The Stäfner Handel and the end of the old regime

A wealthy countryside without rights

By the last decades of the eighteenth century the villages on the shores of Lake Zurich had become some of the most prosperous rural communities in Europe. Cotton and silk were spun and woven in the houses of the lakeside and the Oberland under the Verlag system described in Chapter C.I. A stratum of rural intermediaries had accumulated considerable capital in this trade: the Tüchler and Fergger, who distributed raw material and collected finished goods. Stäfa, on the right bank of the lake, was the largest and economically strongest of these communities. Its leading families were textile entrepreneurs, surgeons, innkeepers and craftsmen who read newspapers, belonged to reading societies and followed the events in France with close attention. Politically, however, they had no voice. The constitution of the city-state reserved government, the higher offices of the church and the army and the most important branches of trade and manufacture to the burghers of the city.¹

The economic dimension of that exclusion was as important as the political one. A rural manufacturer could organise home workers, but he could neither trade freely in finished goods on his own account in the way the city merchants did nor compete with them in the export trade. The Staatsarchiv of the canton summarises the grievance in a sentence that also names its main targets: since the Stäfa affair of 1795 at the latest, protest against the political monopoly of the city burghers and against their exclusive privileges in trade and industry, as well as in the filling of officers’ commissions and pastorates, was widespread.² The prosperity of the rural elite therefore sharpened its sense of injustice. Men who managed hundreds of home workers and handled substantial sums found themselves treated as subjects by a city council whose members were often less wealthy than they were.

The Memorial of 1794 and its repression

On 11 November 1794 Heinrich Nehracher, a stove-maker, presented to the reading society of Stäfa a draft text entitled “Ein Wort zur Beherzigung an unsre theuersten Landesväter”, a word for the consideration of our dearest fathers of the land. It became known as the Stäfner Memorial. Its central demand, that the constitution of Zurich should be distributed equally over the whole land, sought for the rural elite economic, legal and political equality with the burghers of the city. It also called for the abolition of tithes and ground rents. The authorities regarded the text as seditious. They had it burned, exiled Nehracher and other participants and imposed fines and penalties of dishonour.³ Nehracher had three co-authors, the surgeon Johann Kaspar Pfenninger, the baker Heinrich Ryffel and the surgeon Andreas Staub. The memorial listed seven points, beginning with a constitution and including civic equality, freedom of trade and education, the abolition of feudal charges and the restoration of ancient communal rights.⁴

The combination of demands is revealing for the economic historian. Freedom of trade meant the end of the city’s commercial monopoly. The abolition of tithes and ground rents meant the end of the main revenue base of the Zurich state, of its church and of many urban institutions and private owners, for whom these charges were a form of secure, inflation-protected income comparable to a perpetual bond. The memorial thus attacked both pillars of the old order at once: the privileged access of city capital to profitable trade and the rentier income that a large part of the city’s wealth represented.

The repression escalated into what became known as the Stäfner Handel. In February 1795 delegations from the lakeside communities began searching archives for documents guaranteeing ancient liberties, in particular the charters issued after the Waldmann affair of 1489 and the Kappeler Brief of 1532, which they believed the city had suppressed.⁵ In the spring of 1795 unrest reached its height in Stäfa, and bans on reading and assembly were openly violated. On 5 July 1795 the city occupied Stäfa with two thousand troops.⁶ Other accounts put the force at four thousand men and describe a ban on the community in June 1795 that cut it off from trade, a Liberty Tree erected in March and an occupation of the lake communities that lasted two months at their own expense.⁷

On 2 September 1795 the courts pronounced 267 judgments against the principal participants.⁸ Six leaders were sentenced to death. The sentences were commuted after the intervention of moderate city figures, among them the pastor Johann Kaspar Lavater and the educator Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. Johann Jakob Bodmer, textile manufacturer and treasurer (Seckelmeister) of Stäfa, the political head of the movement, underwent a symbolic execution in which the executioner’s sword was raised and lowered over his neck, and was then sentenced to life imprisonment. He had been tortured under interrogation.⁹ Stäfa lost its rights of self-government and was left heavily indebted by the costs of the occupation that it had been forced to bear. The financial punishment of a community by making it pay for its own military occupation was a traditional instrument of early modern government. Within a few years Zurich itself would experience it at the hands of France.

February 1798: the abdication of the city

The repression of 1795 preserved the old order for less than three years. When the French Directory moved against the Swiss Confederation at the beginning of 1798 and Bern prepared for war, the Zurich government called up the rural militia. The countryside largely ignored the order.¹⁰ Faced with a population it could no longer rely on, the government yielded. On 3 February 1798 it announced that deputies would be summoned to discuss greater freedom of trade and professions and the opening of city citizenship, and on 5 February the guild houses received notice of a proclamation altering the constitution.¹¹ On that day the government declared complete freedom and equality for all inhabitants of the canton. A Landesversammlung of 36 city and 128 rural deputies met on 21 February. After the old government abdicated on 12 March, the assembly assumed the administration and closed its proceedings on 14 April 1798.¹²

The Stäfa prisoners were released. Bodmer, freed and rehabilitated, opened the Helvetic Senate in Aarau on 12 April 1798 as its oldest member and first president, and Pfenninger, the co-author of the memorial, became Regierungsstatthalter, the prefect of the Helvetic government in the canton of Zurich.¹³ Within four years the condemned men of 1795 had become the representatives of the new state in the very city that had judged them. In the guilds themselves the end came quickly. In May 1798 most guilds resolved to divide their property among their members, although some, among them the tailors, protested that assets accumulated over generations of contributions should not be privatised in this way.¹⁴ The episode is a small but telling precedent for a question that recurs throughout the history of Zurich’s institutions: when a collective body loses its public function, to whom does its accumulated capital belong?

Notes

1. Kurt Messmer, “«Dieses ist keine gewöhnliche Revolution»”, part 2 of the series on the Helvetic Revolution, Swiss National Museum blog, 4 September 2018, https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/2018/09/dieses-ist-keine-gewoehnliche-revolution/. Messmer describes Stäfa as the most important rural community of the canton by population and economic strength, with a prosperous upper stratum drawn from textile production that remained excluded from political participation. ↩
2. Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich (ed.), Kleine Zürcher Verfassungsgeschichte 1218–2000, p. 35 (see note 1). The passage refers to the “ausschliessliche Privilegien in Handel und Industrie sowie bei der Besetzung von Offiziers- und Pfarrstellen”. ↩
3. Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz (HLS), Bruno Schmid, “Stäfnerhandel”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/017215/. The article dates Nehracher’s presentation to 11 November 1794 and summarises the content of the memorial, including the demand for the abolition of tithes and ground rents. ↩
4. Wikipedia (German), “Stäfnerhandel”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/St%C3%A4fnerhandel, consulted for the names of the four authors and the enumeration of the seven demands; the account is consistent with the HLS entry cited in the previous note. ↩
5. HLS, Bruno Schmid, “Stäfnerhandel”, version of 27.02.2012, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/017215/2012-02-27/, which states that from February 1795 the delegations searched the documents cited in the Memorial, such as the Waldmann charters (Waldmann’sche Spruchbriefe) of 1489 and the Kappelerbrief of 1532, for old guarantees of liberty. The Waldmann charters had been issued after the execution of Burgomaster Hans Waldmann and confirmed certain rights of the rural communities. ↩
6. HLS, Bruno Schmid, “Stäfnerhandel” (see above), for the search for historical guarantees from February 1795, the unrest of spring 1795 and the occupation by 2,000 men on 5 July 1795. ↩
7. Wikipedia (German), “Stäfnerhandel” (see above), and Messmer, “«Dieses ist keine gewöhnliche Revolution»” (see above). Messmer gives 2,000 troops occupying Stäfa for two months at the community’s expense; the Wikipedia account gives 4,000 men from 4 July. ↩
8. HLS, Bruno Schmid, “Stäfnerhandel” (see above). ↩
9. Wikipedia (German), “Johann Jakob Bodmer (Politiker)”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Jakob_Bodmer_(Politiker). The article gives his dates as 1737–1806 and describes him as textile manufacturer, farmer and Seckelmeister of Stäfa. ↩
10. Messmer, “«Dieses ist keine gewöhnliche Revolution»” (see above). ↩
11. Otto Sigg, “Zunftherrlichkeit: die Zürcher Zünfte 1336 bis 1798”, in the Festschrift for the 650th anniversary of the Zurich guilds (1986), pp. 12–32, https://www.zuerich-geschichte.info/pdfs/Zunftherrlichkeit.pdf. Sigg quotes the formula “mehrere Freiheit des Handels und der Profession”, which shows that the city’s commercial privileges stood at the centre of the concessions. ↩
12. Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich (ed.), Kleine Zürcher Verfassungsgeschichte 1218–2000, pp. 35, 37 and 38. ↩
13. Wikipedia (German), “Johann Kaspar Pfenninger”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Kaspar_Pfenninger, and “Johann Jakob Bodmer (Politiker)” (see above). Pfenninger (1760–1838) resigned as prefect in 1800, represented Zurich at the Helvetic Consulta of 1802/03 and sat on the constitutional commission of 1830/31. ↩
14. Sigg, “Zunftherrlichkeit” (see above). ↩

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.