The French invasion, the state treasure and the war of 1799

The treasures of Bern and Zurich

The French invasion of the spring of 1798 was directed first against Bern. General Alexis Balthasar Henri Antoine von Schauenburg organised the operations. Once fighting had begun on 1 March, the Bernese government resigned on 4 March and the capitulation was signed the following day. The resistance of the inner cantons ended with their surrender on 4 May after the fighting at Schindellegi, and on 19 August 1798 the Helvetic Republic concluded a formal alliance with France. The occupiers seized the state treasures of Bern and Zurich, and sent Bern’s bears to Paris as trophies. The Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz adds a qualification that matters for the economic assessment: because the wealth of the cantons consisted mainly of real property, the seizures did not endanger their economic survival.¹

The Bernese treasure was by far the larger prize. A study by Christoph Schaltegger and colleagues at the University of Lucerne, published in 2020 under the title Napoleons reiche Beute, estimates its total value at about 21.6 million livres tournois. Some 10.6 million livres of this was cash, including eighteen barrels of gold and silver and an iron chest of coin, while around 11 million livres consisted of securities, among them English stocks and bonds of the Holy Roman Empire. The official French valuation recorded only 7.95 million livres, a discrepancy which the authors attribute in part to embezzlement. By comparison, the state treasure of Zurich is put at 622,000 livres.² Contemporary estimates of the total extracted by France from Bern and Zurich in forced loans, contributions and treasures run to about 30 million livres, and French historians have linked part of that sum to the financing of Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt. Bern spent years, and more than two thirds of the value of its securities, on attempts to recover them. The question was still on the agenda of the Congress of Vienna, where the powers allowed only a partial compensation.³

The modest size of Zurich’s cash reserve requires explanation, for the Zurich state was regarded as rich. A numismatic history of Zurich money estimates that between 1672 and 1798 the state accumulated surpluses of roughly three million gulden, adding several tens of thousands of gulden a year to its reserves.⁴ The difference between that figure and the contents of the Grossmünster vault reflects the way in which the Zurich authorities had invested their surplus. From 1755 a considerable part of the public funds was placed through Leu & Co. in loans and securities, many of them abroad, and further sums were held in the grain stores, the property of the secularised monasteries and the endowments of church, school and poor relief described in Part B. The fate of the foreign investments of Leu & Co. during the revolutionary wars belongs to Chapter C.II. For present purposes the point is that Zurich’s public wealth was diversified and that the French took the most liquid part of it.

Occupation, requisitions and the battles of Zurich

The first French troops entered Zurich on 27 April 1798, some weeks before the treasure was removed on 5 June.⁵ The heavier burden was the continuous presence of troops who had to be quartered, fed and supplied by the population. A local history of Schwamendingen, then a village north of the city, preserves the testimony of the communal officials. According to them, each farmer had to house ten to fourteen soldiers and those without farms six to eight, who had to be fed from the households’ own meagre stores or with provisions bought at inflated prices. An inventory of damage for a single estate recorded 2,546 men and 1,214 horses quartered there. By August 1800 the combined losses of Schwamendingen and its neighbouring village were estimated at 293,509 francs, including some 60,120 francs for billeting, about 35,000 francs for provisions and supplies, 83,200 francs for destruction in the fighting and 150,000 francs for timber.⁶ Multiplied across the canton, figures of this kind indicate that the cost of occupation and war exceeded by a large margin the value of the treasure that had been carried away.

In 1799 Zurich became a battlefield of the War of the Second Coalition. In the first battle, from 4 to 7 June 1799, the Austrian army under Archduke Charles forced the French under André Masséna to withdraw from the city to a line on the Albis, leaving the country divided between the two armies. In the second battle, on 25 and 26 September 1799, Masséna attacked the Russian army of Alexander Rimsky-Korsakov, supported by Austrian troops under Friedrich von Hotze. Some 75,000 French faced about 60,000 coalition soldiers. In the fighting the French lost around 6,000 men, while the coalition lost some 3,000 dead and wounded and 8,000 prisoners. Masséna’s victory drove the coalition out of Switzerland and contributed to Russia’s withdrawal from the war. It was purchased at a heavy cost to the civilian population, from whom the French requisitioned enormous quantities of food, livestock, fodder, men and money.⁷ One detail from the September fighting has a curious place in the monetary history of the region: according to the Schwamendingen account, Helvetic auxiliaries captured the Russian war chest on the heights above the village.⁸

The war of 1799 had consequences that went beyond the immediate destruction. The Helvetic Republic, already weakened by resistance and internal division, never recovered from the financial exhaustion caused by the campaigns and the continuing requisitions. Its fiscal failure became one of the reasons why Napoleon imposed the Mediation in 1803.⁹ In Zurich, the memory of 1798 and 1799 reinforced a conviction that would shape the attitude of its merchants and bankers for generations. Public reserves held in cash in a vault, it taught, are exposed to whoever controls the territory, while wealth is safer when it is dispersed, invested and, where possible, held abroad or in forms that a conqueror cannot easily seize. It would be an exaggeration to trace the later Swiss culture of discreet, internationally diversified asset management to a single event, but the experience of 1798 was an early lesson of the kind that later generations of Zurich bankers would teach their clients.

Notes

1. HLS, Martin Illi, “Franzoseneinfall”, version of 14 September 2021, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/008915/2021-09-14/. ↩
2. University of Lucerne, article on the research of Christoph Schaltegger, Thomas Studer, Laura Zell and Michele Salvi, Napoleons reiche Beute (2020), https://www.unilu.ch/fileadmin/fakultaeten/wf/Dekanat/Bilder/Professuren/Schaltegger/Artikel_BrunneZytig.pdf. The authors calculate, on the assumption of an annual return of 5.8 per cent, that the Bernese treasure would have grown to some 623 billion Swiss francs by 2018. ↩
3. Wikipedia (German), “Franzoseneinfall (Schweiz)”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franzoseneinfall_(Schweiz). The figure of about 30 million livres is given there for the combined total of forced loans, contributions and state treasures of Bern and Zurich. ↩
4. Ursula Kampmann, “Einleitung ‘Die Zürcher und ihr Geld’ Teil 2”, MünzenWoche, 19 September 2011, https://neu.muenzenwoche.de/nationen/einleitung-die-zuercher-und-ihr-geld-teil-2/. ↩
5. Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich (ed.), Kleine Zürcher Verfassungsgeschichte 1218–2000, p. 35 (see note 1). ↩
6. Zunft Schwamendingen, “Das Ende der alten Ordnung – Kriegstage in Schwamendingen”, https://www.zunft-schwamendingen.ch/geschichte-schwamendingen/385-das-ende-der-alten-ordnung-kriegstage-in-schwamendingen.html. The same account records the oath to the Helvetic constitution taken on 16 August 1798 and the obligation to provide a “liberty drink” from communal funds. ↩
7. Wikipedia (German), “Zweite Schlacht um Zürich”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zweite_Schlacht_um_Z%C3%BCrich. The article also records the plundering of the convent of Fahr on 25 September 1799. ↩
8. Zunft Schwamendingen, “Das Ende der alten Ordnung” (see above). ↩
9. Wikipedia (German), “Helvetische Republik”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetische_Republik, section on the economic situation. ↩

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.