Switzerland which prepared the ground for the overthrow of the existing governments of the cantons and their allies, and for the establishment of a national government on the French model. There were frequent local uprisings, and the famines of the early 1770s increased discontent among the peasants and industrial outworkers. Yet some Swiss people, including the Toggenburg's neighbours in St. Gallen, had gained self-government before the French invasion, taking their new model of government not from France but from the old popular democracies of the Confederation. The Helvetic Society and most of the great men that Bräker met in Zürich and elsewhere were at first in favour of revolution, but many revised their views after the execution of the French king.
Both modern and contemporary sources disagree, however, as to whether the Swiss really needed to follow France's lead into revolution. (They were not alone in doing so; there were revolutionary movements in the Empire, Belgium, Hungary, Ireland, Poland and Holland). Bonjour, Offler and Potter, for example, state categorically (p 208) that the Swiss peasants were not oppressed by the
ancien régime
. Thürer (p. 80) states equally firmly that "...the watchwords "liberty, fraternity and equality" aroused the hope of better times among all those who were in any way underprivileged - and that meant seven-eighths of the Swiss population." Contemporary travellers and foreign residents, as one might expect, mostly thought that the Swiss were well off as they were - or at least better off than their neighbours. Edward Gibbon, for example, writing in 1790, says (p 244) "The people of this country are happy, and in spite of some miscreants, and more foreign emissaries, they are sensible [aware] of their happiness". The great German poet Goethe said, on the other hand, that though Switzerland might have no great tyrants, it had swarms of lesser ones. Dr. Ebel, who knew the Toggenburg well, is quoted by Voellmy (v 2 p 44) as saying: "When the forms of citizenship under which he lives do not raise him to a noble self-respect, nor to respect the being of another, nor allow him a lively participation in the important affairs of his fatherland and the common good, but forcibly restrict him to the narrow circle of his self-seeking impulses, then a man's instinct for moral goodness and beauty degenerates and he becomes a moral cripple, the sight of whom arouses pity and disgust, sorrow and anger."
So possibly material prosperity was not the only factor to be considered. Some of the contemporary witnesses quoted by Böning show how the people had to put up with behaviour from their "superiors" which might not be oppression in a material sense but was offensive to the spirit. A petition circulated in Bern in 1749, just before one of the more serious uprisings, speaks of the haughty demeanour of the patricians: "The cellarman loaded down with a barrel of wine, the merchant with cloth, the smith with iron, the carpenter with wood, all must in sun, wind and rain walk on the open street, so that the noble gentlemen and the monstrous hooped skirts of their haughty wives and daughters may have room to sway along the arcades" (Böning, p 26). He also gives an example of the sense of humiliation expressed when an earlier petition had been rejected, in this case in Werdenberg: "There still resounds in our ears the echo of the laments of our fathers, who in their trouble besought some mitigation, but instead of being heard, had to give up their cause under such vengeful punishment that it brings tears to the eyes of us their sons." (p 90)
He also demonstrates that many of the institutions of the
ancien régime
were oppressive, in the sense that they allowed the lower classes very little opportunity for decision-making in ordering their lives, though it might be true that the people of these classes were materially not too badly off compared with the peasants of France, who before the Revolution had been leading a virtually subhuman existence. Yet perhaps the most telling evidence in favour of the Revolution is the record of the extraordinary measures taken to repress dissent, where even loyal and constructive criticism was met with severe penalties. In Bern, it was said, the censorship would not allow public mention of the government even when the opinions expressed were favourable.
