Through the energetic work of the reformer John Calvin, the small city-state of Geneva became the so-called Protestant Rome in the sixteenth century. Calvin created a morals court, the Consistory, which worked in conjunction with the city council to attack a wide range of ‘sins’, including illicit sexuality, defined as all sexual activity outside of marriage. In Calvin’s time, authorities pursued male and female fornicators (including fiancés) with the same rigour and on rare occasions sentenced adulterers to death. After Calvin’s death a double standard appeared in the treatment of adultery, most blatant in the fact that sexual relations between female servants and their married masters resulted in more severe penalties for the former than the latter. Same-sex relations were considered crimes against nature, but authorities adjudged those involving men much more severely than those involving women, probably based on a belief that sexual relations between male partners degraded them to the level of women. Although a few men were prosecuted for rape, religious and political authorities largely enhanced patriarchy; given the persistent numbers of people who were summoned, they clearly were also less successful in nurturing self-control among Genevans in their sex lives than in other areas of behaviour.

Erasmian humanism paved the way for the spread of the Protestant Reformation in the Swiss Confederation. Basel’s printing houses played a major role in the diffusion of Luther’s ideas, which were then further disseminated by preachers in other cities. Supported by Zurich’s ruling council, Huldrych Zwingli played a key role in spreading the Evangelical movement in Switzerland. Anabaptism also attracted many adherents, but persecution effectively marginalised the movement and limited it to rural areas. Central Switzerland remained staunchly Catholic, and a brief war broke out between Catholic and Protestant Confederates in 1531. The resulting Peace of Kappel rolled back the progress of reform and created a bi-confessional structure within the Confederation. The Catholic cantons formed a majority but they were countered by the powerful Reformed cities of Zurich, Basel, Bern and Schaffhausen. Through the second half of the century these cities allied with Geneva and developed a strong Swiss Reformed identity in response to both German Lutherans and the Tridentine Catholicism that spread from Italy. Confessional tensions were particularly marked in areas jointly governed by Protestant and Catholic members of the Confederation, but competing religious loyalties were never strong enough to overcome their shared political identity as Swiss.

Rousseau’s Social Contract is known for its very distinctive doctrine of the separation of powers in which the legislative power (located in the community as a whole) is sovereign over the executive power (or government). According to Rousseau, the seeds of the downfall of every community, no matter how good it may be, is contained in the tendency of the government to usurp the powers of sovereignty. The sovereign can maintain its authority only if it is regularly assembled and passes judgment on the government, dissolving it and forming a new one if necessary. Critics from a variety of perspectives have argued that the practical and theoretical flaw in Rousseau’s account is that the sovereign can pronounce only when it is assembled and a usurping government can easily prevent it from assembling. I investigate this question by examining the Second Part of the Letters Written from the Mountain, where Rousseau describes the corruption of the Genevan government and discusses the resources available to citizens who wish to call it to account before an unassembled sovereign.

The success of Rousseau’s political vision depends on citizens placing the common interest above their private interest whenever the two conflict. Rousseau says very little about how citizens could be motivated to do so in the Social Contract, however, which gives rise to questions about how the text relates to his other works. This chapter challenges liberal-egalitarian interpretations of Rousseau that draw on Emile to extract a model of modern citizenship for the Social Contract and instead argues that the Discourse on Political Economy is the most informative text for understanding the theory of republican citizenship required to make the Social Contract project viable. In doing so, it elucidates the moral psychology underpinning Rousseau’s proposals for cultivating political virtue, before responding to the objection that this cannot have been what he had in mind for his native Geneva, which he claimed to have taken as the model for the Social Contract.

This historical chapter explains the origins of the ICRC in Geneva immediately before and after 1863 and the organization’s very early activities. It goes into some detail about the two key founding fathers, Henry Dunant and Gustave Moynier. The focus on two key persons gives flesh and blood to early developments for both the ICRC and the global Red Cross network that the ICRC initiated and helped structure. Religious origins are contrasted with secular evolution. Amateurism is contrasted with a quest for professionalization. Flexible decision-making is noted. Also mentioned are Genevan Exceptionalism and Swiss nationalism. This chapter allows a vivid contrast between the early ICRC and the organization it has become in contemporary times.

The topsy-turvy and complicated revolutionary politics of the late eighteenth century is nowhere better illustrated than in the history of Geneva. Intermittent popular rebellion erupted in 1707, the 1730s, the 1760s, the early 1780s and 1790s. This led to speculation about whether the Protestant Rome would meet its end through civil war. Alternatively, one of its rapacious and imperially-minded neighbors, the monarchies of France or Savoy, might devour the republic, ensuring that Geneva followed so many of the continent’s lesser states into oblivion. This chapter provides an overview of the history of Geneva and explains its role in the Age of Revolutions especially through the events of 1782, which saw a popular rebellion put down by invading troops from France, Savoy, and Bern. A significant exile diaspora followed. Some of the exiles who advocated republicanism at Geneva opposed it in France. Although revolution could be attempted at Geneva, this did not mean it would work elsewhere. The age of revolutions was full of fractures, with political stances complicated by the legacy of small state failure and the inability of revolutionaries to establish stable states capable of defending themselves militarily.

This chapter shows how the crisis of the early 1920s and the intellectual relief that followed were essential to shaping European discourses about intellectuals and their roles in democratic societies. It begins by exploring well-known inter-war polemics by Julien Benda, Karl Mannheim, and Antonio Gramsci against the social backdrop of intellectual crisis and reconstruction. The chapter centres on Geneva as a crucible for bureaucracy and home to bodies that sought to categorize and organize international intellectual life. The chapter shows how a wide range of national and international organizations emerged in the 1920s to codify and protect the status of intellectuals and intellectual workers, and argues that all of this activity was motivated and conditioned by the post-war humanitarian crisis. While, by the late 1920s, the rights of intellectuals were increasingly – but unevenly – protected by international legislation, the rise of totalitarianism showed the vulnerability of intellectuals.

This chapter broadens our understanding around how macro and micro levels of conflict come together in the form of ceasefire agreements. It shows how the 2017 Memorandum on the creation of de-escalation areas in the Syrian Arab Republic, negotiated and agreed to by Russia, Turkey and Iran, not only relates to military dynamics but how this agreement influenced elements normally considered the sole purview of the sovereign state such as diplomacy, security and territorial control.

Chapter 1 focuses on the transnational networks of the three English republican exiles. It follows Ludlow, Sidney and Neville on their journeys to the Continent and shows the extent to which the refugees relied on pre-existing networks formed during earlier periods of their lives through their families, their education, their religion and their political activity, and on new connections forged during their travels. Ludlow made his way to Geneva with the help of French Huguenot acquaintances and subsequently benefited from their wider religious networks in Switzerland. Sidney in contrast had to leave a diplomatic assignment in Copenhagen without much preparation and initially moved to Rome on a whim, recovering old and forging new connections among the religious establishment soon after his arrival. Neville was the last of the three to leave for the Continent after being arrested for his suspected involvement in a plot to restore the Commonwealth in England. As a prisoner in the Tower, he made arrangements with the Earl of Clarendon to retreat to Italy, where he was to benefit from the hospitality of the Medici Grand Duke Ferdinando II as well as from the anonymity enjoyed by foreigners in Rome.

This chapter consists of two parts. The first part is an account of the influence that military technological advancements have had on development of the law governing armed conflict. Beginning in the 1860s, it recalls the points at which new weapon technologies have prompted legal responses in the form of treaties, declarations and other instruments. It concludes with the establishment of the International Criminal Court after discussing the two developments of most relevance to the book: the drafting of the Additional Protocols to the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, the latter being the convention under which regulation of autonomous weapons is being debated. The second part discusses the public debate about autonomous weapons beginning with the growth of broad public interest in the early 2000s and the contributions of roboticists, ethicists and other academics. It then covers the involvement of the United Nations and ends by summarising the process by which the regulatory debate in connection with the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons began.

Historians have characterized the prosecution of adultery in early modern Geneva in two different ways that, at first glance, seem to be at odds with one another. Some argue that women were prosecuted more vigorously than men due to a traditional patriarchal understanding of marriage that deemed a woman’s sexual loyalty to be paramount; others maintain that Geneva was a special case, distinct from most of early modern Europe, because men were prosecuted as intensively and as violently for adultery as women.  Some scholars go so far as to argue that Geneva was a “paradis des femmes” because husbands were also held accountable for their sexual wanderings. This chapter demonstrates, however, that Geneva was far more typical in its prosecution of sex crimes than most Reformation historians admit.  For a brief period, the male lovers of adulterous wives were prosecuted aggressively in Geneva.  But if we enlarge our temporal focus to encompass a larger period, and consider the gender and marital status of those punished, it becomes clear that, even in Geneva and even during the Reformation, errant wives were the primary target of adultery prosecutions.

John Calvin was born on July 10, 1509 in Noyon, France to his parents, Gérard Cauvin and Jeanne LeFranc; he was a second-born son, between an older brother Charles and two younger brothers Antoine and François. His mother, whom he remembered for her piety, died when Calvin was only six years old. Gérard Cauvin remarried, and his second wife bore two daughters. Gérard had obtained bourgeois status in 1497 and served as a city magistrate in Noyon. Intending Calvin for the priesthood, his father made arrangements to fund his education through his connections with the bishop and diocesan chapter of Noyon. Consequently, in the spring of 1521, Charles de Hangest, bishop of Noyon, provided Calvin his first ecclesiastical benefice of a third share of the Chapel of La Gésine. A second benefice was added in 1527 providing revenues from Saint-Martin de Martheville.

John Calvin converted to evangelical doctrines in his homeland, France, where Protestantism was officially proscribed. In 1535, during a spike in heresy persecution, like scores of evangelicals before him and thousands afterward, he fled as a religious refugee. By the time of his death in 1564, though ever an exile in Geneva, he had done more than any other person to transform the religious politics of France, which had plunged into the beginning of a long “war of religion” (1562–1598). That civil war’s chief protagonists, French Reformed Protestants, “Huguenots,” were his disciples. In attempting to put Calvin in proper context, one must describe both the political environment that shaped his and other French people’s response to Protestantism as well as his role, among all the other major actors, in reshaping it.

In 1995, David C. Steinmetz, one of the two deans of Calvin studies in America along with Robert M. Kingdon, published a slim volume entitled Calvin in Context. For Calvin studies, that volume became part of the necessary tools of the trade. Steinmetz brilliantly set forth the argument for the history of exegesis method for which he became famous. In so doing, he argued that attempting to understand Calvin apart from those who went before him, his theological and exegetical context, caused a variety of errors.1

In the grand narrative of the European past, Geneva’s history begins with the arrival of the Reformed faith. Historian Herbert D. Foster noted in 1903 that there was not a good history of Geneva written in English prior to the arrival of John Calvin. Sadly, this hole in the scholarship has not been filled more than a century later. The bulk of the works about Geneva focus on the period of John Calvin’s residency there. Louis Binz offers a detailed study in French of the episcopal world of the diocese of Geneva prior to the Reformation, but there is still much to be learned of what life was like in Geneva prior to the changes brought by the introduction of the Reformation. By exploring the civic life of Geneva after the Reformed faith transformed many aspects of the landscape and function of the city within the larger history of the place, a richer picture through multiple lenses emerges.1

The mottled confessional map of Europe at any of the major junctures of the Reformation, say in 1555 or in 1648, hints at the complex tangle of political alliances, military campaigns, and dynastic aspirations that led to Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed territorial holdings. Throughout the course of the Reformation, contingent political and military circumstances established the parameters of religious reform. In the early 1520s, for example, Charles V’s need for support among German princes against enemies foreign and domestic enabled Lutherans to gain traction in Saxony and Hesse. Decades later in the fall of 1588, storms in the North Atlantic blew ships in Spain’s Armada into the coastlines of Scotland and Ireland, helping preserve the Elizabethan settlement in England. And in 1620, the Count of Tilly’s imperial forces overran Bohemian troops at White Mountain, a victory that cleared the way for the recatholicization of Czech lands. Strokes of (mis)fortune at courts, on seaways, and on battlefields such as these carried unforeseen and far-reaching implications for the religious map of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It makes sense, therefore, when considering John Calvin and Calvinism in their fullest contexts to reflect on the conditional political and military incidents that befell the Republic of Geneva in the Reformation period. Calvin’s leadership in propagating his brand of Reformed Protestantism with such vigor and success derived in no small part from the independence Geneva achieved among regional powers.

John Calvin and other Reformed Protestants placed a great deal of emphasis on discipline, and one noted historian has even argued that Calvinist discipline contributed to “the making of the modern mind.”1 Some Reformed leaders, such as Martin Bucer, claimed that discipline was the third mark of the true church, the other two being the pure preaching of the Gospels and the proper administration of the sacraments. There were differences of opinion among Reformed thinkers, however, about how discipline was to be carried out. In Zurich, Ulrich Zwingli asserted that the Christian magistrates had the exclusive authority to discipline the faithful, including the right to excommunicate. By contrast, Bucer maintained that discipline should be under the purview of the pastors who were to be assisted by elders.2 John Calvin, who had gotten to know Bucer during his stay in Strasbourg (1538–1541), reflected the older reformer’s ideas on discipline. Although he never specifically recognized it as the third mark of the church, he placed enormous emphasis on discipline, describing it as the “sinews” of the church, and made the establishment of a new disciplinary institution, the consistory, a condition for his return to Geneva in 1541. Calvin composed the Geneva’s ecclesiastical ordinances that prescribed that the consistory be comprised of the city’s pastors and elders. Consistories became the prime instrument of discipline among the Reformed in sixteenth-century Europe.