speaking Thurgau, Aargau, and St. Gallen; the mixed French and Ger-
man Valais; the French Léman (the old Pays de Vaud); and for the old Italian-
speaking baillages or Vogteien two new cantons, Bellinzona and Lugano, which
were combined into the single canton of Ticino in 1803.^16 The constitution also
15 E. Mottaz, “La République rhodanique” in Zeits. f. schw. Gesch. (1947), 61–79, in addition to
more general accounts.
16 The fact is that all the modern Swiss cantons whose date of entrance into the confederation is
officially listed as 1803 or 1815 (the Act of Mediation or the Congress of Vienna), with the exception