Geneva and Francophone Europe

I lived and taught in Geneva for twelve years. These essays are offshoots of my time there, which gave me some acquaintance with the French-speaking regions of Switzerland and their history. Previous work on the history of Protestantism in Metz had made me aware of the surprising fate of the Reformation in that city, where an important Reformed church grew up in just the years, between 1540 and 1570, when the city lost its status as a free Imperial city and was incorporated into the Valois kingdom. I had long seen the spread of the Reformation across Europe as a process that unfolded at different speeds in different linguistic regions–rapidly within the portions of the continent that spoke different German dialects, slower elsewhere. The first essay listed here tries to escape from the national framework implied by the term “the French Reformation” and understand Protestantism’s dissemination across all of the polities, large and small, encompassed within the Francophone linguistic area in the sixteenth century. Those with a long historiographic memory will detect the influence of Bernd Moeller’s 1962 Imperial Cities and the Reformation. Those abreast of the recent literature on the German Reformation may see interesting parallels with the regional political dynamics revealed by Christopher Close’s 2009 The Negotiated Reformation: Imperial Cities and the Politics of Urban Reform, 1525-1550.

Like any historian of the sixteenth century, I devoted considerable attention to Calvin’s Geneva in my teaching, and assumed before moving to the city that the dramatic transformations of that era still bulked large in the historical consciousness of its inhabitants. As Calvin’s 500th birthday approached soon after my arrival, I was surprised to see how little the civic authorities were prepared to invest in the associated commemorative events. Yet the pre-eminent current expression of Genevan civic pride remains the annual celebration of the Escalade, a holiday and procession commemorating the night in 1602 when the city repulsed a last Savoyard attempt to seize it and cemented for centuries to come the religious regime that Calvin built. An invitation to an international conference on “Remembering the Reformation” provided the occasion for me to explore Geneva’s complex relationship to its Reformation past across the centuries. For the published version of the conference lecture I recruited the assistance of a Genevan colleague and leading expert on the city’s more recent religious history, Sarah Scholl.

Related Publications

“The Spread of Protestantism in Francophone Europe in the First Century of the Reformation,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 109 (2018), 7-52.

(Co-authored with Sarah Scholl), “Religious Heritage and Civic Identity: Remembering the Reformation in Geneva from the Sixteenth to the Twenty-First Century” in Brian Cummings, Ceri Law, Karis Riley and Alexandra Walsham eds., Remembering the Reformation (London: Routledge, 2020), p. 265-285.

“Of Handbooks, Companions, and Essay Collections: Recent Multi-Authored Volumes on Calvin and Calvinism, the Genevan Reformation, and Global Protestantism,” Church History 93 (2024), 126-140.