CHAPTER XII 

 POLITICS AT GENEVA 



IN the preceding chapters we have been mainly occupied in follow- 

 ing de Saussure's scientific career as a physical student and an 

 Alpine explorer. But no portrait of the author of Voyages dans 

 les Alpes can pretend to be complete which omits his home life 

 and his services to the Republic. 



Whatever criticism the patrician families of Geneva may 

 be liable to as practical politicians, it must be admitted 

 that they were active in fulfilling their public duties. They 

 furnished the State its magistrates, the Academy its professors, 

 and the Church many of its presbyters. They enriched the city 

 by their business enterprise, whether as merchants or bankers. 

 There were few drones in the busy hive planted on the hill above 

 the Rhone. De Saussure was no exception to the general rule. 

 Throughout his life he was engaged in many and very varied 

 occupations, social, civil, and political ; he was not only a hard- 

 worked professor and a versatile man of science, he was also an 

 ardent educationalist and, when compelled by occasion, an active 

 legislator. As a young man, during the troubles of 1766-68, he 

 was called on to serve as a political correspondent to his friend 

 Haller, who was at the time engaged officially as an adviser to 

 one of the Mediating Powers, the Canton of Berne. At a 

 later date he was drawn reluctantly into the narrow but 

 turbid stream of Genevese politics in an earnest attempt to 

 save his city from being overrun by the flood of the French 

 Revolution. 



Of the difficulties that face a biographer addressing English 

 readers in any attempt to do justice to this hitherto neglected 

 side of de Saussure's character and career I am very conscious. 

 What Sainte-Beuve has written in noticing Sayous' well-known 



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