William Emmanuel Rappard, Un projet volontairement oublié de réforme du Pacte de 1815 (1830) (1941)

William Emmanuel Rappard’s historical article reconstructs an overlooked initiative to reform Switzerland’s Federal Pact of 1815 and examines why its authors subsequently ceased to acknowledge it. Its subject complicates the familiar genealogy of the American influence on the Swiss Constitution of 1848. After 1798, moderate conservatives had admired American federalism as an alternative to the rigid unity of the Helvetic Republic; after 1830, radical reformers invoked it to strengthen national institutions and extend liberal principles. Yet the earliest American-inspired reform initiative following the July Revolution came from Swiss officers recently serving the French monarchy. Their concern was national strength and military coordination, rather than the representative institutions later championed by radicals.

The article proceeds as an account of historical detection: contemporary testimony establishes the existence of missing documents; correspondence identifies their authors and reception; a newspaper finally supplies the text of one petition. Rappard begins with accounts by J. Baumgartner, Carl Müller von Friedberg, and Fazy-Pasteur. Although their details differ, they agree that senior Swiss officers in French service circulated proposals for an American-inspired federal government late in 1830. Baumgartner names Philippe de Maillardoz and Auguste de Bontems, while also recording suspicions that their centralizing programme concealed a military dictatorship. Fazy-Pasteur describes a presidential scheme with a federal Diet whose representation varied between cantons. Rappard initially treats these reports as evidence of one or two initiatives, not as grounds for reconstructing a single definitive constitution.

The disappearance of the texts creates the article’s central problem. Searches in Swiss libraries and archives yielded nothing; later constitutional historiography omitted the episode. More strikingly, Maillardoz and Bontems themselves remained silent about it when subsequently discussing federal reform. Rappard proposes that their return to Switzerland revealed an uncomfortable political alignment: centralization enjoyed support among advanced reformers but hostility within the officers’ conservative, federalist circles.

Or s’il est, pour un homme et peut-être surtout pour un officier supérieur, une chose plus difficile que d’abandonner une cause à laquelle il a attaché son nom, c’est de continuer à la défendre quand il découvre qu’elle ne compte d’amis que parmi ses propres adversaires et qu’elle ne compte que des adversaires parmi ses propres amis.

English translation: Now if there is, for a man and perhaps especially for a senior officer, one thing more difficult than abandoning a cause to which he has attached his name, it is continuing to defend it when he discovers that its only friends are among his own adversaries and its only adversaries among his own friends.

This explanation remains a hypothesis to be tested, rather than a substitute for documentary investigation. The decisive discovery comes in an unclassified bundle of reports addressed to Maillardoz during the demobilization of Swiss regiments in France. Letters from December 1830 through April 1831 distinguish Maillardoz’s petition from Bontems’s separate printed project. They also disclose differing assessments of feasibility, foreign influence, and the relation between political reform and military preparedness.

The correspondence shows that resistance did not necessarily mean rejection of stronger federal institutions. Dufour welcomed the objective but feared that constitutional deliberation would distract Switzerland from immediate external danger:

Car notre premier besoin est l'indépendance, il nous faut avant tout et par dessus tout couvrir nos frontières.

English translation: For our foremost need is independence; before everything else and above everything else, we must protect our borders.

Guiguer de Prangins likewise questioned the wisdom of unsettling the existing Pact when national defence required cohesion. Muralt’s objections were more structural: cantonal attachments, the expense of central administration and a permanent military nucleus, and distrust of proposals originating in Paris. The officers’ experience abroad could furnish a diagnosis of Swiss weakness while simultaneously undermining their authority to prescribe its remedy.

French assistance became an especially damaging issue. Bontems wanted his project conveyed to Louis-Philippe’s foreign minister, General Sebastiani, believing France alone had an interest in a stronger Switzerland. Rappard questions the propriety of this prospective collaboration while noting that it produced no consequences. By January, Bontems was relieved that the project had not been forwarded:

On nous accuse d'avoir agi sous l'influence de la France, jugez donc si je suis bien aise que vous n'avez pas adressé mon projet au Gal Sebastiani.

English translation: We are accused of having acted under French influence; judge, then, how glad I am that you did not send my project to General Sebastiani.

The suspicion exposed a contradiction between patriotic intent and political credibility. By April, Bontems had adopted an incremental strategy: replacing the rotating directing cantons with an elected federal authority and centralizing military command could prepare later consolidation without immediately provoking resistance to a wholesale transfer of powers. These letters substantiate retreat from the original initiatives; they do not establish that the authors systematically destroyed every surviving copy.

A reference in the correspondence leads Rappard to the Journal de Genève of 23 December 1830, which reproduced Maillardoz’s petition. Its appeal joins constitutional regeneration to common defence, demanding an enduring federal government strong enough to secure independence and neutrality. The newspaper’s liberal opposition rejected it as a threat to cantonal sovereignty and a possible route to dictatorship, although it favoured some federal reform. Rappard explains why the same newspaper could subsequently advocate the American example without genuine inconsistency:

Ce qui, en effet, séduisait l'officier fribourgeois dans les institutions d'outre-mer, c'était avant tout la force du gouvernement central qu'elles prévoyaient et nullement leur régime parlementaire.

English translation: What attracted the Fribourg officer in the institutions across the Atlantic was, indeed, above all the strength of the central government they provided for, and not at all their parliamentary system.

The radical appropriation instead emphasized bicameral federalism. “American influence” therefore names distinct constitutional selections, not a uniform programme. Rappard’s contribution is both substantive and methodological: he recovers a conservative-military strand in Swiss federal reform while demonstrating how correspondence, political silence, and hostile journalism can restore an obscured initiative. His conclusion remains provisional. The newspaper supplies Maillardoz’s petition, but its original and Bontems’s complete project still await discovery; the article closes by inviting further research rather than claiming to have recovered the entire constitutional design.