The Tagsatzung, the federal council of the Old Swiss Confederacy, then sent an army from Zürich to definitively end the rebellion, and after the Battle of Wohlenschwil, the Huttwil League was forcibly disbanded in the peace of Mellingen.

Soon after the war, the ruling aristocrats instituted a series of reforms and even lowered some taxes, thus fulfilling some of the peasants' original fiscal demands.

In the long term, the peasant war of 1653 prevented Switzerland from an excessive implementation of absolutism as occurred in France during the reign of Louis XIV.

The federation comprised rural cantons as well as city states that had expanded their territories into the countryside by political and military means at the cost of the previously ruling liege lords.

After the Peace of Westphalia, the southern German economy recovered quickly, the Swiss exports dwindled, and the prices for agrarian products dropped.

The population began hoarding the silver coins, and the cheap copper money that remained in circulation continually lost in purchasing power.

Bern and also Solothurn and Fribourg set a compulsory fixed exchange rate between copper and silver money instead, but this measure did not break the de facto devaluation.

[9] Since the 15th century, the political power in the city cantons had become more and more concentrated in the hands of a few urban families, who increasingly saw their public offices as hereditary positions and who developed aristocratic and absolutist attitudes.

[12][13] The peasants of the Entlebuch valley, led by Hans Emmenegger from Schüpfheim and Christian Schybi from Escholzmatt, sent a delegation to Lucerne to demand remedies, but the city council refused to even hear them.

[17][18] The large majority of the rural districts of the canton of Lucerne sided with the peasants of the Entlebuch valley in an alliance concluded at Wolhusen on February 26, 1653.

[19] On March 18, 1653, the mediating Catholic central Swiss cantons proposed in Lucerne a resolution that fulfilled most of the peasants' demands, especially the fiscal ones.

At a meeting at Signau on April 10, 1653, the delegates from the Entlebuch convinced their neighbours in the Emmental: the assembly decided not to honor the new oaths its representatives had sworn in Bern.

While the authorities debated at the Tagsatzung how to deal with the insurrection, the peasants worked to gain support for their cause amongst the rural population of other regions and lobbied for a formal alliance.

A peasant delegation sent to Zürich was turned back promptly: the city authorities, who had put down local unrests in their territory already in 1645 and again in 1646, had already recognized the danger of the agitation.

[24] On April 23, 1653, representatives of the people of the countryside of Lucerne, Bern, Basel, and Solothurn met at Sumiswald and concluded an alliance to help each other to achieve their goals.

Leuenberger's army lifted the siege of Bern and retreated, but the people refused to follow their leaders and objected to dissolving the Huttwil League.

[37][38] Thus rebutted, the peasants attacked Werdmüller's troops on June 3, 1653, but being poorly equipped and lacking any artillery, they were defeated decisively in the Battle of Wohlenschwil.

Bern did not accept the terms of the peace of Melligen with its amnesty, claiming the treaty was invalid on its territory, and cracked down hard on the rural population.

[50] While they took steps to disempower the rural population politically, they also fulfilled many of the peasants original fiscal demands, alleviating the economic pressure on them.

[51] Suter even concludes that the peasant war of 1653 thwarted a further advancement of absolutist trends in Switzerland and prevented a development similar to that which occurred in France following the Fronde.

[50] The city council even opened legal procedures against a few of its district sheriffs against whom there were many complaints from the rural population, accusing them of corruption, incompetence, and unjustified enrichment.

[e] Abraham Stanyan, who had been ambassador of England in Bern from 1705 to 1713, published in 1714 an extensive treatise entitled An account of Switzerland, in which he described the authorities' rule as particularly mild, mentioning explicitly the low taxation in comparison to other European states and giving as the reason for the comparatively soft-gloved government the fear of rebellions.

Resistance symbols like the flags or the weapons used by the peasants, in particular their typical clubs with nails on the hitting end (called (Bauern-) Knüttel), were outlawed, confiscated, and destroyed.

Any public remembrances or pilgrimages to the places where the leaders had been executed were forbidden and carried the death penalty, as did the singing of the peasants' war songs.

[57] Historic texts written during the Ancien Régime of Switzerland generally follow the official diction and mention the peasant war, if they do so at all, only briefly and in negative terms.

The restoration of the Ancien Régime after the end of the Napoleonic era proved to be only temporary, until Switzerland became a federal state in 1848 when its first democratic constitution was passed.

A scene devoted to the peasant war of 1653 in a theatre production for the Swiss sexacentennial celebrations in 1891, for instance, was cut on the demands of the organizers.

[67] More statues and plaques were installed in various other places at the tricentennial of the war in 1953, for instance a relief showing Schybi in a chapel at Sursee, where the peasant leader had been incarcerated.

[59][68] Modern historians generally agree that the peasant war was an important event in Swiss history, and also in comparison to other popular revolts in late medieval Europe.

[70] The simultaneous 350-year anniversary of the peasant war was reflected in the city only in a few newspaper articles, but it was widely celebrated in the countryside[71] with speeches, colloquia, and an ambitious and very successful open-air theatre production at Eggiwil in the Emmental.