The Helvetic Republic 679
All this went on during military occupation by the French, while the French
were at war with Britain and foreseeing renewed war with Austria. The French
made heavy demands on the country, beginning with Brune’s removal of the
6,000,000- livre “treasure” of Bern, and continuing with requisitions to support the
French forces in Switzerland, to help finance the expedition to Egypt, and for
other purposes. Various civilian commissioners arrived from Paris. It was their
task, while attempting to control the French military and to repress individual pil-
lage, to produce a lucrative flow of money and provisions. The best- remembered of
these commissioners was Rapinat, a man who made jokes about his own name,
telling the Swiss with a hearty laugh that he “loved rapine.” He seems to have been
guilty of no more than excessive zeal in the discharge of his duties, but was last-
ingly pilloried by a quatrain famous in its day:
Le pauvre Suisse qu’on ruine
Demandait qu’on examinât
Si Rapinat vient de rapine,
Ou rapine de Rapinat.^21The exactions of the French, the irrepressible individual pillaging, the imposi-
tion of the new constitution and the initiation of all kinds of structural reforms,
naturally combined to create a wide array of enemies to the new regime. Active
opposition, as distinct from apathy and resentment, came on the whole from
two quarters—the former elites and privileged classes, and the old democratic
cantons.
Among the former privileged classes two men stood out as leaders of a wave of
Swiss émigrés, who came to number 5,000 or more, and who, like the Orange
émigrés from Holland in 1795, or the French émigrés, appealed to the Austrian
and other governments for armed intervention, and received British money to fo-
ment resistance in their home countries. One of these was N. F. von Steiger, the
last schultheiss (or chief magistrate) of Bern, a member of one of the families which
had flourished for generations by the government of subject districts. The other
was the abbot of St. Gallen, who as temporal ruler of some 100,000 people had
been an ally of the thirteen cantons, and had nothing to gain by the conversion of
his territory to a cantonal status.
The rural, upland, “primitive,” and “democratic” cantons, of which six were
Catholic and two Protestant, likewise opposed the Paris constitution and the Hel-
vetic Republic. They too, in a way, had been privileged under the old order, in
which, as original oath- fellows, they were full members in the Eidgenossenschaft,
and shared in the suzerainty over various subject districts and common lordships.
They were accustomed to sovereignty in their own local affairs, which were very
simple. They governed themselves through folk- meetings attended by all grown
men. Nowhere in Europe was the antithesis so clearly posed between the old and
the new conception of democracy. Against a new conception of national citizen-
ship, and of organized government deriving powers from an extensive people, the
21 Godechot, Commissaires, II, 73.