Switzerland was among the territories transformed by the French Revolutionary Wars. French forces established control there during the 1790s and weakened the power of guilds, feudal landlords, and the Church; the book presents these changes as part of a wider reshaping of European institutions that helped make industrialization possible.

Switzerland before French control

In the account of pre-revolutionary Europe, Switzerland appears as a place where political and economic power could be concentrated in the hands of a few families. The book situates this pattern alongside the strength of guilds in many European cities: in Cologne and Aachen, guilds blocked the adoption of textile machinery, while cities including Bern and Florence were controlled by a small number of families. Such arrangements restricted economic entry and helped preserve established privileges.

French expansion in the 1790s

The French Revolutionary Republic expanded its borders after military successes against monarchies that sought to crush the revolution. Its leaders aimed to create a buffer between the republic and hostile powers, and French forces took control of the Austrian Netherlands, the United Provinces, and much of modern Switzerland. The French maintained strong control in these territories through the 1790s.

That expansion brought institutional change as well as military rule. In Switzerland, as in other conquered territories, guilds, feudal landlords, and the Church were defeated; feudal privileges were removed, and guilds were abolished and expropriated. These measures attacked the corporate and inherited barriers that had governed access to economic activity and political influence.

Reforms and their longer significance

The book places Switzerland’s experience within a broader French program: ending feudal relations, diminishing clerical power, weakening guilds, and extending equality before the law. These reforms were not uniformly lasting. In Hanover, old elites returned after Napoleon’s fall and reversed much of the change, while in other places feudalism and guild power were permanently destroyed or weakened, and the Napoleonic Code remained in force after French troops departed. The account does not give a separate postwar trajectory for Switzerland, so its specific institutional settlement should not be assumed from the wider comparison.

The significance assigned to the French intervention is therefore both disruptive and enabling. French armies caused extensive suffering, but across much of Europe their campaigns dismantled structures that had restricted economic participation and treated people unequally by birth. The book argues that this institutional transformation helped create conditions in which industrialization could take root; by the mid-nineteenth century, industrialization was advancing rapidly in many places once controlled by France, unlike in several territories the French had not conquered or held only briefly.