Korruption oder Patronage? Außenbeziehungen zwischen Frankreich und der Alten Eidgenossenschaft als Beispiel (16. bis 18. Jahrhundert)

Abstract

The article analyses secret practices of influence in the foreign relations between France and Switzerland in early modern times. It demonstrates the following four points: the King of France and other European monarchs exercised great influence on Swiss politics by means of secret payments; the critics of such payments and influence made excessive use of semantics of deviance and corruption; the issue of corruption caused many political conflicts in the Confederation, thereby destabilizing early modern state building; and the contemporaries tried hard to fight such secret practices. Based on the results of the empirical work two more general conclusions are drawn: Firstly, corruption and its critique are not a phenomenon of modernity or of modernising societies only, as studies on patronage, clientelism and networks following Sharon Kettering and recent research on corruption in the 19^th and 20^th centuries inspired by modernisation and systems theory have suggested. Secondly, practices of secret influence should therefore be discussed not exclusively with regard to models of patronage, but with a double perspective including both the concepts of patronage and corruption.