suppress the valley led to the Second Battle of Villmergen in 1712 and the sacking of the Abbey of St. Gall by Bernese and Zürich troops. From 1719–22 the Werdenberg region rebelled against the city of Glarus. In 1717, Major Jean Daniel Abraham Davel was appointed the commander of the Lavaux region, which is in modern-day Canton Vaud. He identified with the French-speaking population that felt oppressed by the German-speaking city of Bern that occupied Vaud. Davel believed that he had been called by God to free the inhabitants of Vaud from Bern. On 31 March 1723 he mobilised 600 men and marched on Lausanne to ask the city leaders to revolt with him. However, they reported him to Bern and arrested him on the next morning. He was judged guilty of treason and beheaded. About a quarter century later, in 1749, there was another unsuccessful uprising in Bern against the patrician families of the city. A few years later, in 1755, the unsuccessful Liviner Uprising against Uri. Finally in 1781 the Chenaux Uprising occurred against the city of Fribourg. Age of Enlightenment The Age of Enlightenment was well received in Swiss cities, in spite of contemporary tendencies towards political conservatism. The early modern period was a time when Swiss science and literature flowered. In Zürich the scholar and physician Johann Jakob Scheuchzer wrote about Swiss history, geology, geography and science. In Basel the Bernoulli family and Leonhard Euler worked on mathematics and physics, coming up with some fundamental concepts in these fields. Albrecht von Haller and Jean-Jacques Rousseau praised the natural beauty and unspoiled state of Switzerland and triggered an early wave of tourism (notably, Goethe's visit to Switzerland in 1775). Zürich at the time was home to a number of internationally known scholars, such as Johann Jakob Bodmer, Salomon Gessner, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Johann Caspar Lavater, styling itself as "Republic" (after the great city states of the time, such as the Republic of Venice). Culture during the early modern period Before the early modern period most of the literature of the Swiss Confederation was either in Latin or German as until 1798 the confederation was overwhelmingly German with only small pockets of French. During the early modern period German still dominated though French, Italian and Romansh began to develop literary traditions within the boundaries of modern Switzerland. German writings In the 18th century the intellectual movement in