Léman was the name of a canton of the Helvetic Republic from 1798 to 1803, corresponding to the territory of modern Vaud. A former subject territory of Bern, Vaud had been independent for only four months in 1798 as the Lemanic Republic before it was incorporated into the centralist Helvetic Republic. Léman comprised all of the territory of Vaud detached from Bernese occupation, apart from the Avenches and the Payerne which, after 16 October 1802, were annexed by the canton of Fribourg until the Napoleonic Act of Mediation the following year when they were restored to the newly established and newly sovereign canton of Vaud. The capital of the canton was Lausanne, with the préfet’s residence, the administrative chamber, and the judicial tribunal. The canton was divided into 17 administrative districts, each with a sous-préfet. Léman was also one of the five cantons — purely administrative subdivisions — of the Rhodanic Republic planned in March 1798 by the French general Guillaume Brune. History Under Bernese rule Much of the region that would become the Canton of Léman was conquered in 1538 by Bern and had been jointly administered by Bern and Fribourg for the following two and a half centuries. As the doctrines of the French Revolution spread, they found a warm reception from the citizens of the French-speaking towns around Lake Geneva () which was known as Pays de Vaud. Following the outbreak of the French Revolution of 1789, Frédéric-César de La Harpe (at that time the tutor to the children of Tsar Paul I of the Russian Empire) began to plot a Vaudois uprising from St. Petersburg. La Harpe was a republican idealist, seeing the rule of the Bernese administration as oligarchical, and as an infringement of the natural rights of the people of Vaud and the other subject states, such as Fribourg. In 1794 he returned to Switzerland and thence to Paris, where he and other exiles sought French assistance to release Vaud and Fribourg from Bern's domination. French invasion La Harpe published his Essay on the Constitution of the Vaud, an anti-Bernese tract. On 10 December 1797 he addressed the French Directory, stating that commitments made by the Duke of Savoy in treaties signed with Bern at Lausanne in 1564 were now the responsibility of the French and thus gave them the right to assist the people of Vaud against the Bernese. The French Directory, which