The Swiss foreign service and Bernese reform politics in the late eighteenth century

The political system of Berne during the enlightenment era was dominated by landowning patricians who represented a “republican type of gentry.” These landowners promoted agriculture, traded in grain, wood, wine, invested in cottage industries, and also were involved in foreign military service. In the debates about republican political economy in the 1760s, there was a cleavage within the Bernese aristocracy. On one side, conservatives defended the mercenary service as part of existing political obligations, above all towards France. Against this, the Economic Patriots combated corrupting influences from abroad and censured military service. Socio-moralistic principles, condensed in the term “civic virtue,” ranked higher in the patriots’ eyes than economic or political interests; in a virtuous and frugal republic, there should have been no place for mercenaries. The paper reconstructs these arguments over key decades in the eighteenth century.