274 Chapter XI
rights of man. Here at Basel, he said, our basic statute starts out by talking about
the office of burgomaster, and says nothing of any rights of citizens, peasants or
men as such. His work in the Basel council began to disgust him. “Would you be-
lieve it? The secret council at Bern has begged our secret council to prohibit any
newspaper from writing in favor of abolition of the tithe or legal proceedings
without cost.” As early as October 1789 he saw a chance of war between France
and Europe, thought France would win, and revolution spread; but as a prudent
Swiss he decided to reduce his French investments.^67
Ochs’ brother- in- law, Jean Dietrich, was elected in 1790 to be the first mayor of
Strasbourg under the new regime. A frequent visitor, Ochs was in Strasbourg in
June 1790, and witnessed the fête de la fédération there, as William Wordsworth did
at the same time at Calais. He even wrote a poem about it, which, if it fell short of
Wordsworth’s recollections in the Prelude, still expressed his opinions:
Que les temps ont changé! Qui l’eût jamais pu croire?
L’égalité civile ennoblit les Français...^68The next year found him in Paris on the business of Basel, to collect the compensa-
tion money due for the loss to Basel citizens that followed abolition of tithes in
Alsace. In Paris he saw the sequel to the episode of Varennes, and observed the
growth of republicanism, which is to say the discrediting of the French King and
Queen. Ordinary people speak of them without ceremony, he reported, “as Mr. and
Mrs. Louis XVI.”^69
His feelings mounted as the international crisis became more acute. With the
approach of war he was back in Basel. “The revolutions of America, France, and
Poland obviously belong in a chain of events that will regenerate the world.”^70
The war came, and a few days later, at his sister’s house in Strasbourg, a captain of
engineers named Rouget de Lisle composed the Marseillaise. We were having some
people in, she explained to her brother, and, as you know, it is always necessary to
invent something to do; so we began to make up a song; it is like Gluck, only more
lively; I myself arranged the parts for the various instruments, and “my husband, a
good tenor, sang the passage that is so stirring and has a certain originality.”^71
Such, in brief, is the story of how a Swiss patrician, between 1776 and 1792,
turned from the author of a Latin dissertation on human dignity into a collabora-
tor with the Revolution in France.
Reflections on the Foregoing
We have now surveyed the course of events, roughly between the American and
the French Revolutions, in the Dutch Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland, and
67 Ibid., 212–20, 227, 244.
68 Ibid., 239, 469.
69 Ibid., 302.
70 Ibid., 325.
71 Ibid., 353.