The democratic movement of the 1860s

Roots in the countryside

The democratic movement of 1867 had older roots. Its programme had been formulated two decades earlier by men who belonged to the radical wing of the liberal camp and who concluded that the representative system created after the Ustertag of 1830 had given power to a new elite of lawyers, merchants and industrialists (see Part C). The Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz describes the democratic movement as the revisionist forces of the 1860s which, in several cantons, turned against the liberal establishment and sought to replace the purely representative system with direct democracy and with a more active role of the state in economic and social life. Its motto, “Alles für das Volk, alles durch das Volk”, combined the political demand for popular sovereignty with an economic programme that included progressive taxation of wealth and inheritance, cheap salt, reform of debt enforcement and, prominently, cantonal banks offering favourable credit. The same entry lists the social background of the movement’s supporters: craftsmen, small industrialists, farmers and workers, led intellectually by teachers, clergymen, newspaper editors, officials, doctors, lawyers and manufacturers.¹

In Zurich, the earliest articulation of that programme is usually traced to Johann Jakob Treichler, a teacher of modest rural origin, who gave public lectures in early 1846 with titles such as “Is there a proletariat in Switzerland?” and “On the sovereignty of the people”. Treichler’s manifesto demanded direct elections, salaries for members of parliament, a legislative referendum, comprehensive public education, protection of workers, social workshops, support for co-operatives, progressive taxation, the abolition of capital punishment and a cantonal bank. The Grand Council of the time reacted with what contemporaries called an anti-communist law, which threatened those who agitated about inequality of property with fines of up to 1,000 francs and two years’ imprisonment.² Treichler himself later made his peace with the establishment and became a member of the cantonal government. The demand for a state bank, however, survived his change of camp and remained part of the radical and socialist repertoire for the next twenty years.

The second early figure was Karl Bürkli, a son of a conservative Zurich family who trained as a tanner, encountered the early socialism of Charles Fourier in Paris and became the most persistent advocate of co-operative socialism and direct democracy in the canton. In 1855 he emigrated to Texas to join a Fourierist settlement, which failed within a short time. Back in Zurich, Bürkli published a pamphlet in 1866 calling for a “cantonal people’s bank, not a lords’ bank”, an institution that would break the power of what he called the financial aristocracy.³ Bürkli’s rhetoric was more radical than the institution that eventually emerged. His role in preparing public opinion was nevertheless considerable, because he turned the abstract demand for cheap credit into a slogan that could be shouted at a popular assembly.

The crisis years and the Landsgemeinden of 1867

What turned an old programme into a mass movement was a sequence of economic and sanitary shocks in the mid-1860s. Mortgage interest rates had been rising since about 1860 and made the indebtedness of the farming population heavier. The end of the American Civil War in 1865 disturbed the markets of the European textile industry. Zurich’s silk exports fell by about a quarter in 1866 and 1867, which led to wage cuts and dismissals in an industry that employed tens of thousands of homeworkers and factory hands. Food prices rose sharply, bread by some 28 per cent and potatoes by some 63 per cent. In the late summer and autumn of 1867 a cholera epidemic killed about 500 people in Zurich and exposed the authorities to the charge that they were incapable of protecting the population.⁴ The HLS also notes that the movement in Zurich gained its momentum in 1867 and 1868 in the wake of the cholera epidemic.⁵

The spark came from the jurist Friedrich Locher. Between 1866 and 1872 Locher published, anonymously, a series of pamphlets under the title Die Freiherren von Regensberg, in which he attacked the administration of justice and the conduct of leading figures of the liberal regime, Escher’s circle included. The pamphlets combined personal invective with accusations of nepotism and abuse of office. Their tone was often unfair, yet they supplied the movement with the language in which it described the “system”. On 17 November 1867 Locher convened an assembly of the opposition at the Altes Schützenhaus in Zurich, which demanded a revision of the constitution.⁶ Locher had been a schoolmate of Gottfried Keller, who served at the time as Staatsschreiber of the canton and who, according to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, considered resigning when the old regime fell but stayed in office until 1876.⁷

The decisive day was Sunday 15 December 1867. On that day four popular assemblies, called Landsgemeinden in deliberate reference to the old assemblies of the rural cantons, met at Uster, Winterthur, Bülach and Zurich. According to the Sozialarchiv they brought together about 18,000 men, more than a quarter of the electorate. The constitution required 10,000 signatures for an initiative to revise the constitution, whereas the organisers collected about 27,000. Bürkli personally delivered the petitions to his former ally Treichler, who by then sat in the cantonal government.⁸ In the following weeks some seventy-five political meetings were held across the canton. The popular vote of 26 January 1868 on the principle of a total revision was a landslide. The NZZ gives about 51,000 votes in favour and 7,400 against, with every political commune except Boppelsen and Regensberg voting yes.⁹

Leaders, newspapers and the Winterthur milieu

The democratic movement was a coalition. Its geographical centre was Winterthur, the second town of the canton, whose manufacturers, merchants and professional men resented the dominance of the city of Zurich in politics, railways and finance. Its newspaper was Der Landbote, published in Winterthur, which Salomon Bleuler, a former pastor and former editor of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, took over in 1861 and turned into a democratic party organ with national influence. The political head of the movement in Winterthur was Johann Jakob Sulzer, who had originally belonged to the radical-liberal camp, left the cantonal government in 1857 in protest against Escher’s dominance and became one of the leading democrats. Sulzer chaired the constitutional council of 1868–1869 and later initiated the Schweizerische Nationalbahn, the “people’s railway” that was meant to break the monopoly of Escher’s Nordostbahn and that ended in bankruptcy in 1878.¹⁰

Alongside these men stood the teacher Johann Caspar Sieber, a veteran of the Sonderbund War who regarded popular education as the key to the social question, and the physician Friedrich Scheuchzer, who edited the Bülach-Regensberger Wochen-Zeitung. Friedrich Albert Lange, a German philosopher and economist who had moved to Winterthur in 1866 after political persecution in Prussia, took part in the constitutional debates and later taught at the University of Zurich.¹¹ The educator Ignaz Thomas Scherr, whose name is sometimes associated with the radicalism of the 1830s, does not appear among the leaders of 1867–1869 in the sources consulted for this chapter. The social breadth of this leadership explains the character of the reforms that followed. Farmers wanted cheaper mortgages, workers wanted factory legislation, teachers wanted free schools and the Winterthur bourgeoisie wanted to end the political and economic hegemony of Zurich’s liberal establishment. What held them together was the conviction that representative government had been captured by a narrow group, which had to be subjected to the direct control of the people.

The adversary was what the democrats called the “system”. Since the early 1850s Alfred Escher had combined, in his own person, the presidency of the cantonal government or of the cantonal parliament, a seat in the National Council, the direction of the Nordostbahn and the chairmanship of the Schweizerische Kreditanstalt, which he had founded in 1856 (see Chapters D.I and D.II). His associates occupied the key posts in the administration, the courts and the press. To the democrats this concentration of offices was the very definition of an oligarchy. The Kreditanstalt was a bank for railways and industry, which had little interest in the small mortgage of a farmer in the Tösstal or the working capital of a weaver in the Zürcher Oberland. The demand for a cantonal bank was therefore political as well as economic. It aimed to create a source of credit that did not depend on the goodwill of the men who dominated the government. In the language of the time, the citizen who depended on a creditor was not a free citizen, whose independence a state bank would restore.

Notes

1. Markus Bürgi, “Demokratische Bewegung”, in Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz (HLS), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/017382/. The article records successful constitutional revisions in Basel-Landschaft, Zurich and Thurgau, and partial successes in Lucerne (1863), Bern (1869) and Aargau (1870). ↩
2. Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv, “Vor 150 Jahren: Die Demokratische Bewegung pflügt den Kanton Zürich um”, 24 February 2019, https://www.sozialarchiv.ch/2019/02/24/vor-150-jahren-die-demokratische-bewegung-pfluegt-den-kanton-zuerich-um/. ↩
3. Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv, “Vor 150 Jahren” (cited above), sections on Bürkli and on the Kantonalbank. The Sozialarchiv quotes Bürkli’s formula of a “kantonale Volksbank, nicht Herrenbank”. ↩
4. Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv, “Vor 150 Jahren” (cited above), section on the crisis factors of 1865–1867. ↩
5. Bürgi, “Demokratische Bewegung”, HLS (cited above). ↩
6. Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv, “Vor 150 Jahren” (cited above), sections on Locher and on the events of November 1867. The Sozialarchiv notes that Locher remained politically isolated despite the effect of his pamphlets. ↩
7. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, “Als das Zürchervolk das ‘System’ stürzte”, https://www.nzz.ch/zuerich/als-das-zuerchervolk-das-system-stuerzte-ld.1350950. ↩
8. Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv, “Vor 150 Jahren” (cited above), section on 15 December 1867. ↩
9. NZZ, “Als das Zürchervolk das ‘System’ stürzte” (cited above). The Sozialarchiv gives 87 per cent in favour at a turnout of 90 per cent. ↩
10. Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv, “Vor 150 Jahren” (cited above), sections on Bleuler (1829–1886), Sulzer, Ziegler and the Nationalbahn. The railway side of the conflict is treated in Chapter D.I. ↩
11. Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv, “Vor 150 Jahren” (cited above), sections on Sieber, Scheuchzer and Lange. ↩

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.