Helvetic Republic: Switzerland's Revolutionary Crucible, 1798-1803

In the spring of 1798, a French army crossed into Switzerland and shattered a political order five centuries in the making. Within six catastrophic weeks, the Old Swiss Confederacy — a patchwork of sovereign cantons, subject territories, and patrician oligarchies — collapsed entirely. What rose in its place was an extraordinary and doomed experiment: the Helvetic Republic, a centralized nation bui...