The Ustertag and the liberal regeneration

The assembly of 22 November 1830

The July Revolution in Paris in 1830 gave the signal for a wave of constitutional movements in the Swiss cantons. In Zurich, more than one hundred citizens from the countryside met in Stäfa on 19 November 1830 and called a popular assembly for three days later in Uster.¹ On 22 November 1830 some ten thousand men gathered on the Zimiker hill at Uster. The Memorial of Uster that they adopted demanded a new constitution based above all on equality between city and countryside.² The principal speaker was the physician Johannes Hegetschweiler of Stäfa, later a member of the government. The central political demands were, in the words of one historian, freedom rights first, and then two thirds of the seats in the Grand Council for the countryside, to be granted within six months, a programme that was largely achieved.³

The Ustertag has a place in Zurich’s political memory comparable to that of the battle of Sempach in the national memory. When the canton commemorated it in 1994, Federal Councillor Kaspar Villiger drew exactly that comparison, describing it as a breakthrough that showed Switzerland’s capacity for renewal.⁴ For the economic historian, the assembly is significant for a second reason. The movement united two very different groups. The rural elite of manufacturers, merchants, physicians and lawyers wanted political rights and legal equality. The home weavers and small manufacturers of the Oberland wanted protection of wages and a prohibition of machines, above all of the mechanical looms that had just been installed. The historian Kurt Messmer summarises the divide in a phrase: some wanted politics, others their daily bread.⁵ The Memorial of Uster contained both sets of demands. Its political programme was carried out within months. The liberal government it had brought to power rejected its economic programme.

The constitution of 1831

The government capitulated before the end of 1830. A constitutional commission, on which the Stäfa veteran Pfenninger also sat, prepared a new constitution, which the Grand Council adopted on 10 March 1831. On 20 March 1831 the voters approved it by 40,503 votes to 1,721, and on 10 April 1831 the citizens swore the oath to it in the parish churches of the canton.⁶ The constitution placed sovereignty in the people as a whole and declared all citizens equal before the law and in their political rights. Besides guaranteeing the freedom of the press and prohibiting censorship for all time, it gave citizens the right to bring their views, wishes and complaints before the Grand Council.⁷

Three provisions were of direct economic significance. Article 7 declared that the freedom of trade and of trades was expressly guaranteed. Article 15 secured the inviolability of property. Article 16 guaranteed the right to redeem tithes and ground rents by legal means.⁸ Together these articles established in Zurich the legal framework of a liberal market economy: free entry into trades and commerce, secure private property and the progressive liberation of land from feudal charges. The same combination of guarantees would reappear, at federal level, in the constitutions of 1848 and 1874. From the perspective of a lawyer working in the financial centre today, Article 7 of the Zurich constitution of 1831 belongs to the genealogy of the economic freedom now guaranteed by Article 27 of the Federal Constitution. Every bank, asset manager and fiduciary in Zurich relies on that freedom when it enters the market and is supervised within it.

The constitution of 1831 did not introduce full democracy in the modern sense. The Grand Council still combined direct election with indirect elements. Nor did the property and guild structures that had shaped representation since 1803 disappear at once. The Wikipedia summary of the canton’s constitutional history stresses both points: an approval by ninety-six per cent of those voting and the persistence of conservative restrictions.⁹ Systematic direct democracy, with popular initiative and referendum and the direct election of the government, came to Zurich only with the constitution of 1869, which made the canton a pioneer in Switzerland. The liberal constitution of 1831 was nevertheless the decisive break. It created, in the words of the cantonal government, the foundations of the modern canton of Zurich.¹⁰

The Usterbrand of 1832

The economic demands of the Ustertag returned two years later in violent form. On 22 November 1832, the anniversary of the assembly, a crowd of small manufacturers and home weavers from the Zurich Oberland attacked and burned the mechanical spinning and weaving mill of Corrodi & Pfister in Oberuster. The Historisches Lexikon describes the event as the most important instance of machine-breaking in Switzerland. The attackers had helped to overthrow the conservative government in 1830, but the new liberal Grand Council had refused their demand to prohibit weaving machines. Seventy-five people were arrested in Uster and the surrounding districts. In 1833 the principal culprits received long sentences of hard labour in chains, but they were amnestied after the Züriputsch of 1839. In 1835 the Grand Council passed a law for the protection of property.¹¹ A local historian has identified seven men among those convicted for the arson who had taken part in the assembly of 1830, among twenty-nine sentenced in all, and records that the factory had acquired some twenty-one mechanical looms before it was destroyed.¹²

The Usterbrand shows the other side of the liberal settlement. The liberal government applied the two guarantees of the constitution of 1831, freedom of trade and the inviolability of property, against the demands of the weavers who had helped to bring it to power. While the owners of the mill were protected, the home weavers were left to the market. The property protection law of 1835 was the legislature’s answer to the attack. For the financial history of the canton the episode is significant because it settled, early and decisively, a question on which the security of industrial investment depended: whether the state would protect the owners of new technology against those whose livelihoods it destroyed. The unambiguous answer given in Zurich in 1832 and 1835 encouraged the investment of capital in mechanised production during the following decades. The social costs of that choice belong to the history of the second half of the century, as does the later factory legislation that sought to mitigate them.

The liberal reforms of the 1830s

The liberal government that came to power in 1831 undertook a programme of reforms in law, education and public works that transformed the canton within a decade. Its leading figure was the jurist Friedrich Ludwig Keller, born in 1799, who had taught civil law at Zurich’s Political Institute since 1824 and stood at the head of the movement for legal reform. Keller became president of the new Obergericht, the cantonal high court, in 1831, at the age of thirty-one, and presided over the Grand Council in 1832 and 1835. He edited the Monatschronik der zürcherischen Rechtspflege from 1833 to 1838 and has been called the creator of Zurich’s judicial reform and the founder of scientific jurisprudence in Switzerland.¹³ His biographer in the local history of Küsnacht describes him as the undisputed leader of the regeneration after the Ustertag, a co-founder of the newspaper Der Republikaner and a member of the education council whose persuasive power secured the founding of the university.¹⁴

The reform of the judiciary had an importance for the future financial centre that is easily overlooked. Merchants and bankers need courts that decide commercial and property disputes independently, predictably and on the basis of published reasoning. Keller’s Obergericht, with its separation from the executive and its reasoned decisions reported in his Monatschronik, introduced to Zurich a style of adjudication that combined the learning of the German historical school of Roman law with the practical needs of a commercial canton. The tradition of the Zurich courts as competent and reliable fora for commercial disputes, which later found institutional form in the Commercial Court (Handelsgericht) of the canton, has one of its roots in this reform. It also prepared the ground for the codification of Zurich private law in the Privatrechtliches Gesetzbuch of the 1850s, which in turn influenced the Swiss Civil Code.¹⁵

In 1833 the canton founded the University of Zurich by combining its existing institutions of higher education into a single university with four faculties: theology, law, medicine and philosophy. In its first year it had 161 students, of whom 98 studied medicine, 26 law, 21 philosophy and 16 theology, and 55 teachers, 26 professors and 29 Privatdozenten. The university describes itself as the first in Europe to have been founded by a democratic state. Its intellectual father, the classical philologist Johann Caspar von Orelli, hoped that a Zurich university might one day become the Swiss university.¹⁶ The faculty of law, with Keller as its leading figure, trained the jurists who would staff the courts, the administration and later the banks and insurance companies of the canton. Alfred Escher, the dominant figure of Part D, studied law there in the 1830s and 1840s. Ever since, the university has continued to play its role in the formation of the Zurich economic elite.

The liberal government also removed the most visible symbol of the city’s former supremacy. On 30 January 1833 the Grand Council decided to demolish the baroque fortifications, the Schanzen, which had encircled the city since the seventeenth century. The official reasons were their military worthlessness and the obstruction they caused to growth and traffic, especially at the gates. Because the rural population saw in the ramparts a symbol of urban domination, their demolition in 1833 and 1834 became a powerful image of the city’s loss of political power.¹⁷ The land released by the demolition made possible the expansion of the city in the following decades. Bahnhofstrasse, laid out in the 1860s along the line of the old moat, the Fröschengraben, and today the address of the headquarters of Switzerland’s largest banks, is the most famous product of that expansion.¹⁸

The economic institutions of the old regime were adapted to the new order. The Kaufmännisches Direktorium, the merchants’ corporation that had administered the postal service, the commercial infrastructure and the interests of Zurich’s trade since 1662, ended its existence in 1834. Its functions passed to state and private bodies. The Zürcher Handelskammer was founded only in 1873, initially under the name Kaufmännische Gesellschaft.¹⁹ Hans Conrad von Muralt, a merchant who presided over the Kaufmännisches Direktorium from 1829 and over the cantonal commercial council from 1835 to 1849, was among the founders of the Neumühle spinning and engineering works and of the Bank in Zürich in 1836. He also served twice as Bürgermeister of the canton and in 1840 as Landammann of Switzerland.²⁰ The Bank in Zürich, the first joint-stock bank of the city, began to issue banknotes in 1837, and remained an independent institution until its association with the Schweizerische Kreditanstalt in 1905.²¹ Its history belongs to Chapter C.IV, together with the question of note issue before 1907.

The Züriputsch of 1839

The pace and direction of the liberal reforms provoked a reaction among the rural population, which was attached to its church and suspicious of the educated elite in the city. The occasion was the appointment in early 1839 of the theologian David Friedrich Strauss, whose critical Life of Jesus had scandalised orthodox Protestants, to a chair at the new university. The liberals withdrew the appointment before Strauss took it up, but the conflict continued. On 6 September 1839 some eight thousand men from the countryside, led by Bernhard Hirzel, pastor of Pfäffikon, marched into Zurich armed with agricultural implements and weapons and singing hymns. When shots were fired on the Münsterplatz, fourteen insurgents and the government councillor Johannes Hegetschweiler, the speaker of the Ustertag, who had tried to arrange a ceasefire, were killed. As members of the government fled to Baden, the city president Karl Eduard Ziegler formed a provisional council that steered the canton in a conservative direction. The German word Putsch is said to have entered general usage from this event.²²

The conservative interlude lasted until 1845, when the liberals regained control of the canton.²³ The conservative government abolished neither the constitution of 1831 nor its economic guarantees and made no attempt to restore guild privileges or the political supremacy of the city. A revolt about religion and education, the Züriputsch left intact the economic settlement of the regeneration. Keller, who had fled to Baden during the putsch, declined to return to office when recalled in 1842 and left for Germany in 1844.²⁴ A younger generation of liberals, among them Alfred Escher, took over the leadership after 1845 and led Zurich into the federal state of 1848.

Notes

1. Kurt Messmer, “Regeneration und Volkstage um 1830”, Swiss National Museum blog, 22 November 2018, https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/2018/11/regeneration-volkstage-um-1830/. ↩
2. Wikipedia (German), “Ustertag”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ustertag. The article describes the event as a revolution by virtue of its force, its clear objectives and the speed of its consequences; the National Museum account cited in the previous note gives about 12,000 participants. ↩
3. Messmer, “Regeneration und Volkstage um 1830” (see above). ↩
4. Wikipedia (German), “Ustertag” (see above). ↩
5. Messmer, “Regeneration und Volkstage um 1830” (see above). ↩
6. Canton of Zurich, press release “Vor 175 Jahren: Totale Erneuerung des Kantons Zürich”, April 2006, https://www.zh.ch/de/news-uebersicht/medienmitteilungen/2006/04/082erneuerun.html. The release describes the constitution as the canton’s entry into modernity and notes that Winterthur’s withdrawal of allegiance contributed to the capitulation of the old government. ↩
7. Staatsverfassung für den eidgenössischen Stand Zürich of 10 March 1831, articles 1, 3, 5 and 6, as reproduced at https://www.verfassungen.ch/zuerich/verf31.htm. ↩
8. Staatsverfassung für den eidgenössischen Stand Zürich of 10 March 1831 (see above), articles 7, 15 and 16: “Die Freyheit des Handels und der Gewerbe ist ausdrücklich gewährleistet”; “Die Verfassung sichert die Unverletzlichkeit des Eigenthums”; and the “Befugniß, Zehnten und Grundzinse auf gesetzlichem Wege loszukaufen”. ↩
9. Wikipedia (German), “Verfassung des Kantons Zürich” (see above), section on the constitution of 1831. ↩
10. Canton of Zurich, press release “Die kantonale Verwaltung historisch betrachtet” (see above). ↩
11. HLS, French edition, Markus Bürgi and Bruno Schmid, “Incendie d’Uster”, version of 19 February 2013, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/016530/. ↩
12. Lukas Leuzinger, “Vom Ustertag zum Usterbrand”, https://lukasleuzinger.substack.com/p/vom-ustertag-zum-usterbrand. The figures given there should be read together with the HLS entry cited in the previous note, which reports seventy-five arrests. ↩
13. HLS, “Keller, Friedrich Ludwig”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D7312.php. Keller left for Germany in 1844, taught at Halle and Berlin and later turned to conservative Prussian politics. ↩
14. Werner Sautter, “Friedrich Ludwig Keller (1799–1860) zum 100. Todestag”, Küsnachter Jahrheft 1961, https://www.ortsgeschichte-kuesnacht.ch/pdf/1961-1966/Kuesnachter-Jahrheft-1961-Friedrich-Ludwig-Keller-1799-1860.pdf. ↩
15. Heinrich Mitteis, “Bluntschli, Johann Caspar”, Neue Deutsche Biographie 2 (1955), 337–338, https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz4832.html, which describes the code drafted by Bluntschli and put into force from 1853 as the forerunner (Vorläufer) of Eugen Huber’s Swiss Civil Code and records Keller’s formative influence on Bluntschli. Kurt Siehr, “Swiss Civil Code (ZGB)”, Max Planck Encyclopedia of European Private Law, https://max-eup2012.mpipriv.de/index.php/Swiss_Civil_Code_(ZGB), dates the code 1853/55. ↩
16. University of Zurich, “175 Jahre Universität Zürich: Chronologie”, https://www.175jahre.uzh.ch/ueber/chronologie.html. ↩
17. Wikipedia (German), “Stadtbefestigung Zürich”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadtbefestigung_Z%C3%BCrich, section on the demolition of the Schanzen. ↩
18. Wikipedia (English), “Bahnhofstrasse”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahnhofstrasse, which states that the street was created after the city fortifications were demolished in 1864 and the ditch in front of the walls, the Fröschengraben, was filled in. ↩
19. HLS, Martin Illi, “Kaufleute”, version of 23.03.2016, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/articles/016380/2016-03-23/ (“In Zürich wurde 1662 das Kaufmännische Direktorium gegründet (1834 aufgelöst)”), which also names roads, bridges and the postal service among the tasks of such merchants’ bodies. Zürcher Handelskammer, “Die Zürcher Handelskammer”, https://www.zhk.ch/de/ueber-uns/die-zuercher-handelskammer.html, which states that it was founded in 1873 as the Kaufmännische Gesellschaft and renamed Zürcher Handelskammer in 1919. Marcel Grossmann’s dissertation Das kaufmännische Direktorium in Zürich 1662–1834 also takes 1834 as the end date of the institution. ↩
20. HLS, Susanne Peter-Kubli, “Muralt, Hans Conrad von”, http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D7317.php. ↩
21. Kampmann, “Die Zürcher und ihr Geld, Teil 2” (see above), for the first issue of banknotes in 1837; Wikipedia (English), “Bank in Zürich”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_in_Z%C3%BCrich, for the founding in 1836 and the agreement with the Schweizerische Kreditanstalt of 14 January 1905. ↩
22. Alexander Rechsteiner, “Züriputsch”, Swiss National Museum blog, September 2017, https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/en/2017/09/zueriputsch-en/. ↩
23. Chronik Bäretswil, “Geschichte des Kantons Zürich”, https://chronik-baeretswil.ch/geschichte-kanton-zuerich/. ↩
24. Sautter, “Friedrich Ludwig Keller” (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.