City privileges and rural grievances

The monopoly of the city burghers

The putting-out system in Zurich operated within a political order that reserved trade and the crafts to the burghers of the city. The official conception, as the Staatsarchiv’s constitutional history summarises it, was that trade and crafts belonged to the city burghers, in clear demarcation from the country people, to whom God had naturally apportioned agriculture, together with those local crafts that served self-supply.¹ In practice this meant that a subject in the countryside could spin, weave and even organise the work of others as a Tüchler, but could not import raw materials directly from abroad, sell finished goods to foreign buyers or set up as a merchant in his own name. The rural producer was bound to the city merchant, who alone had access to the export market.

The monopoly was defended in the name of the survival of the city. A petition of the Zurich clockmakers in 1790 justified the exclusion of rural competitors from the urban market by the necessity of self-preservation, an argument the merchants also used.² The monopoly guaranteed the merchants a share of the value created by the rural economy that they could not have obtained under open competition. It also concentrated the capital generated by the whole Zurich economy in the hands of a few hundred families in the city. Seen from the point of view of the financial centre, it was a mechanism of accumulation: it channelled profit from a population of well over a hundred thousand into the counting houses of the Limmat.

From craftsmen to merchants and rentiers in the councils

The same development changed the composition of the city’s government. The guild constitution of 1336 had given the craftsmen a large share of power, which allowed them still to sit in numbers in the councils in the sixteenth century. From the seventeenth century, however, rentiers, living from their landed wealth and capital, and merchants took over the leadership of the state. Sigg’s figures illustrate the shift: in 1637 craftsmen still made up some 40 per cent of the Small Council, whereas in 1790 its members were 6 per cent craftsmen, 58 per cent rentiers and 36 per cent merchants.³ The rentiers of 1790 were in many cases the descendants of merchants of earlier generations who had withdrawn from trade into the management of their capital. The government of Zurich at the end of the ancien régime was therefore a government of capital owners whose policies, from the maintenance of the trade monopoly to the investment of public funds abroad through the Zinskommission of 1755 (see Chapter C.II), reflected their interests.

This concentration of economic and political power in a narrow circle had a double effect. It gave Zurich stable, cautious and financially competent government, under which the city’s finances were in good order, its reserves ample and its credit sound. It also produced exclusion. Families that had come to Zurich as refugees, like the Pestalozzi, had to wait two centuries for access to the Great Council. The rural population had no access at all, and even the wealthiest Tüchler of the Oberland or the lake shore remained a subject.

The Stäfner Handel as a symptom

The tension between the city’s privileges and the aspirations of the rural elite produced by proto-industry broke into the open in 1794–95. On 11 November 1794 a memorial drafted by Heinrich Nehracher of Stäfa, a village on the right bank of the lake, demanded that the Zurich constitution apply equally across the whole territory. After the movement had spread from February 1795, the government occupied Stäfa militarily on 5 July 1795. On 2 September 1795 it passed 267 verdicts against the participants, imposing banishment, fines and penalties of honour. The intervention of moderate figures in the city, among them Johann Kaspar Lavater and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, helped to prevent executions.⁴ The Staatsarchiv’s constitutional history describes the affair as the expression of widespread protest against the political monopoly of the city burghers and their exclusive privileges in trade and industry.⁵

The Stäfner Handel and its aftermath belong to Chapter C.III. For the present purpose it is enough to note that the protest came precisely from the most economically developed part of the countryside, the lake shore villages where proto-industry had created wealth, literacy and self-confidence. The rural entrepreneurs of the putting-out system had learned to calculate, to borrow and to trade. Now they demanded the right to do so on their own account. The collapse of the old order in 1798 gave it to them.

Notes

1. Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich, Kleine Zürcher Verfassungsgeschichte (cited above). ↩
2. Sigg, “Zunftherrlichkeit” (cited above). ↩
3. Sigg, “Zunftherrlichkeit” (cited above). ↩
4. HLS, Bruno Schmid, “Stäfnerhandel”, version of 2010 (edited 27 February 2012), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/017215/. The HLS emphasises that the movement was carried largely by rural elites seeking parity with the city burghers and mentions demands for the abolition of tithes and ground rents. ↩
5. Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich, Kleine Zürcher Verfassungsgeschichte (cited above). ↩

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.