The Mediation: the canton restored

The Act of Mediation and the liquidation of the Helvetic state

The Act of Mediation of 19 February 1803, drawn up by Napoleon Bonaparte with the Helvetic Consulta that he had summoned to Paris, served as the fundamental law of Switzerland from 10 March 1803 until 29 December 1813. It created a confederation of nineteen equal cantons, with an annual Diet whose deputies voted on cantonal instructions and a Landammann of Switzerland at the head of the federal authority. Former subject territories such as Aargau, Thurgau and Vaud became cantons of equal rank, so that the central achievement of 1798, the end of the relationship between ruling and subject territories, survived the fall of the unitary state. French troops withdrew by February 1804, but Switzerland remained bound to France by a defensive alliance, by a military capitulation that supplied soldiers to Napoleon’s armies and by an obligation to buy French salt.¹ The Zurich statesman Hans von Reinhard took part in the Consulta, signed the Act of Mediation and obtained territorial gains for his canton.²

The Act contained provisions of direct financial importance. The federal part guaranteed that Swiss coins should have a uniform fineness to be fixed by the Diet and allowed citizens to settle in another canton and to exercise their trade there freely. It also abolished the old rights of transit and guaranteed the free circulation of provisions, livestock and merchandise without internal tolls, while frontier tariffs were left to the border cantons, subject to the approval of the Diet. The final provisions returned the property of the monasteries, transferred the administration of the national property to the cantons and provided for the liquidation of the Helvetic national debt from cantonal assets. Any surplus was to be distributed proportionally, with the remaining movable and immovable property reverting to the cantons. A commission of five members was to determine the needs of the municipalities and to carry out the liquidation within fixed time limits.³

For Zurich, the liquidation raised a question that had never arisen under the old regime: which assets belonged to the canton and which to the city? Before 1798 the two had been identical, since the city was the state. The settlement of 1803 divided them. The canton received most of the commissions and offices of the old government, while the city of Zurich kept certain institutions such as the grain office and the forest administration.⁴ The division of 1803 is the origin of the separate public finances of the canton and the city of Zurich, which survive in the dual structure of cantonal and municipal budgets, and later of cantonal and municipal institutions, that characterises Zurich to this day. In the language of modern corporate law, the old republic was demerged into two entities, and much of the political conflict of the following decades concerned the terms of that demerger.

A constitution of property owners

Napoleon issued the new constitution of the canton on 19 February 1803. It created, for the first time, a legislature, a government and an administration of the canton distinct from the institutions of the city.⁵ Political rights, however, were tied to wealth. To vote, a man needed property of at least 500 francs, economic independence and military fitness, and had to be thirty years old or married. The Staatsarchiv estimates that about half of the male population of the countryside was thereby excluded from political participation.⁶ The Grand Council had 195 members, elected in a system based on sixty-five electoral guilds, thirteen for the city and fifty-two for the countryside. Eligibility for the council required fortunes of between 5,000 and 20,000 francs according to the manner of election. The arrangement gave the city, with about eleven thousand inhabitants, 75 seats, against 120 for a rural population of some 182,000.⁷

The census constitution of 1803 expressed a principle that would dominate the political thought of the propertied classes in Zurich for half a century: political participation should correspond to economic stake. It restored the city’s preponderance in a new form, replacing the legal privilege of the burgher with the qualification of the property owner. Since the wealth of the canton was concentrated in the city and in the lakeside villages, the result was a government of merchants, rentiers and prosperous rural entrepreneurs. The Grand Council of the Mediation included men such as the architect and industrialist Hans Caspar Escher, who sat in it until 1830.⁸

The Bockenkrieg of 1804

The new cantonal government soon found itself confronted with the unresolved question of the feudal charges. The countryside around the lake resented a series of measures of the restored authorities: restrictions on communal liberties, the appointment of pastors and teachers by the Small Council, limits on the freedom of trades and, above all, a law on the redemption of tithes that fixed prices higher than in other cantons. The spark was an oath of allegiance decreed on 4 December 1803, by which citizens were to swear loyalty to the constitution and to all present and future laws. Forty-seven of the 192 communes refused.⁹ In Wädenswil some two thousand people gathered for the swearing ceremony on 16 March 1804 and rejected the oath with shouts, so that the federal representatives had to leave in haste. On 24 March the empty castle of Wädenswil, the seat of the former bailiff, was set on fire.¹⁰

About six hundred men from the left bank of the lake and the district of Knonau, led by Hans Jakob Willi, a shoemaker from Horgen, marched towards Zurich and defeated government forces under Colonel Jakob Christoph Ziegler at the Bocken estate above Horgen on 28 March 1804. The Landammann of Switzerland, Niklaus Rudolf von Wattenwyl, mobilised Bernese and Aargau troops even before Zurich formally requested help. By 3 April 1804 the rising had been suppressed at Affoltern am Albis. The region was occupied and disarmed and had to pay war contributions, while Willi and two other leaders were executed.¹¹ The two other executed leaders were Heinrich Häberling and Jakob Schneebeli. The tithe redemption law itself was enforced without amendment.¹²

The financial punishment was heavy and precisely calibrated. Wädenswil had to pay a contribution of 112,000 francs and Horgen 48,000 francs, raised through property taxes and municipal loans. Beyond the executions, the courts imposed prison terms, a sentence of twenty years in chains, lifelong banishment and the suspension of political rights. Wädenswil itself lost its voting rights and recovered them only in stages between 1811 and 1813.¹³ The episode repeated the pattern of 1795 with reversed roles in one respect: the property-owning government of the Mediation used the instruments of the old regime to enforce the interests of the owners of feudal charges, most of whom lived in the city. The redemption of tithes and ground rents in Zurich accordingly proceeded slowly and on a voluntary basis, as in most of German-speaking Switzerland. Only in the 1860s was the final compulsory redemption of the remaining land charges in Zurich ordered.¹⁴

For the history of the financial centre, the slow redemption of feudal charges is of greater importance than it might appear. A tithe or ground rent was an encumbrance that ran with the land and could not easily be combined with a mortgage. As long as the land of the canton was burdened with perpetual charges in favour of the state, the church and urban rentiers, rural credit remained fragmented and personal. The gradual conversion of these charges into cash payments released capital to their former owners, who reinvested it in securities, industrial ventures and mortgage loans. At the same time it created unencumbered land that could serve as security. The mortgage banks and savings banks of the nineteenth century, and later the Zürcher Kantonalbank founded in 1870, built their business on this transformed property regime.

The Continental Blockade and the first spinning mills

The Mediation coincided with the most dramatic transformation of Zurich’s industrial base since the arrival of the silk trade in the sixteenth century. From around 1790 English mechanically spun cotton yarn, cheaper and more uniform than hand-spun thread, had begun to undermine the home spinning on which the Zurich countryside depended.¹⁵ The first response came from Winterthur. In 1800 seven members of Winterthur families, among them Johann Heinrich Sulzer and Johann Heinrich Ziegler, formed the Hardgesellschaft. After buying land near Wülflingen on the river Töss in 1801, they built the mill of the Hard in 1802, the first enterprise in Switzerland to combine mechanical spinning machines with water power.¹⁶ Drawing on French capital, the enterprise began with forty-four mechanical spinning machines, which are said to have displaced the work of about eight thousand hand spinners.¹⁷

In the city, Hans Caspar Escher and Salomon von Wyss founded in 1805 a cotton spinning mill in the Neumühle on the Limmat, the second successful mechanical spinning mill in Switzerland. Escher had been trained as a merchant and as an architect under Friedrich Weinbrenner in Rome, and von Wyss was a banker. The machines were at first built only for the firm’s own use, until the workshop began to accept outside orders in 1810 and did so permanently from 1828.¹⁸ By 1829 Escher Wyss had become the largest machine-building enterprise in Switzerland, producing textile machinery, steamships, an early turbine in 1841 and later steam locomotives.¹⁹

The Continental Blockade proclaimed by Napoleon on 21 November 1806 accelerated this development. Switzerland had prohibited the import of cotton goods as early as 22 February 1806 and adopted the ban on British goods on 5 July 1806, while allowing machine yarn to enter through thirteen customs posts. The Trianon tariff of 1810 raised duties on colonial goods to as much as fifty per cent, while the Fontainebleau decree ordered the public burning of British merchandise. By excluding English competition, the blockade paradoxically encouraged the mechanisation of Swiss cotton spinning.²⁰ The number of mills rose rapidly. The Historisches Lexikon gives sixty spinning mills in Zurich by 1814 in one article and seventy-four in another, against twenty to thirty each in St. Gallen and Appenzell. Of these mostly small mills, only the larger and better equipped survived.²¹

The Glarus industrialist Caspar Jenny, looking back in 1930, described the effect of the blockade on the hand cotton industry as almost destructive and credited it with forcing the Swiss to build their own machines, which gave rise to engineering firms such as Escher, Wyss & Co. and Jacob Rieter & Cie.²² The significance of this development for Zurich’s later financial history can hardly be overstated. Mechanical spinning required fixed capital on a scale unknown to the Verlag system, in buildings, water rights and machines. It created a demand for long-term industrial finance that the merchant bankers of the old type, accustomed to short-term commercial credit, were only partly able to meet. The same process produced a new class of industrial fortunes whose owners would later found banks to serve their needs. The line from the Neumühle of 1805 to the Schweizerische Kreditanstalt of 1856, discussed in Part D, runs through the balance sheets of these spinning and engineering firms.

Notes

1. HLS, French edition, “Médiation”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/009798/. The article describes the regime as a hybrid, neither purely confederal nor fully federal, with a limited capacity to act. ↩
2. Wikipedia (German), “Hans von Reinhard”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_von_Reinhard. Reinhard (1755–1835) was Landammann of Switzerland in 1807 and 1813 and represented Switzerland at the Congress of Vienna. ↩
3. Axel Tschentscher (University of Bern), edition of the Mediationsakte (1803), chapter XX (federal act and final provisions), https://www.verfassungsgeschichte.ch/CH_1803_Mediationsverfassung_Kapitel_XX_(Bund).pdf, articles 4–7 of the federal act and articles 1–7 of the fiscal provisions. ↩
4. Canton of Zurich, press release “Die kantonale Verwaltung historisch betrachtet”, May 2008, https://www.zh.ch/de/news-uebersicht/medienmitteilungen/2008/05/115.html. The release notes that the cantonal administration relied on commissions until the introduction of the departmental system in 1849/50, which Alfred Escher had advocated. ↩
5. Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich (ed.), Kleine Zürcher Verfassungsgeschichte 1218–2000, pp. 39 and 41. ↩
6. Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich (ed.), Kleine Zürcher Verfassungsgeschichte 1218–2000, p. 41, where the property threshold of 500 francs is quoted verbatim. ↩
7. Wikipedia (German), “Verfassung des Kantons Zürich” (see above), section on the Mediation constitution; for the 65 electoral guilds see also “Geschichte des Kantons Zürich” (see above). ↩
8. HLS, “Escher, Hans Caspar”, version of 7 April 2006, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/019847/2006-04-07/. ↩
9. Wikipedia (German), “Bockenkrieg”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bockenkrieg, for the list of grievances, the oath decree of 4 December 1803 and the number of communes refusing it. ↩
10. Baukultur Wädenswil, “Bockenkrieg und Mediation”, https://www.baukultur-waedenswil.ch/bockenkrieg-und-mediation.html. The page quotes Councillor Usteri’s description of the ceremony as “tumultuous beyond measure”. ↩
11. HLS, Italian edition, Peter Ziegler, “Guerra di Bocken”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/017223/. ↩
12. Wikipedia (German), “Bockenkrieg” (see above). ↩
13. Baukultur Wädenswil, “Bockenkrieg und Mediation” (see above). ↩
14. HLS, French edition, “Redevances féodales” (see above), which records that Lucerne, Zurich and Thurgau ordered the final redemption of the remaining ground rents between 1861 and 1865, and that the federal land register introduced with the Civil Code of 1912 swept away the last feudal charges incompatible with modern property law. ↩
15. HLS, French edition, “Coton”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/013961/, section on the emergence of mechanical spinning. ↩
16. HLS, “Spinnerei im Hard”, version of 20 February 2012, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/048184/2012-02-20/. ↩
17. Wikipedia (German), “Spinnerei Hard”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinnerei_Hard. The article also records the addition of worker housing with dormitories, bakery and laundry by 1817 and of a weaving department in 1824. ↩
18. Wikipedia (German), “Escher Wyss AG”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escher_Wyss_AG. The article relates that Escher had seen the first spinning machine in Switzerland in operation at the former monastery of St. Gallen around 1801. ↩
19. HLS, “Escher, Hans Caspar” (see above). The article also records that Escher founded a sickness and support fund for workers in 1837 and a savings bank for them in 1846. ↩
20. HLS, “Kontinentalsperre”, version of 30 October 2008, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/013928/2008-10-30/. The article also notes that the end of the blockade in 1813 was followed by the crisis of 1816–17, when cheap British textiles flooded the continental markets. ↩
21. HLS, French edition, “Coton” (see above), giving 74 mechanical spinning mills for Zurich in 1814; HLS, “Kontinentalsperre” (see above), giving 60 for Zurich and 17 for St. Gallen. ↩
22. Caspar Jenny, “Die schweizerische Baumwollindustrie”, lecture of 19 November 1930 to the economic society of Zurich, published in the 1930 volume of the journal of the Swiss Society of Economics and Statistics, https://www.sses.swiss/journal/archive/pdf/1930/1930-I-46.pdf. ↩

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.