The economic constitution of 1848: a single market

Customs: from four hundred toll stations to one frontier

Before 1848 the Swiss internal market existed only in a very limited sense. The Federal Pact of 1815 had left customs matters essentially to the cantons. More than four hundred cantonal customs posts were in operation by 1823. A federal survey of 1844 counted some 550 posts in all, of which 147 lay on the external frontier and more than 180 inside the country. Cantons levied duties on imports, exports and transit, many of them also collecting road, bridge and market dues. Attempts at co-ordination through regional concordats in the 1820s and 1830s foundered on the divergent interests of eastern and western Switzerland. The proposed revision of the Pact in 1832 and 1833 failed as well.¹

For a merchant sending silk from Zurich to Geneva or cotton goods from the Glarus valleys to Basel, this meant repeated payments on the same goods, repeated declarations and frequent delays. For several cantons, however, the tolls were a fiscal necessity. Uri, Valais, Graubünden and Ticino, which controlled the Alpine transit routes, depended heavily on them. According to research quoted by Swiss public radio, toll revenues accounted for between fifty and ninety per cent of cantonal revenue in some of these cantons, depending on the year. The economist Christoph Schaltegger has observed that the compensation granted to these cantons in 1848 amounted to the first system of fiscal equalisation in the history of the federal state.²

The Constitution resolved the problem with a small number of articles. Article 23 provided laconically: “Das Zollwesen ist Sache des Bundes” (“Customs are a matter for the Confederation”). Article 24 empowered the Confederation to abolish, against compensation, the land and water tolls, road and bridge dues and similar charges previously authorised. Article 25 laid down principles for the federal tariff: raw materials needed for domestic industry and necessities of life were to be taxed as lightly as possible, luxury goods most heavily, and transit duties were to be moderate. Article 26 fixed the compensation at four Batzen per head of each canton’s population according to the census of 1838, with the surplus of customs revenue flowing into the federal treasury. Article 29 guaranteed free purchase and sale and free import, export and transit of foodstuffs, livestock and merchandise from one canton to another.³

The implementation followed quickly. A first federal tariff came into force in 1849 and was replaced in 1851 by a general tariff that remained essentially unchanged for more than two decades and was justified on free-trade principles. Although the compensation paid to the cantons exceeded their earlier receipts, customs revenue grew so strongly with the expansion of trade that it became the principal income of the Confederation, accounting in the 1870s and 1880s for about three-quarters of federal receipts.⁴ The federal customs administration began collecting duties at the national frontier in early 1850, on the basis of the Federal Act on Customs of 1849.⁵ Switzerland thus entered the second half of the nineteenth century with low tariffs, a unified internal market and a Confederation financed essentially by indirect taxation at the border. The liberal orientation lasted until the 1880s, when the tariff was raised step by step in 1884, 1887 and 1891.⁶

For the financial centre, the customs settlement had two consequences that are easily overlooked. First, the federal budget rested for decades on a revenue source that did not require direct taxation of income or wealth at the federal level. The cantons retained the direct taxes and with them the capacity for fiscal competition among themselves that has shaped the location decisions of companies and wealthy individuals ever since. Second, the settlement accustomed the Swiss to a model in which a central competence was exercised for the benefit of all while the cantons were compensated for their losses. That model of financial equalisation would reappear in the distribution of the profits of the Swiss National Bank to the cantons after 1907.

Posts, weights and measures, and gunpowder

Article 33 transferred the postal service throughout the Confederation to the federal government, with guarantees that existing connections would be maintained, that tariffs would be uniform and that the cantons would receive compensation.⁷ Before federalisation seventeen postal organisations divided the territory of Switzerland among themselves, which made the service, as a modern account puts it, correspondingly complicated, slow and expensive.⁸ Zurich had been an innovator in this field: on 1 March 1843 the canton issued the Zürich 4 and Zürich 6 stamps, which made it the first issuer of postage stamps after Great Britain. Geneva followed in the same year and Basel in 1845 with its celebrated dove. The federal postal service began on 1 January 1849 and introduced the Rayon stamps, graduated by distance zones, in 1850.⁹ A uniform postal service mattered to bankers and merchants, whose business depended on the reliable transmission of bills of exchange, letters of credit, correspondence and remittances.

Article 37 obliged the Confederation to introduce uniform weights and measures throughout the country, and Article 38 reserved the manufacture and sale of gunpowder to the Confederation.¹⁰ Weights and measures had varied as widely as coins: an ell measured 545.9 millimetres in Solothurn and 600 millimetres in neighbouring Bern, while the foot ranged between about 26 and 36 centimetres. A concordat of 1835 had introduced a common system based on metric reference values in twelve cantons. The federal act of 1851 extended it to the whole country, although five cantons, among them Geneva, Vaud and Ticino, resisted. The final step came with the Metre Convention of 20 May 1875, which Switzerland signed with seventeen other states. From 1 January 1877 the metric system took full effect in Switzerland.¹¹ The system of 1851 retained traditional names but defined them in metric terms, so that the Swiss foot corresponded to thirty centimetres and the Swiss pound to half a kilogram.¹²

Freedom of establishment and freedom of trade

Article 41 guaranteed to every Swiss citizen of Christian denomination the right to settle anywhere in the Confederation, subject to the production of documents on origin, conduct and means of subsistence. Naturalised citizens had to have held Swiss citizenship for five years.¹³ The restriction to Christians excluded Swiss Jews, who obtained freedom of establishment only through the partial revision of the Constitution in 1866, under strong pressure from France and other trading partners.¹⁴ This blemish apart, freedom of establishment allowed merchants, industrialists, clerks and bankers to move to the centres of economic activity. Zurich, whose industries and banks grew rapidly after 1850, was one of the main beneficiaries of the internal migration that followed.

The guarantee of free inter-cantonal trade in Article 29 was equally important. It deprived cantons of the power to protect local producers against competition from other cantons, although it left them important powers over trades and professions for many decades. The full freedom of trade and industry (Handels- und Gewerbefreiheit) as a general constitutional right came only with the total revision of 1874. The Constitution of 1848 nonetheless created the essential condition of a national market: goods produced in one canton could be sold in another without duty or prohibition.

Taken together, the economic articles of 1848 amounted to what would today be called a customs union with a common external tariff, a single postal and communications system, a programme for the harmonisation of standards and a partial freedom of movement for persons. Seen from the vantage point of 2026, the parallels with the construction of the European single market are evident, though the Swiss achieved in a few articles and a few years what took the European Communities several decades. The piece that completed the design and that interests the financial historian most was the monetary article.

Notes

1. Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz (HLS), Marco Polli-Schönborn, “Douanes” (French version of “Zölle”), http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/f/F13765.php. ↩
2. Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen (SRF), “Zollstreit in der Schweiz: Als kantonale Zölle den Handel behinderten”, https://www.srf.ch/news/wirtschaft/zollstreit-in-der-schweiz-als-kantonale-zoelle-den-handel-behinderten. ↩
3. Bundesverfassung der Schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft vom 12. September 1848, Arts. 23–26 and 29, text at https://www.verfassungen.ch/verf48.htm. ↩
4. HLS, Marco Polli-Schönborn, “Douanes”, http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/f/F13765.php. ↩
5. The Federal Act on Customs (Bundesgesetz über das Zollwesen) is generally dated 30 June 1849 and the federal frontier duties are generally said to have been levied from 1 February 1850. ↩
6. Die Volkswirtschaft, “Schweizer Zollgeschichte” (June 2025), https://dievolkswirtschaft.ch/de/2025/06/schweizer-zollgeschichte/. ↩
7. Bundesverfassung 1848, Art. 33, https://www.verfassungen.ch/verf48.htm. ↩
8. Zeitlupe, “Die Post ist da – seit 175 Jahren”, https://zeitlupe.ch/panorama/gesellschaft/anno-dazumal/die-post-ist-da-seit-175-jahren/. ↩
9. Wikipedia (de), “Postgeschichte und Briefmarken der Schweiz”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postgeschichte_und_Briefmarken_der_Schweiz. ↩
10. Bundesverfassung 1848, Arts. 37 and 38, https://www.verfassungen.ch/verf48.htm. ↩
11. Swissinfo, “Seit 150 Jahren misst die Schweiz in Metern”, https://www.swissinfo.ch/ger/seit-150-jahren-misst-die-schweiz-in-metern/89348855. ↩
12. Wikipedia (English), “Swiss units of measurement”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_units_of_measurement, which gives the Fuss as 0.30 m and the Pfund as 0.500 kg according to the fixed values defined during the transition to the metric system. ↩
13. Bundesverfassung 1848, Art. 41, https://www.verfassungen.ch/verf48.htm. ↩
14. Patrik Süess, “No right of domicile for Jews”, Swiss National Museum blog, April 2019, https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/en/2019/04/no-right-of-domicile-for-jews/, which records the acceptance of the revision by the voters on 14 January 1866 and France’s refusal to negotiate a treaty that excluded French Jews from the right of establishment. ↩

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.