Date of Award
5-1-2026
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D. in History
First Advisor
Marc H. Lerner
Second Advisor
Marc Lerner
Third Advisor
Jeffrey Watt
School
University of Mississippi
Relational Format
dissertation/thesis
Abstract
This dissertation answers the question: how did Genevans become Swiss? Genevan admission into the Swiss Confederation occurred after Napoleon’s defeat and was more than a single diplomatic event. This dissertation argues that Genevans became Swiss through a gradual and contested process of political, territorial, cultural, and diplomatic transformation. This process, identified here as cantonnement, unfolded across local, regional, and international contexts beginning in the eighteenth century and concluded in 1817. This transformative process demonstrates that the Republic of Geneva was inseparable from the broader European security culture emerging at the same time. Through the years of revolution and French annexation which exposed the limits of sovereignty, to the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire, Genevan diplomats sought to recover their independence, make Geneva and Genevans viable within the new international collective security order, and bring territorial coherence to their fragmented polity. In doing so, the Genevans demonstrated their Swissness through constitutional reform, civic rituals, diplomatic language, and public displays of belonging; all while simultaneously negotiating their material conditions such as territorial contiguity, defensible borders, customs corridors, and the resolution of exclaves and enclaves, laying the foundation for their integration into the Swiss Confederation. By situating and contextualizing Geneva and Genevans at the crossroads of the changing international order, this dissertation finds that Swiss neutrality after 1815 was a legally, spatially, and institutionally imposed regime by the Great Powers. Genevan cantonnement made that regime workable on Europe’s western Alpine frontier. In this sense, the integration of Geneva and Genevans into the Swiss Confederation was a constitutive mechanism through which post-Napoleonic Swiss neutrality and European collective security were made geographically, politically, and culturally possible.
Recommended Citation
Cleveland, Jordan, "From Republic to Canton: Securing Geneva After Revolution, War, And Empire, 1798-1817" (2026). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 8807.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/8807