Restoration: the Federal Treaty and the return of the patriciate

Zurich and the Federal Treaty of 1815

The collapse of Napoleon’s power after the battle of Leipzig in October 1813 gave the conservative forces in Switzerland the opportunity to reverse part of the revolutionary settlement. Bern restored its patrician government on 23 December 1813, and Solothurn, Fribourg and Lucerne followed in early 1814.¹ Zurich, whose Reinhard had been Landammann of Switzerland in the decisive year 1813, became the meeting place of the Diet that negotiated the new federal order. On 9 September 1814 the Diet constituted the new confederation, to which Valais, Neuchâtel and Geneva were admitted on 12 September. The Federal Treaty was sworn in Zurich on 7 August 1815.² After the Congress of Vienna had confirmed the twenty-two cantons in March 1815, the Treaty of Paris of 20 November 1815 recognised Switzerland’s perpetual neutrality.³

The Federal Treaty consisted of fifteen articles whose primary aim, in its own words, was to secure the freedom of the cantons. The confederation had competences in military organisation, war finance and customs, but it had no economic union and no common coinage. The direction of federal affairs rotated every two years among Zurich, Bern and Lucerne, the three Vororte.⁴ The absence of an economic union meant that the freedom of trade and settlement guaranteed in the Act of Mediation lost its federal basis. Each canton levied its own tolls and fees, regulated its own trades and struck its own coins. For a commercial and increasingly industrial city like Zurich, whose merchants dealt with suppliers and buyers across Europe, the fragmented internal market of the Restoration was a constant source of cost and friction. The demand for a Swiss customs union and a single currency accordingly became one of the main economic arguments of the liberals in the following decades.

The position of Zurich as one of the three Vororte gave the city a federal role that was more than ceremonial. During its two-year terms, the Zurich government conducted the business of the confederation, received foreign envoys and corresponded with the other cantons. The presence of federal diplomacy in the city reinforced the international orientation of its governing families, many of whom combined political office with commercial and banking interests. Hans von Reinhard, who had known Napoleon and the other rulers of his time personally, has been described as the last Swiss politician of international stature of the old type.⁵

The constitution of 1814 and the return of city dominance

In Zurich the Restoration took the form of a revision of the Mediation constitution in favour of the city. The Grand Council adopted the new constitution on 11 June 1814 by 105 votes to 62, without submitting it to a popular vote. The distribution of seats, which under the Mediation had been relatively balanced, was changed so that 130 of the 212 members of the Grand Council came from the city of Zurich.⁶ A large part of the council was filled by co-optation, and twenty of the twenty-five members of the Small Council, the government, were city burghers. The arrangement favoured the aristocratic interest and obstructed the relief of the countryside from its feudal charges.⁷

The political restoration left the economic results of the revolution largely in place. The city burghers did not recover their monopoly of trade and manufacture. Although restricted in detail, freedom of establishment and of trades was not abolished. Meanwhile the rural textile entrepreneurs who had emerged under the Helvetic Republic and the Mediation continued to build their businesses. The Restoration regime was a government of the propertied city families over an economy that had already escaped their exclusive control. That tension between political and economic power was the underlying cause of the upheaval of 1830.

Hunger, crisis and growth

The first years of the Restoration were marked by economic crisis. The end of the Continental Blockade exposed the young Swiss spinning mills to British competition. A second shock came when the eruption of Mount Tambora in April 1815 was followed by the “year without a summer” of 1816. Eastern Switzerland, including the Zurich Oberland, suffered particularly, because its textile workers depended on imported grain. Prices in some areas rose to six times their normal level while the cantons closed their borders to grain exports in disregard of their federal obligations.⁸ The famine of 1816–17, the last great subsistence crisis in Swiss history, demonstrated the vulnerability of a proto-industrial economy that had specialised in textiles for export and depended on the purchase of food.

The recovery that followed was remarkable. Swiss yarn production rose from 680 tonnes in 1814 to 2,800 tonnes in 1827. By 1830 Switzerland had the highest export rate per capita in Europe. The number of banking institutions in the country grew from ten in 1815 to seventy-four in 1830. The population grew from about 1.8 to 2.2 million, and rapid demographic growth combined with the limits of the economy produced the widespread poverty that contemporaries called pauperism.⁹ The growth of banking in these years deserves emphasis. The savings banks, the private banks and the first joint-stock institutions of the Restoration period were the channels through which the capital released by the redemption of feudal charges and generated by trade and industry began to be collected and lent. In Zurich, the old merchant banking houses described in Chapter C.I continued their business, and new institutions began to appear, culminating in the Bank in Zürich of 1836.

The career of Heinrich Kunz illustrates the new industrial wealth of the period. Born in 1793, he began in 1811 with a hand-spinning business in Oetwil, rented a mill in Wetzikon in 1815 and built a five-storey spinning mill in Oberuster in 1816. Further mills followed at Niederuster in 1826, at Windisch in 1828, at Linthal in 1838, at Adliswil in 1842 and at Aathal in 1851. By the 1840s he controlled some 150,000 spindles and employed about two thousand workers, and contemporaries called him the spinning king of Europe. At his death in 1859 his business was valued at 25 million francs.¹⁰ A fortune of that size, created within a single lifetime by an entrepreneur from the countryside, would have been legally impossible under the old regime, when the organisation of manufacture and trade was reserved to the burghers of the city. It is the clearest measure of what the revolution of 1798 had changed in the economic structure of the canton.

Notes

1. HLS, French edition, “Restauration”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/009799/. ↩
2. HLS, “Bundesvertrag”, version of 4 April 2024, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/009809/2024-04-04/. ↩
3. HLS, French edition, “Restauration” (see above). ↩
4. HLS, “Bundesvertrag” (see above). The article notes that individual freedoms were protected only indirectly, through the prohibition of relationships of subjection between cantons. ↩
5. Wikipedia (German), “Hans von Reinhard” (see above), which quotes the assessment that Reinhard was regarded as the last Swiss politician of international format, since he knew all the powerful men of his time personally. ↩
6. Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich (ed.), Kleine Zürcher Verfassungsgeschichte 1218–2000, p. 46. ↩
7. Wikipedia (German), “Verfassung des Kantons Zürich” (see above), section on the constitution of 1814. ↩
8. Higgs.ch, “Die letzte grosse Hungersnot in der Schweiz”, https://www.higgs.ch/die-letzte-grosse-hungersnot-in-der-schweiz/33511/. The article records that in Appenzell Innerrhoden about one tenth of the population died of hunger. ↩
9. HLS, French edition, “Restauration” (see above), section on economic and social transformation. ↩
10. Wikipedia (German), “Heinrich Kunz (Unternehmer)”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Kunz_(Unternehmer). ↩

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.