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<sup>th</sup> and 20<sup>th</sup> 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 <italic>and</italic> corruption.
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