Swiss statesman, Schultheiss (chief magistrate) of the canton of Bern, and the most prominent political figure during the last years of the old Swiss Confederation.

From a Bernese patrician family, Steiger was dispatched to Halle in Germany and Utrecht, Neth., for his education, eventually returning to Bern in 1754. Thereafter, he held several minor government offices, served as cantonal emissary to Neuchâtel, Aarau, and Geneva, and finally was elected Schultheiss of Bern (1787), a position he retained until the fall of the confederation in 1798.

A bitter enemy of the French Revolution, Steiger headed the Swiss party that favoured resistance against the French Revolutionary armies, for which purpose he allowed English, Spanish, and Sardinian recruitment of Swiss mercenaries in 1793 and 1795. The French defeat of the Bernese at Grauholz, Switz. (March 5, 1798), ensured the demise of the confederation, and he fled to Bavaria. In exile he continued to lead a party of Swiss émigrés in plotting the overthrow, with Austrian support, of the French-protected Helvetic Republic and the restoration of the old confederation.