POLITICS AND HOME LIFE (1781-92) 339 



our liveliest hopes could not have foreseen so favourable a surrender. 

 I can still hardly believe it. I am overwhelmed with visits and 

 congratulations on the success of our particular siege. We passed 

 some odd moments.' All this time, we are told, de Saussure's 

 guides were waiting for him at Chamonix ; but there was to be no 

 Alpine travel that summer. 



A few days later the allied troops entered the town, and the 

 revolution was thus brought to a violent end by the action of 

 two of the Protecting Powers, France and Berne, supported on 

 this occasion by the King of Sardinia. Zurich, already radical, 

 had refused to join in this forcible intervention. The Genevese, 

 very brave in their preparations and professions, prudently 

 succumbed at the sight of hostile batteries planted before their 

 gates and the threat of bombardment. Their leaders made haste 

 to capitulate. The aristocratic Councils, reinstated and strong 

 in the support of the allied troops, remained complete masters of 

 the situation. Geneva fell again under the rule of the patrician 

 oligarchy, which was now not only released from the restrictions 

 imposed on it fourteen years previously, but had gained additional 

 power. 



Some six hundred of the popular party left the city. 

 On d'lvernois' and Lord Mahon's representations, the English 

 Government was induced to assist in founding for the exiles a 

 ' New Geneva ' near Waterford in Ireland, and to obtain a grant 

 from Parliament of 50,000 in furtherance of the scheme. The 

 site selected had already, since the close of the seventeenth century, 

 harboured a colony of French exiles. But difficulties soon arose, 

 and after two years the settlement was definitely abandoned by its 

 promoters, and the exiles took refuge elsewhere, many at Constance 

 and in other parts of Germany. 



The next seven years were a period of commercial and general 

 prosperity in Geneva ; but to a populace growing in numbers and in- 

 telligence, the reactionary Government forced on the city by foreign 

 intervention became constantly more and more irksome. The 

 recent home of Voltaire and the birthplace of Rousseau was little 

 likely to escape the influence of the new ideas that were in the air, 

 while the passing of the old order in France could not fail to affect 

 a Republic on its immediate frontier. Bonnet anticipated justly 

 what was to come when he wrote to a Swedish correspondent : 



