Alfred Escher: family, fortune and formation

The Escher vom Glas and the fortune of Heinrich Escher

Johann Heinrich Alfred Escher was born in Zurich on 20 February 1819 into the Escher vom Glas, one of the old patrician families of the city, whose members had held guild offices, sat in the councils and traded in silk since the early modern period (see Part C).¹ The family name carried social weight, but the wealth that made Alfred Escher independent from his youth was of recent origin. His father, Heinrich Escher (1776–1853), had trained in Paris with the banker Hans Konrad Hottinger. He spent the years from 1795 to 1806 and again from 1812 to 1814 in the United States, where he acted as commercial agent for the house of Hottinguer & Cie and dealt in tobacco, cotton, rice and sugar for European markets.² Land speculation and colonial trade allowed him to return to Zurich in 1814 with a fortune that has been estimated at about one million francs, an enormous sum for the city at the time.

Back in Zurich, Heinrich Escher turned from trade to the management of his capital. He married Lydia Zollikofer von Altenklingen, the daughter of a St Gallen family, in 1815. Ten years later, in 1825, he acquired land in the village of Enge on the western shore of the lake, where he built the country house called Belvoir.³ Alfred grew up in this house and later lived and died there. The father was also a serious naturalist who assembled an important insect collection, later looked after by the botanist and entomologist Oswald Heer and eventually transferred to the Federal Polytechnic, an early sign of the connection between private wealth, science and public institutions that would run through his son’s career.

The family fortune had a darker side, which Swiss historiography acknowledged only in the twenty-first century. Heinrich Escher’s brothers had acquired a coffee plantation called Buen Retiro near Artemisa in western Cuba around 1821, with Heinrich providing financial backing. When the plantation passed to Heinrich in 1845, its value was put at about 40,000 silver pesos, nearly half of which the inventory attributed to 85 enslaved people.⁴ The research of the Cologne historian Michael Zeuske, who found the plantation records in Cuban archives, brought this connection to public attention in 2017.⁵ The point matters for the history of the financial centre because it shows that the capital which financed the first Zurich railways and the first Zurich joint-stock bank was, in part, Atlantic colonial capital, accumulated in the same world of commodity trade, shipping and plantation credit in which other Zurich merchant houses were active (see Chapter C.I).

Education and the making of a liberal

Alfred Escher received private instruction until 1834, among others from Oswald Heer, and then attended the upper gymnasium in Zurich from 1834 to 1837. He studied law at the young University of Zurich, founded in 1833, and continued his studies in Bonn and Berlin in 1838 and 1839. In 1842 he took his doctorate under Friedrich Ludwig Keller, the leading Zurich jurist of the liberal regeneration, and after his habilitation in 1844 he taught civil procedure and Swiss constitutional law at the university until 1847.⁶ His presidency of the Zofingia, the national student association whose members formed much of the liberal and radical leadership of the Federal State, gave him a network of contemporaries across the cantons. Many of the men he met there later sat with him in the National Council or on the boards of railway companies.

Escher’s liberalism was of a distinctly economic kind. The German biographical dictionary summarises him as a classical liberal who championed representative democracy and the development of a free market.⁷ He believed that the state should create the legal framework for commerce and education while leaving enterprise to private initiative. Elected representatives, in his view, deserved far more trust than assemblies of the people. Both convictions were to shape the railway question. They also explain why the democratic movement of the 1860s regarded him as its principal opponent, since that movement demanded direct popular participation in legislation and state credit for small producers.

A political career without parallel

Escher’s rise was rapid even by the standards of a revolutionary generation. He entered the cantonal Grand Council in 1844 at the age of 25 and remained a member until his death, serving as its president for most of the years between 1848 and 1868.⁸ After a year as first state secretary of the canton in 1847, he was elected in 1848 to the cantonal government, of which he remained a member until 1855. In 1849 he held the office of Bürgermeister, the title then borne by the head of the Zurich government, before presiding over the government in 1850, 1851 and 1854. As director of education from 1850 and president of the cantonal education council from 1849 he controlled the school and university system of the canton.

At the federal level Escher represented Zurich at the last Diets of 1845, 1846 and 1848 and was elected to the first National Council in 1848, a seat he held until his death in 1882. He presided over the chamber in 1849–1850, 1856–1857 and 1862–1863, having declined a further election to the presidency in 1855 on grounds of health.⁹ He never sought a seat in the Federal Council. Contemporary observers and later historians have read this abstention as a conscious choice, since membership of the federal executive would have obliged him to give up his cantonal offices and his positions in business.¹⁰ As a parliamentarian he could combine political leadership with the presidency of a railway company, a bank and, from 1854, the vice-presidency of the board of the Federal Polytechnic, which he held for 28 years.

What made Escher unique was the combination of these offices. No other figure in Swiss history held so many public and private functions of such weight at the same time and for so long. Critics called him “König Alfred I” or the “Bundesbaron”, nicknames that were not meant kindly.¹¹ Yet his power rested on election, on his ability to organise majorities and on a formidable capacity for work. His correspondence, of which the Alfred Escher Foundation edited some 5,000 letters, shows a man who managed his network of allies across Switzerland with unceasing attention to detail.¹²

Notes

1. HLS, “Escher, Alfred” (cited above). The HLS gives his full name, date and place of birth and the names of his parents, Heinrich Escher and Lydia Zollikofer von Altenklingen. On the family’s role in the silk trade and in the Zurich patriciate see the family article “Escher (vom Glas)” in the HLS, cited in Chapter C.I. ↩
2. Wikipedia (en), “Heinrich Escher (1776–1853)”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Escher_(1776%E2%80%931853). The article summarises the research of Michael Zeuske and others and draws on the HLS article “Escher, Heinrich”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/030956/2024-08-26/. ↩
3. Wikipedia (en), “Heinrich Escher (1776–1853)” (cited above), sections on his return to Switzerland and his properties. The Belvoir park, today a public park in the district of Enge, still bears the name of the estate. ↩
4. HLS, “Escher, Alfred” (cited above), section on the family fortune. The HLS notes that conservative opponents already accused the Eschers of profiting from the slave trade in the nineteenth century and that slavery remained legal in the United States until 1865 and in Cuba until 1886. ↩
5. Hans Fässler, “Die kubanische Plantage der Familie Escher”, WOZ Die Wochenzeitung, 12 July 2017 (updated 1 February 2018), https://www.woz.ch/1728/sklaverei/die-kubanische-plantage-der-familie-escher. The article reports that Zeuske located the documents in the Cuban national archives and discusses possible reputational consequences for Credit Suisse under slavery-era disclosure ordinances in several American cities. ↩
6. HLS, “Escher, Alfred” (cited above), section on education and early career. The HLS also records that Escher presided over the student society Zofingia in 1840–1841. ↩
7. Werner Ganz, “Escher, Alfred”, Neue Deutsche Biographie 4 (1959), p. 645, online at https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz13722.html. ↩
8. HLS, “Escher, Alfred” (cited above), list of cantonal offices. The HLS gives membership of the Grand Council (Kantonsrat from 1869) from 1844 to 1882 and the presidency between 1848 and 1868; the presidency was held for one-year terms and was not continuous in every year. ↩
9. Wikipedia (en), “Alfred Escher” (cited above), section on political offices. Röll’s railway encyclopaedia also records that Escher was elected president of the National Council four times but accepted only three times: Victor von Röll (ed.), Enzyklopädie des Eisenbahnwesens, 2nd edn (1912–1923), vol. 4, “Escher”, online at http://www.zeno.org/Roell-1912/A/Escher. ↩
10. Marco Marcacci, “Alfred Escher – Bundesbaron und Eisenbahnkönig”, swissinfo.ch, 27 May 2006, https://www.swissinfo.ch/ger/finanzplatz-schweiz/alfred-escher-bundesbaron-und-eisenbahnkoenig/5205196. ↩
11. Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, Presence Switzerland, “Alfred Escher, ein Visionär der modernen Schweiz”, aboutswitzerland.eda.admin.ch, https://www.aboutswitzerland.eda.admin.ch/de/alfred-escher-ein-visionaer-der-modernen-schweiz. The official portal describes the nickname “König Alfred I” as an expression of critics’ concern about his concentration of power. ↩
12. Alfred Escher-Stiftung, home page (English version), https://www.alfred-escher.ch/en/. The foundation reported that its digital letter edition comprised more than 5,000 letters and that it had completed both a printed and a digital edition. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of September 2025.