The Helvetic Republic 683
French.”^28 The predominant feeling in Switzerland, even with Russian, Austrian,
and French troops operating in the country, seems to have been one of innocent
neutrality violated by outsiders, as if Swiss destinies were uninvolved.
In fact, however, when Marshal Suvorov and his Russians, in July 1799, crossed
the St. Gotthard pass from Italy, where they had just overthrown the Cisalpine
Republic, into Switzerland, where they meant to destroy the Helvetic Republic,
the action was part of a widespread anti- republican movement, with an Anglo-
Russian force simultaneously preparing to expunge the Batavian Republic in Hol-
land, and to converge with Suvorov against the French Republic and the supposed
source of the whole disturbance—Paris. This grand confrontation is described in a
later chapter. In Switzerland, as the Russians entered from the south, the Austrians
came in from the east. The Swiss émigrés returned. Some of them, whose views
were expressed by the former schultheiss of Bern and abbot of St. Gallen, and
strongly insisted on by William Wickham, demanded the total restoration in
Switzerland of the situation of 1797. Even moderate conservatives wished to re-
store the system of subject districts with domination by ruling cantons. The Hel-
vetic Republic was kept in being by Masséna’s victory at the second battle of Zu-
rich in September 1799; and the exclusion of the old regime from Switzerland,
north Italy, Holland, and France itself was further settled by Bonaparte’s victory in
1800 at Marengo, which, according to Reubell, could never have happened with-
out the Swiss revolution two years before.
The Helvetic Republic, or at least the Paris constitution of 1798, proved to be
more unitary and centralized than the Swiss would tolerate. Other constitutions
were to follow, and many compromises made, but they modified without repudiat-
ing the principles of the Revolution. The Helvetic constitution of 1798 had the
kind of permanence that the exactly contemporary Dutch constitution also en-
joyed. It was not itself permanent, but its principles of territorial uniformity, legal
equality, assured civil rights, and modern citizenship proved to be lasting. In 1920
an important three- volume history of modern Swiss public law began to be pub-
lished at Basel. Its author, a member of the university there, was Eduard His. He
was the great- great- grandson of Peter Ochs. It was not family attachment, but the
nature of the subject itself, that made him begin his history with the revolution of
1798, and devote the entire first volume to the fifteen years thereafter.
28 F. Burckhardt, Die schweizerische Emigration, 1798–1801 (Basel, 1908), 287. This is excellent
also on the incipient restoration of 1799.