272 Chapter XI
Aristocracy was resurgent at Geneva after 1782, but its enjoyments were to be
brief, for there was more trouble in 1789, followed in 1794 by a terrible retribution,
when Genevese Burghers put to the guillotine certain fellow townsmen who had
brought in the French twelve years before.
Meanwhile Etienne Clavière lived in France (as other Genevese, Dutch, and
Belgian refugees were to do), became allied with Brissot, joined his Gallo-
American society, collaborated with him on a book on America, and plunged with
him into the politics of the French Revolution, becoming French financial minis-
ter in 1792. Their friend of that time, Mme. Roland, was given new cause to la-
ment the ordeals of virtue. “Virtue and liberty,” she wrote in 1782, “have no more
asylum except in a few honest hearts.”^59 But the best way to conclude on the affairs
of Geneva, as they stood on the eve of the great European struggle, is with the
words of another Genevese exile, Francis d’Ivernois. In 1789 he published a book
on the recent history of Geneva. From it one should learn, he said, that “whenever
there exists in a State a numerous class rejected by the constitution, and which is
conscious of this fact and complains of it, either this class must be made associates
in the constitution, or the constitution will be in danger of being smothered by the
very ardor with which the excluded class tries to embrace it.”^60
Of the rest of Switzerland, or Switzerland proper, since Geneva did not belong
to the confederation, there is nothing to report in the way of spectacular events in
these years, and it would be necessary in any case, and prohibitively repetitious and
lengthy, to follow the story canton by canton. Political ideas were taking shape
here as elsewhere. The number and the circulation of periodicals increased, and
reading and discussion clubs formed in various towns. Pestalozzi, the famous edu-
cational theorist, belonged to such a group of young men in Zurich, and as early as
1766 opposed the use of Zurich troops at Geneva, getting into a scrape for which
he spent three days under house arrest. Isaac Iselin at Basel heralded the progress
of civilization and Johannes von Miiller was moved to add six hundred new facts
to his history.
The correspondence of Peter Ochs, recently published, allows us to see clearly
into this fermentation of ideas.^61 A member of one of the ruling families at Basel,
whose great moment was to come in the revolution of 1798, Ochs came of age
about 1770. Completely bilingual, writing in his younger days a once- famous his-
tory of Basel in German, and conducting all his correspondence in French, and
with a sister who married an Alsatian, he had a wide acquaintance in the Swiss
cantons, Germany, the Low Countries, and France. At the University of Basel, Is-
elin was one of his teachers, and another professor there was later tutor to the son
of the Prince of Orange. He remained in contact with these men also.
59 Ibid., 130.
60 F. d’Ivernois, Tableau historique et politique des dernières révolutions à Geneve (London, 1789), I,
viii–ix.
61 “Recently” for the slow- moving science of history. The Ochs correspondence was published as
long ago as 1927–1937, but I know of no work in English that has made any use of it. G. Steiner, ed.,
Korrespondenz des Peter Ochs, 3 vols. (Basel, 1927–1937). On the very great importance of these docu-
ments see the review by Guggenbühl in Zeitschrift fiir schweitzerische Geschichte (1936), 339–41. For
political institutions at Basel and in Switzerland see Chapter II above.