of the Little Council (named for a fixed term by the Great Council), 18 members named by the Constafel, and 144 selected by the 12 guilds, these 162 (forming the majority) being co-opted for life by those members of the two councils who belonged to the gild to which the deceased member himself had belonged. Early in the 18th century a determined effort was made to crush by means of heavy duties the flourishing rival silk trade in Winterthur. It was reckoned that about 1650 the number of privileged burghers was 9000, while their rule extended over 170,000 persons. The first symptoms of active discontent appeared later among the dwellers by the lake, who founded in 1794 a club at Stäfa and claimed the restoration of the liberties of 1489 and 1531, a movement which was put down by force of arms in 1795. The old system of government perished in Zürich, as elsewhere in Switzerland, with the French invasion in the spring of 1798, and under the Helvetic constitution the country districts obtained political liberty. Modern history Napoleonic era Zürich lost much of its power in the Helvetic Republic, with territory lost to the Aargau, the Thurgau and the Canton of Linth. In 1799, the city became even a battlefield of the French Revolutionary Wars of the Second Coalition, at the First Battle of Zürich in June and the Second Battle of Zürich in September. Gottfried Keller became an intellectual influence on the Radical "free-thinking" side in the formation of Switzerland as a federal state. The environs of Zürich are famous in military history on account of the two battles of 1799 (French Revolutionary Wars). In the first battle (4 June) the French under General André Masséna, on the defensive, were attacked by the Austrians under the Archduke Charles, Massena retiring behind the Limmat before the engagement had reached a decisive stage. The second and far more important battle took place on 25 and 26 September. Massena, having forced the passage of the Limmat, attacked and totally defeated the Russians and their Austrian allies under Korsakov's command. 19th century In 1839, the city had to yield to the demands of its rural subjects, following the Züriputsch of 6 September. Most of the ramparts built in the 17th centuries were torn down, without ever having been sieged, to allay rural concerns over the city's hegemony. The Limmatquai was built in