4 - The Ancien Régime, 1713–1798

Summary

The Peace of Aarau and the fourth Landfrieden revised the religious balance in Switzerland to the benefit of the Protestant cantons, but left undisturbed the rigid patrician oligarchies within the cantons. As outsiders noted, the country remained as stable and as complicated a European fixture as ever, but, while other Western states were modernizing their armies and governance, the Swiss political class did not follow suit, and so became increasingly passive participants in international affairs and less flexible and accommodating at home. In fact, the peace enabled the patricians to consolidate what can be called the Swiss Ancien Régime: a congeries of stable urban and rural oligarchies, relatively prosperous but increasingly inflexible and repressive. All this encouraged stasis.

Stasis intensified despite the fact that the oligarchic regimes experienced repeated challenges, often from ordinary people who felt the patricians were breaking older conventions and undertakings, but also from within patrician circles by those influenced by Enlightenment thinking, which was one of many European trends in which the cantons shared. Slow but steady internal change – often pushed by members of elite families or by ambitious individuals from the edges of the elite – also threatened the existing order. And, despite growing oligarchical resistance to change from the 1770s, economic growth over the following two decades generated further pressures at the very time that the French Revolution encouraged new forms of protest. Ultimately, the Ancien Régime’s increasing rigidities and its promotion of cantonal over confederal interests made it impossible for the old Confederacy to survive in the face of French invasion.