Geneva: The Refuge and the Protestant Bank (seventeenth to eighteenth centuries)

The Refuge and the Protestant Bank (seventeenth to eighteenth centuries) — a part of the book Geneva as an International Financial Centre by Dr Alexander Ressos.

The Refuge and the Protestant Bank (seventeenth to eighteenth centuries)

Between the end of the sixteenth century and the French Revolution, Geneva became a financial centre. The small Reformed republic, which had hardly any bankers in Calvin’s day, was home in the eighteenth century to an elite of capitalists whose funds fed the loans of the European monarchies, and it supplied Paris, Lyon, Amsterdam and London with some of the most prominent bankers of their time. Two Genevans would even direct the finances of the kingdom of France on the eve and at the outset of the Revolution. This rise was by no means a foregone conclusion. It resulted from the convergence of the institutions inherited from the Reformation, the influx of Huguenot refugees, the growth of export industries, the accumulation of capital in a prudent oligarchy and the considerable financial needs of the great states.

Part C retraces this convergence in five chapters. The first describes the successive waves of the Refuge and the formation of the Geneva Fabrique, that cluster of luxury industries — watchmaking, jewellery, gilding, printed calicoes — which enriched the city. The second presents the “Protestant Bank”, in the phrase of the historian Herbert Lüthy, that is to say the network of Huguenot and Genevan bankers which played a major role in French and European finance. The third follows four Genevans in the service of the finances of the king of France: Isaac Thellusson, Jacques Necker, Isaac Panchaud and Étienne Clavière. The fourth analyses a celebrated financial innovation, investments in life annuities on the lives of young Genevan girls, often referred to as the “thirty maidens of Geneva”. The fifth retraces the political crises of the Republic in the eighteenth century, the French annexation of 1798 and the Restoration of 1813-1815, which would make Geneva a Swiss canton.

The guiding thread of this part is the relationship between a small financial centre and a large neighbouring state. In the fifteenth century, the France of Louis XI had ruined the Geneva fairs. In the eighteenth century, the France of Louis XV and Louis XVI became the principal debtor of the Genevan capitalists. This dependence yielded considerable profits, and then severe losses when the monarchy collapsed. The lesson of risk concentration, already encountered in Part A, here takes on a spectacular dimension.

The historiography of this period is particularly rich. Herbert Lüthy’s monumental study of the Protestant bank in France, the work of Anne-Marie Piuz and Liliane Mottu-Weber on the Geneva economy, and research on French public debt and on life annuities provide a solid foundation.¹ The figures and dates cited in the pages that follow nevertheless remain subject to verification, and the notes say so.

Notes

Herbert Lüthy, La Banque protestante en France de la Révocation de l’Édit de Nantes à la Révolution [The Protestant Bank in France from the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes to the Revolution], 2 vols, Paris, S.E.V.P.E.N., 1959-1961 (reissued Paris, Éditions de l’EHESS, 1998); Anne-Marie Piuz and Liliane Mottu-Weber, L’économie genevoise de la Réforme à la fin de l’Ancien Régime, XVIe-XVIIIe siècles [The Geneva economy from the Reformation to the end of the Ancien Régime, sixteenth to eighteenth centuries], Geneva, 1990, 668 pp. ↩

About the book

This part belongs to Geneva as an International Financial Centre by Dr Alexander Ressos, published here in full, section by section.