The long survival of the guild order and its legacy

Four and a half centuries

The guild constitution created by Brun and revised in 1373, 1393, 1489 and 1498 survived the Reformation, the Thirty Years’ War and the Enlightenment. It adapted through successive amendments. Its framework in 1790 was recognisably that of 1498: a Small and a Great Council elected through twelve guilds and the Constaffel, two mayors and a civic community bound by oath. By the fifteenth century the Small Council had been reorganised into two halves of twenty-four members each, alternating every six months, composed of guild masters, Constaffel representatives and councillors elected from the Great Council. This structure lasted, with adjustments, until the end of the ancien régime.¹ The population of the city governed by this constitution remained small: some 5,700 inhabitants around 1408, about 4,750 in 1467 and 5,100 in 1529, rising to about 11,500 by 1762.² In 1769 Zurich counted 10,579 inhabitants and about 1,100 craftsmen. A few thousand citizens, organised in thirteen corporations, governed a territory of well over a hundred thousand rural inhabitants.

The end came from outside. On 3 February 1798, under the pressure of events in France and of the revolutionary movement in the countryside, the Zurich authorities announced reforms, including a wider freedom of trade. Some guild members contemplated armed resistance, others debated whether the guilds’ collective property should be divided among the members. In the tailors’ guild in particular, members defended the common property as an “anvertrautes Erbgut”, an inheritance entrusted to them by their ancestors.³ The French invasion and the internal revolution that demanded equality between city and countryside dissolved the city-state.⁴ On 19 October 1798 the Helvetic Republic abolished compulsory guild membership, and freedom of trade and industry was finally anchored in the Federal Constitution of 1874.⁵

The guilds did not disappear. The Meisen reconstituted itself as a society in 1801.⁶ During the Restoration, between 1815 and the liberal revolution of 1830–1831, the Constaffel and the guilds regained a role as electoral bodies, the Constaffel being restored as one of thirteen electoral guilds.⁷ The guilds lost their last functions in the state in the 1860s and continued as private associations. From 1867 new guilds were founded in the city and in the suburbs incorporated in 1893 and 1934, so that today twenty-six guilds and societies form the Zentralkomitee der Zünfte Zürichs.⁸ The Constaffel reorganised itself as a social society in 1841 and has been called the Gesellschaft zur Constaffel since 1899. It sold the house zum Rüden to the city in 1868 and bought it back in 1937.⁹

The Sechseläuten

The most visible legacy of the guild order is the Sechseläuten, the spring festival held on the Monday after the equinox. Its name recalls a regulation of working hours: in the summer half-year, from the spring equinox, the bell of the Grossmünster signalled the end of the working day at six o’clock. The guild of the butchers dates this regulation to the craft ordinances of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, while the city’s tourism office places it in the sixteenth century.¹⁰ Either way, the festival commemorates a moment when the guild calendar governed the rhythm of work in the whole city. Its modern form is a creation of the nineteenth century. In 1839 the Constaffel and all the guilds met together on the Lindenhof for the first time. The burning of the Böögg, the snowman figure that represents winter, was originally a separate children’s custom and was merged with the guild festival only in the later nineteenth century. Since 1902 the Böögg has been burned on the square now known as the Sechseläutenplatz. Some 3,500 guild members now march through the old town in historical costume.

Guild houses and the networks of the financial centre

Beyond the festival, the guilds have remained social networks of the Zurich establishment. Admission is by invitation and vote: prospective members attend events as guests and are then admitted, or not, by a vote of the members.¹¹ The guild houses on the Limmat and the Münsterhof, the Saffran, the Meisen, the Rüden, the Zimmerleuten and others, are places where lawyers, bankers, entrepreneurs, officials and politicians have met for generations at guild dinners and on the Sechseläuten. The extent of their influence on business is disputed. The press has linked leading figures of Credit Suisse, among them Urs Rohner and Walter Kielholz, to the guilds. The collapse of the bank in 2023 prompted commentary on the decline of the old Zurich establishment, of which the guilds, the Liberal party, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and the great banks had formed parts.¹² The historian Helmut Meyer, by contrast, has dismissed the idea of a hidden guild power as a fantasy, observing that headhunters do not ask about guild membership. Both views contain truth. The recruitment of senior management in Zurich’s financial institutions has been internationalised since the 1990s and no longer follows the paths of the old networks, yet the guild houses remain places where trust is built across the boundaries of firms, professions and political parties, which is what networks in a financial centre have always been for.

The guilds have also had to confront the exclusion that Ogilvie identifies as a defining feature of the historical guilds. Until recently all Zurich guilds were male associations. The Gesellschaft zu Fraumünster was founded in 1989 as a women’s society and has taken part in the Sechseläuten procession since 2014, officially as guests of the Constaffel.¹³ In February 2025 the Zunft zur Meisen, with some 200 members the largest of the guilds, decided by a majority of 88 per cent at an extraordinary assembly to admit women as full members on the same terms as men, the first Zurich guild to do so, although the Zunft Höngg had approved the admission of women with transitional provisions in 2024.¹⁴ That the guild of the wine-dealers and innkeepers, whose house on the Münsterhof has received queens and prime ministers, should have led this change is a sign that the institutions of 1336 are still capable of the kind of negotiated adaptation that preserved them for so long.

The constitutional legacy

The deeper legacy of the guild order lies in habits of government. Four features stand out. The first is collegiality. From 1373 onwards Zurich was governed by two alternating mayors and by councils that rotated every half year, so that no individual office carried decisive authority for long. The city and canton of Zurich today are governed by collegial executives, a principle the Federal Council also follows. The governance of Zurich’s great financial institutions, with their strong boards and their separation of chair and chief executive, reflects a comparable preference for dispersed authority.¹⁵ The second is consensus. The election of guild masters required the assent of the ordinary members, while the constitution was revised by negotiation and renewed by oath. The Swiss practice of seeking broad agreement before legislation, which shapes the regulation of the financial centre, belongs to the same tradition. The Staatsarchiv describes the Zurich model as a form of democracy grown from below.¹⁶

The third feature is distrust of concentrated power. Brun’s lifetime mayoralty was abolished within fifteen years of his death, and Waldmann’s personal rule ended on the scaffold. The lesson was learned so thoroughly that Zurich produced no dynasty of rulers in the following centuries: power belonged to families, to guilds and to councils, and was shared. The fourth feature is the fusion of economic interest and public office. For four and a half centuries the people who regulated the market were the people who worked in it or lived from its profits. This produced a governing class with an intimate knowledge of commerce and a strong sense of responsibility for the city’s prosperity. The same fusion also produced protectionism, exclusion and, in the eighteenth century, an oligarchy of rentiers. The Swiss system of self-regulation in the financial sector, in which industry associations have long drafted rules that the supervisor then recognises as minimum standards, is a distant but recognisable descendant of this tradition.¹⁷

A brief comparison with Geneva, the subject of this book’s companion volume, sharpens the point. Geneva never became a guild town. There the councils of the city, dominated by a small number of families, regulated the trades from above. The merchants and bankers who made the city’s fortune in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries operated within a patrician republic.¹⁸ Zurich’s commercial elite, by contrast, came to power through the guilds and remained bound to them. The difference helps explain why Zurich’s financial centre, when it emerged in the nineteenth century, grew out of a broader civic and industrial base, while Geneva’s grew out of a narrower circle of private bankers.

Notes

1. Otto Sigg, “Zunftherrlichkeit” (1986), https://www.zuerich-geschichte.info/pdfs/Zunftherrlichkeit.pdf, who describes the Small Council from 1441 onwards as composed of twelve guild masters, two Constaffel representatives, six guild councillors and one Constaffel councillor elected from the Great Council, and three freely chosen councillors in each half. ↩
2. HLS, “Zürich (Gemeinde)”, table of population, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/000171/2015-01-25/. ↩
3. Otto Sigg, “Zunftherrlichkeit” (1986), https://www.zuerich-geschichte.info/pdfs/Zunftherrlichkeit.pdf. ↩
4. Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich (ed.), Kleine Zürcher Verfassungsgeschichte 1218–2000 (2000), https://www.zh.ch/content/dam/zhweb/bilder-dokumente/themen/politik-staat/recherche-im-staatsarchiv/z%C3%BCrcher-geschichte/zh_verfassungsgeschichte.pdf. ↩
5. HLS, “Handwerk” (Anne-Marie Dubler), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/articles/013954. ↩
6. Zunft zur Meisen, “Zunfthaus”, https://www.meisen.ch/zunfthaus. ↩
7. HLS, “Konstaffel” (Martin Illi), http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D10249.php. ↩
8. Zentralkomitee der Zünfte Zürichs, “Zunftporträts”, https://www.sechselaeuten.ch/de/zuenfte, and “Geschichte”, https://www.sechselaeuten.ch/de/wissenswertes/geschichte. ↩
9. HLS, “Konstaffel” (Martin Illi), http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D10249.php; Wikipedia, “Haus zum Rüden”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haus_zum_R%C3%BCden. ↩
10. Zunft zum Widder, “Sechseläuten”, https://www.zunft-widder.ch/historisch-sechselaeuten.html; Zürich Tourismus, “Sechseläuten – Das Zürcher Frühlingsfest”, https://www.zuerich.com/de/events-nachtleben/typische-events/sechselaeuten. ↩
11. Lukas Hässig, “Oberstrass-Zunft lehnte Urs Rohner ab”, Inside Paradeplatz, 27 December 2019, https://insideparadeplatz.ch/2019/12/27/oberstrass-zunft-lehnte-urs-rohner-ab/, which describes the admission procedure. ↩
12. Tages-Anzeiger, “Welchen Einfluss haben die Zürcher Zünfte heute noch?”, https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/welchen-einfluss-haben-die-zuercher-zuenfte-heute-noch-442924799238; Peter Hossli, “Swissair, GC und CS heruntergewirtschaftet – am Sechseläuten wieder hoch zu Ross”, Blick, 17 April 2023, https://www.blick.ch/politik/swissair-gc-und-cs-heruntergewirtschaftet-am-sechselaeuten-wieder-hoch-zu-ross-zuercher-elite-zelebriert-ihren-zerfall-id18492726.html. ↩
13. Limmattaler Zeitung, “Zunftwesen: Die Zürcher Zunft zur Meisen stellt nun die Frauenfrage”, January 2022, https://www.limmattalerzeitung.ch/limmattal/zuerich/zunftwesen-die-zuercher-zunft-zur-meisen-stellt-nun-die-frauenfrage-ld.2200946. ↩
14. SRF News, “Keine reine Männersache mehr: Erste Zürcher Zunft nimmt Frauen offiziell als Mitglieder auf”, 6 February 2025, https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/keine-reine-maennersache-mehr-erste-zuercher-zunft-nimmt-frauen-offiziell-als-mitglieder-auf. ↩
15. The collegial structure of the Stadtrat and Regierungsrat of Zurich and of the Federal Council is common knowledge. The separation of board and executive management in Swiss banks is laid down in Art. 11(2) of the Banking Ordinance of 30 April 2014 (BankV, SR 952.02): “Kein Mitglied des für die Oberleitung, Aufsicht und Kontrolle verantwortlichen Organs einer Bank darf dem Organ angehören, das mit der Geschäftsführung betraut ist”, LexFind, https://www.lexfind.ch/tolv/149083/de (version as at 1 January 2016). ↩
16. Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich (ed.), Kleine Zürcher Verfassungsgeschichte 1218–2000 (2000), https://www.zh.ch/content/dam/zhweb/bilder-dokumente/themen/politik-staat/recherche-im-staatsarchiv/z%C3%BCrcher-geschichte/zh_verfassungsgeschichte.pdf. ↩
17. Federal Act on the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMASA) of 22 June 2007, Art. 7(3): FINMA “supports self-regulation and may recognise and implement the same as a minimum standard within terms of its supervisory powers”, droit-bilingue.ch, https://droit-bilingue.ch/en-de/9/95/956.1-7-10.html; FINMA, “FINMA anerkennt Selbstregulierungen aus der Vermögensverwaltungsbranche”, 27 April 2009, https://www.finma.ch/de/news/2009/04/aktuell-selbstregulierungen-20090427/, referring to FINMA Circular 2008/10 “Selbstregulierung als Mindeststandard”. The historical link to the guild tradition is the author’s interpretation. ↩
18. HLS, “Zünfte” (Katharina Simon-Muscheid), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/013729/2015-02-03/: the Geneva guilds of the late sixteenth century stood under the control of the authorities from 1557 and played no political role. HLS, “Genfer Revolutionen” (Dominique Quadroni), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/026890/2012-05-10/, describes the eighteenth-century regime in which “eine Minderheit von Patriziern … die ganze Macht auf sich konzentrierte”. HLS, “Villes corporatives”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/f/F9917.php, does not count Geneva among the guild towns. ↩

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.