Swiss Peasant War of 1653 - Causes of The Conflict

Causes of The Conflict

At its root, the peasant war of 1653 was caused by the rapidly changing economic circumstances after the end of the Thirty Years' War. The Swiss Confederacy had been spared from all belligerent action; the Swiss peasants generally had profited from the wartime economy as they had been able to export their agrarian products at higher prices than before. After the Peace of Westphalia, the southern German economy recovered quickly, the Swiss exports dwindled, and the prices for agrarian products dropped. Many Swiss peasants, who had raised mortgages during the boom at wartime, suddenly faced financial problems.

At the same time the war had since the 1620s caused significant expenses for the cities, e.g. for building better defenses such as new bastions. A significant source of income for the cantons ran dry: their financial means exhausted by the war, France and Spain no longer paid the Pensions, the agreed sums in return for the cantons providing them with mercenary regiments. The city authorities tried to compensate for this and to cover their expenses on the one hand by increasing the taxes or inventing new ones and on the other hand by minting less valuable copper coins called Batzen that had the same face value as the previously minted silver money. The population began hoarding the silver coins, and the cheap copper money that remained in circulation continually lost in purchasing power. Zürich, Basel, and the central Swiss cantons therefore began already in 1623 to mint more valuable coins again. Bern and also Solothurn and Fribourg set a compulsory fixed exchange rate between copper and silver money instead, but this measure did not break the de facto devaluation. At the end of the war, the population thus faced both a postwar depression and a high inflation, combined with high taxes. This financial crisis led to a series of tax revolts in several cantons of the Confederacy, for instance 1629–36 in Lucerne, 1641 in Bern, or 1645/46 in Zürich. The uprising in 1653 continued this series, but would take the conflict to an unprecedented level.

Since the 15th century, the political power in the city cantons had become more and more concentrated in the hands of a few urban families, who increasingly saw their public offices as hereditary positions and who developed aristocratic and absolutist attitudes. Slowly, an urban oligarchy of magistrates had formed. This concentration of power in the city cantons in a small urban élite caused a veritable "participatory crisis" (Suter). The rural population increasingly was subject to decrees issued without their consent that restricted their rights of old and also their social and cultural freedom.