678 Chapter XXVIII
The French influence lasted long enough for Swiss revolutionaries to proceed
with internal changes.
Internal Stresses in the Helvetic Republic
There is room only to mention some of these changes, which in any case resembled
those undertaken in other countries touched by the Revolution, and which, while
launched in 1798, were generally carried out, with various compromises, in the
years when Switzerland, like the rest of western Europe, was protected by the fa-
mous Emperor of the French.
From the beginning of the Helvetic legislature two parties developed. One, that
of the moderate revolutionaries, was led by Usteri of Zurich and other men from
the cities, who advised against haste and violence, thought that action should be
taken for the people but not by them, and imagined themselves to be walking in the
footsteps of the French Girondists. The other and more radical party drew its
strength from rural areas, where the inhabitants, having so lately been subjected to
the cities, still harbored suspicions against them. The tendency for peasants to be
more revolutionary than townspeople was a peculiarity of the Swiss situation, hardly
paralleled either in France or the other sister- republics. The two parties differed on
much, especially on the liquidation of tithes and manorial dues. Only a fifth of the
tithe at the end of the eighteenth century was owned by church bodies or clerical
persons; much of it had become simply a secular property; and most of it had passed
into the hands of the former cantonal governments, and so in effect constituted a
kind of tax, but a tax that was paid only by rural people, especially in the lowlands.
That the tithe had already disappeared from the high valleys suggests one reason
why the people there were little drawn to the revolution. Since the tithe was largely
a tax, to abolish it was to raise hard questions of public finance and of new forms of
revenue. Nor could either the tithe or the manorial dues be liquidated without
threatening the incomes of many middle- class revolutionaries. The result was delay,
confusion, and frustration; after 1800, when Usteri’s party drove out La Harpe and
won out over the radicals, various complex adjustments were introduced.
The Republic simmered in what Brune called a “ferment of organization”: aboli-
tion of gilds, new freedom of occupation and enterprise, new laws of purchase and
sale; rationalization of tolls and tariffs—abolition of torture and reform of the
courts—proliferation of pamphlets and journals under new press laws—religious
liberty and separation of church and state; closing of convents and monasteries
and confiscation of their property, with pensions to former inmates; transfer of
birth registration from parishes to municipalities; provision for civil marriage,
transfer of matrimonial cases to civil courts, and authorization of mixed marriages
between Protestants and Catholics—projects to codify the laws—plans to develop
higher education and public schools, in which uniform standards should be pre-
scribed, compulsory religious instruction eliminated, and bright boys from poor
families given financial aid; along with programs for the training of teachers, for
which Pestalozzi received a grant from the Republic to operate a normal school at
Burgdorf near Bern.