"The Epidemic That Fueled Switzerland’s Leap Toward #DirectDemocracy"

In the summer of 1867, cholera swept through Zürich. The disease claimed nearly 500 lives, striking hardest in the cramped, unsanitary quarters of the working class.

The wealthy, meanwhile, retreated to their country estates and lakeside villas, far from the contagion. The exodus was more than an act of self-preservation—it was a vivid illustration of a society divided into two tiers.

In the city, the poor were left behind to face disease and death; in the countryside, the elite waited for the danger to pass, their power and privilege intact.

The outrage that followed was not directed only at the bacteria but at the political order that had allowed such unequal suffering.

The liberal-radical establishment, long dominated by figures like Alfred Escher, had held Zürich’s reins for decades. Their response to the epidemic—flight, neglect, and the maintenance of the very conditions that made the city vulnerable—exposed the limits of representative liberalism.

It was, in Johann Jakob Treichler’s words and actions, proof that a system in which the few governed in the name of the many could not be trusted to protect the many when it mattered most.

Treichler, born into modest circumstances in Richterswil in 1822, had already spent decades challenging the political order.

As a journalist, lawyer, and parliamentarian, he spoke often of popular sovereignty, social justice, and the need for citizens to hold direct power over the laws under which they lived. His earlier lectures, with titles like "On the Sovereignty of the People", drew on Rousseau’s belief that legitimacy flowed from the people themselves. In the wake of the cholera crisis, those ideas gained new urgency.

For Treichler, the epidemic was not an isolated tragedy; it was a symptom of structural disease.

Public health policy had been shaped by men who did not live in the conditions their policies governed. Housing, sanitation, and medical care were afterthoughts so long as the elite could insulate themselves from the consequences. This, Treichler argued, was the inevitable result of a two-tier society—one tier making the rules, the other enduring them.

His remedy was not just reform but a transfer of sovereignty. “There must be no doubt,” he insisted, “that the sovereignty of legislation must rest with the people themselves—not with the few chosen by wealth and privilege. Only when citizens directly decide their laws will justice and social trust be restored.”

Bringing Power Back to the People

The call was radical in its simplicity: let the people decide, not periodically at the ballot box to choose representatives, but continually, through referendums and popular initiatives that could correct or overturn negligent governance.

The cholera crisis became the catalyst for political change. By 1869, Zürich’s new constitution enshrined the principle that sovereignty resides in the people, granting citizens the tools to challenge legislation and propose their own.

Treichler sat on the constitutional commission that drafted these reforms, though he ultimately voted against the final document—seeing in its compromises a lingering deference to the old elite. Even so, the mechanisms it introduced would spread across Switzerland, shaping the federal constitution in 1874 and again in 1891.

This was the enduring impact of Treichler’s life and the epidemic that sharpened his cause.

The outbreak had stripped away illusions about who truly held power, and in its wake came a decisive turn toward a system where the governed could govern themselves.

While Treichler did not live to see the full flowering of Swiss direct democracy, the reforms born of those years became the foundation of a political culture unique in the modern world—one in which citizens can write laws, veto legislation, and hold their leaders to account without waiting for permission from the very class they might need to challenge.

In this sense, the cholera of 1867 did more than claim lives—it accelerated a democratic evolution. Treichler’s voice, forged in outrage and conviction, carried the idea that the people themselves must be the ultimate authority.

His legacy is written not only in speeches or pamphlets but in the living practice of Swiss democracy, where the lesson of that epidemic still resonates: in times of crisis, only a people who can act directly can ensure that power serves the common good.

Curious, isn’t it, how history keeps circling back? As someone once said, “There’s nothing new under the sun.” Recent history, case in point!

This story also appears in my novel GRASSROOTS - Dawn of Transformation