Geneva Painted by J. Hardwicke Lewis & May Hardwicke Lewis. Described by Francis Gribble.

Horace Benedict de Saussure, who, like so many eminent Genevans, was of French extraction, was born in 1740. Nominally, his work in life, entered upon at the age of twenty-two,...

Necker bought the property from his old banking partner, Thelusson, for 500,000 livres in French money, and retired to live there when the French Revolution drove him out of pol...

Calvin died and was buried with his fathers--not before it was time, in the opinion of a good many of his critics--and was succeeded in the dictatorship by Théodore de Bèze, who...

Another bone of contention was found in Voltaire’s passionate devotion to the theatre. His tastes were shared by the ‘advanced’ set at Geneva; but the divines, in spite of their...

The time was December, 1602. Duke Charles Emmanuel had secretly crossed the mountains, and established his head-quarters at Etrembières; a sufficient army had been quietly mobil...

Straddling the Rhone, where it issues from the bluest lake in the world, looking out upon green meadows and wooded hills, backed by the dark ridge of the Salève, with the ‘great...

In Old Geneva education had been neglected. Emperor Charles IV. had offered the citizens a University in the fourteenth century, and the offer had been rejected for fear, it was...

Stories such as those related above make it clear that rowdyism was likely to be the note of the Reformation at Geneva so long as Farel remained at the head of ecclesiastical af...

About 1830 the Caveau Genevois broke up. Some of its members were dead, some had left Geneva, some were growing too old for poetry, and some were going in for politics. But as t...

The Sisters had long been exposed to annoyance by Reformers of the baser sort. One such Reformer, having occasion to call at the convent on some municipal business, had insisted...

The Transvaal troubles which culminated in the South African War may furnish an analogy which will help to make the situation clear; the story being, in fact, a long story of ac...

Voltaire was sixty years of age when he settled on the shores of the lake, where he was to remain for another four-and-twenty years; and he did not go there for his pleasure. He...

The period, at any rate, is one in which notable names meet us at every turn. There were exiled Genevans, like de Lolme, holding their own in foreign political and intellectual...

‘Réveil’ is Swiss for Revivalism. The movement was the Genevan analogue of our Wesleyan Methodism, though it did not begin till more than five-and-twenty years after John Wesley...

It does not appear that the fustigations at first formed brilliant scholars. The University was, for a long time, more famous for its professors than for its pupils. Few learned...

While Voltaire was vexing the citizens of Geneva, he was also enjoying the veneration of all educated Europe, and even of educated America. He corresponded regularly with at lea...

Such was the constitution in theory; and, if we want to see it at work, we have only to turn to the Register of the Consistory, in which we may read how the citizens were punish...

We have spoken of the literature of science. In the literature which is an art, and an end in itself, Geneva never excelled; and if we look for reasons, we can find several.

The Reformation occurred simultaneously with the political revolution; and the informal historian, who is under no compulsion to take a side, is inevitably impressed less by the...

Geneva, it should be explained, was a fief of the duchy of Savoy; or so, at all events, the Dukes of Savoy maintained, though the citizens were of the contrary opinion. Their vi...

M. de Bèze was succeeded in the Presidency of the Venerable Company of Pastors by Simon Goulart--the warrior whom we have seen excusing himself for not fighting against the Duke...

The situation righted itself by degrees, with the help of subscriptions from other Swiss cities; but then there was another deadly peril to be faced. The pretensions of Savoy we...

Perhaps it is in song and satire that Geneva has done best. ‘Roulez, tambours,’ is not the only Genevan song that has passed the Genevan frontier; and Geneva, in fact, has alway...

It has been remarked as curious that the Age of Revolution at Geneva was also the Golden Age--if not of Genevan literature, which has never really had any Golden Age, at least o...

One would be tempted, if space permitted, to say something of the later literary luminaries of Geneva: of Amiel, the ‘virtuous Don Juan,’ as his friends called him, who, after l...