At the national level, where there were almost no permanent common institutions other than the Diet, immobility was the result of the contrasting political and confessional options, which rendered impossible the accession of new cantons, though there was some interest from Geneva, Neuchâtel, and the Roman Catholic bishop of Basel. Yet, nobody dared to question the existing equilibrium, and for the same reason the cantons remained neutral during the Thirty Years’ War, despite pressure from religious leaders; only the Graubünden was almost torn apart between France and Spain during the Valtellina troubles (1620–39), involving Spain, Austria, and France. During the 17th-century wars of French king Louis XIV, neutrality gradually developed as an official maxim of the Swiss Confederation, both as a result of an institutionally weak foreign policy and as a way to avoid the internal strife inherent in the different loyalties of the various cantons. Neutrality, which de facto favoured France, also corresponded to the confederation’s new status as a sovereign republic after Basel’s burgomaster, Johann Rudolf Wettstein, obtained Switzerland’s exemption from the Holy Roman Empire in the Peace of Westphalia of 1648.

In the Diet, where every canton had an equal vote, and especially in most joint dependencies, which were governed by only the first eight members of the confederation, the Catholics had the majority despite a smaller population and comparatively less wealth. When Zürich and Bern attempted to gain supremacy in 1656, the five Roman Catholic cantons waged and won the first war of Villmergen in Aargau. In 1712, however, the same adversaries clashed in the second war of Villmergen, and this time the Protestants triumphed. Besides smaller changes in the joint dependencies, the confessional boundaries essentially were maintained, but the more economically prosperous Protestant towns now were also the incontestable political leaders in Switzerland.

In contrast to the weak political and military structures of the confederation, since the 15th century the oligarchies, especially in the towns, had been strengthening their power within their cantons. They expanded their administrative power especially in the domains of jurisdiction, taxes, and military conscription. In the late 16th and 17th centuries, the cities gradually stopped admitting new burghers and restricted access to the councils and official duties to a small group of oligarchic families. A similar process produced poor peasants without juridical rights in the rural cantons. The growing number of regulations and taxes was particularly resented in the countryside, where people usually invoked old privileges. Sporadic unrest climaxed in 1653 in a large peasant revolt that united Catholic and Protestant peasants, especially in Lucerne, Bern, and Basel, but was violently suppressed. Toward the end of the 17th century, the councils gradually considered and represented themselves as absolute sovereigns. Judged from the outside by Aristotelian criteria, they could be described variously as aristocracies (e.g., patrician towns such as Bern), democracies (e.g., the rural cantons with assemblies of all men), or a mixture of both (e.g., the towns ruled by guilds such as Basel); yet everywhere power was in the hands of elites who oriented themselves along the lines of French court life. But the model of and the alliance with the Protestant states (especially the Netherlands and England) increasingly became an alternative about the turn of the 18th century. Under these circumstances, the Protestant principality of Neuchâtel was inherited in 1707 by the Prussian king Frederick I rather than by a French prince favoured by Louis XIV.

Industrialization

In contrast to many surrounding regions, Switzerland experienced the 17th and 18th centuries as periods of peace and rising prosperity. Neutrality was beneficial to the economy, allowing the confederation to supply other countries with goods, and the influx of refugees, especially French Huguenots after their expulsion in 1685, was particularly important in rehabilitating old crafts and establishing new enterprises. By the 16th century French and Italian refugees had introduced watchmaking to Geneva, and by the late 18th century the city had some 1,000 master watchmakers and several thousand apprentices. Refugees were not instrumental in the founding of watchmaking in the canton of Neuchâtel, however; in the city itself, precision metallurgy was carried out as early as the 16th century, and specialists spread throughout the Jura, establishing this mountainous area as the major region of Swiss watchmaking.

Having accumulated mainly from the pensions of the mercenary system and from commercial sources, Swiss capital was desperately needed in those countries that constantly were at war, especially in France, and Genevan bankers became the centre of an extensive European financial network. Thanks to such benefits and without the costs of a court or a standing army, several towns were able to abolish the taxing of subjects in the 18th century. Thus, there was plenty of capital available to finance industrial expansion. Topography and historical parceling precluded the possibility of investing in large agricultural estates. In addition, natural resources did not exist in sufficient quantities for easy exploitation, and the cultivation of land could not support the rising population. Consequently, the Swiss Confederation benefited from the ample supply of labour available. Because landlocked Switzerland had no shipping enterprises or colonial possessions, industry was the natural target for economic development. Thus, by the end of the 18th century, about one-fourth of Switzerland’s working population was employed in industry, especially in the textile and watchmaking sectors. Owing to restrictions imposed by the guilds in the towns, this growth essentially occurred in the countryside; urban entrepreneurs provided raw materials to peasants, who were unable to subsist solely on their land and supplemented their incomes by spinning and weaving silk, linen, and especially cotton in their own cottages.

Since its origin in the 14th century, the manufacture of wool cloth had always been among the most important Swiss industries, but, after the demographic and economic crisis following the Black Death, textiles (excluding Sankt Gallen’s linen) did not blossom again until the 17th century, when refugees reestablished silk manufacture and later introduced fine spinning and muslin weaving. The free import of cheap machine-made thread from England sparked a last boom before the chaos of the French Revolution engulfed Switzerland, which was then among the most highly industrialized countries in Europe. The major producing regions were located in rural areas of the northeast, in proximity to Zürich–Winterthur and Sankt Gallen–Appenzell–Glarus, near sources of impounded water that provided mechanical energy for running the machines. In contrast, Bern and the Catholic cantons continued to rely primarily on agriculture. Rational commercial farming was introduced with some success, sometimes with the help of enlightened societies (such as those in Zürich and Bern).