Refugees, printing and networks

Geneva’s first Refuge

No single factor did more to differentiate the two economies than the scale of immigration. From the late 1540s Geneva became the principal destination of French Protestants fleeing persecution, and of smaller but influential groups from Italy, the Netherlands and England. In 1549 the city opened a register of new inhabitants, the Livre des habitants, which was closed in 1560 for political reasons and reopened after the massacre of St Bartholomew in 1572. The Musée protestant reports that the register for 1549–1560 contains some 4,800 names and that some 5,000 refugees arrived in a decade, doubling the population.¹ The International Museum of the Reformation records that more than 1,200 French refugees arrived in 1559 alone and more than 1,600 in the last months of 1572, after the St Bartholomew massacres.² Figures of this kind should be treated with caution, since not every registered person stayed. Many moved on to France, Bern, Basel, Zurich or further afield. The order of magnitude is nevertheless clear: within a generation, a city of perhaps ten thousand inhabitants absorbed several thousand immigrants, many of them educated, skilled and connected.

The refugees included noblemen, lawyers, pastors, merchants, printers, goldsmiths and textile workers. Besides capital, sometimes considerable, they brought above all relationships: with family members who had remained in Lyon, Paris or Lucca, with correspondents in Antwerp and Frankfurt, and with fellow believers throughout France. Geneva became a centre of exchange between the Protestant communities of France and the rest of Reformed Europe, an exchange much of which took the form of books, letters, persons and money.

Printing as Geneva’s first export industry

The most visible economic result of the first Refuge was the Genevan printing industry. Jean Crespin, a lawyer from Arras, received burgess rights in Geneva in 1548 and within two decades produced some 250 books, including Bibles in French, Italian, Spanish and English and the famous Livre des martyrs, first published in 1554. The Musée protestant, in its notice on Crespin, observes that printing supported more than a thousand people in Geneva, about five per cent of the population.³ Robert Estienne, royal printer in Paris and one of the great scholar-printers of the age, left Paris for Geneva in 1550 and there operated about four presses, an exceptional number at a time when most Genevan printers owned one or two. By 1557 his son Henri had established his own press in the city.⁴

Printing was a capital-intensive business. It required advances for paper, type and labour, long credit to booksellers and colporteurs, and the capacity to bear the risk of confiscation when books were smuggled into France. Genevan printers worked with financiers, often fellow refugees, who advanced the capital and shared in the profits. The book trade thus became a school of commercial credit and risk management for the refugee community. The interpretation suggested here is that the printing industry played for sixteenth-century Geneva a role similar to that of the silk trade for seventeenth-century Zurich: it was the sector in which merchant capital, credit and export networks were first organised on a significant scale.

Zurich had its own great printer in Christoph Froschauer, a Bavarian by birth who became a Zurich citizen, printed Zwingli’s works and the Zurich Bible, and in whose house the famous sausage meal of Lent 1522 took place.⁵ Froschauer’s press was a major enterprise and exported books widely, but it was one great house in a city whose economy remained dominated by crafts, trade and agriculture. Printing in Geneva was a sector of the urban economy, whereas in Zurich it meant one outstanding firm.

The English exiles: Zurich and Geneva as places of refuge

The Marian exiles of 1553 to 1558 illustrate how the two cities could play complementary roles. When Mary I restored Catholicism in England in 1553, some 800 English Protestants went abroad. They settled in Frankfurt, Strasbourg, Basel, Aarau, Zurich, Geneva, Wesel, Emden and other Reformed cities.⁶ Of roughly 500 exiles whose occupations are known, the same survey counts 67 clergy, 119 students of theology, 166 gentry, 40 merchants, 32 artisans and 7 printers, and notes that the exile was financed in part by London merchants such as Richard Springham and John Abel.⁷

Zurich received a group of scholars and future bishops who lived in close contact with Bullinger and his colleagues, and who after their return to England under Elizabeth I carried on a long correspondence with Zurich. Later edited as the Zurich Letters, this correspondence is an important source for the Elizabethan church.⁸ Geneva received a larger and more radical congregation. The English church in Geneva, founded in 1555, reached a peak of 233 persons in about 140 households, around two per cent of the city’s population. With John Knox and Christopher Goodman among its ministers, the congregation produced the Book of Geneva of 1556 and the Geneva Bible of 1560, the most widely read English Bible of its time.⁹ The pattern is characteristic. Zurich offered learned hospitality to a limited circle and maintained its influence by correspondence. Geneva absorbed a larger community for a few years and turned it into an instrument of religious and political change abroad.

The Locarnesi and the Lucchese

The Italian refugees give the comparison its sharpest edge. In 1555 the Protestant families of Locarno, expelled after a decision of the Catholic cantons that shared the lordship of that territory, crossed the Alps and settled in Zurich. Among them were the Orelli and Muralt families, whose descendants became leading figures in Zurich’s commerce, printing and politics. The Orelli interest in a printing company eventually developed into the firm of Orell Füssli.¹⁰ Their story, and their role in the beginnings of the Zurich silk industry, is the subject of Chapter B.V.

Geneva received Italian refugees from many cities, among whom the merchants of Lucca were the most important for its economic history. The Lucchese families, among them the Burlamacchi, Calandrini, Diodati, Micheli and Turrettini, brought expertise in the silk trade and in international banking. The most famous of their enterprises was the Grande Boutique, a partnership for the manufacture of and trade in silk that also conducted banking business. Its capital, according to the summary of the literature available online, grew from 18,000 écus in 1594 to many times that amount in the early seventeenth century, with annual profits between fifteen and thirty per cent in its best years, before it was dissolved in the late 1620s.¹¹ Francesco (François) Turrettini, born in Lucca in 1547, fled papal arrest in 1575 and joined the Italian church in Geneva on 19 December of that year. Before settling in Geneva he had tried his fortune in Antwerp and in Zurich. In Geneva he became the leading figure of the Grande Boutique and a banker in partnership with Carlo Diodati. He and his sons received Genevan citizenship in 1627, shortly before his death in 1628.¹²

The Turrettini episode is a small but revealing detail. A Lucchese merchant with capital and international connections tried Zurich and moved on to Geneva. Since the reasons are not documented in the sources consulted here, it would be unwise to build too much on a single biography. The general contrast is, however, well established in the literature. Geneva, needing people and capital and governed by magistrates who could see the advantages of immigration, admitted merchant refugees as habitants and, where they were rich or useful enough, as bourgeois. In Zurich, by contrast, the guilds protected their members against competition, so that refugees were admitted reluctantly and confined to trades that did not threaten established crafts.¹³ Chapter B.V shows how the Locarnesi turned that constraint into an opportunity by developing the silk trade, which the guilds did not yet occupy.

Notes

1. Musée protestant, “The Huguenot Refuge in Switzerland”, https://museeprotestant.org/en/notice/the-huguenot-refuge-in-switzerland/. The register for 1549–1560 was edited by Paul-F. Geisendorf, Livre des habitants de Genève, t. I (Geneva: Droz, 1957). ↩
2. Musée international de la Réforme, “La Genève réformée – Informations” (as above). ↩
3. Musée protestant, “Jean Crespin (1520–1572)”, https://museeprotestant.org/en/notice/jean-crespin-1520-1572-2/. ↩
4. Edward Worth Library, Dublin, “Editor Printers”, exhibition The Estiennes, https://estiennes.edwardworthlibrary.ie/editor-printers/. ↩
5. Evangelisch-reformierte Landeskirche des Kantons Zürich, “Reformation von A bis Z” (as above), for the sausage meal at Froschauer’s house in 1522; Zentralbibliothek Zürich, “Reformation” (as above), for Froschauer’s German Bible of 1525 and the complete Zurich Bible of 1531. ↩
6. Wikipedia, “Marian exiles”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_exiles; the Swiss National Museum’s blog, “The Marian Exiles in Switzerland” (November 2020), https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/en/2020/11/the-marian-exiles-in-switzerland/, confirms the exile to Switzerland after Mary’s accession in 1553 and the later influence of the exiles on English political and cultural life. ↩
7. Wikipedia, “Marian exiles” (as above), citing the standard prosopographical studies of the exile. ↩
8. The Zurich Letters, comprising the correspondence of several English bishops and others, with some of the Helvetian reformers, during the early part of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, ed. Hastings Robinson for the Parker Society, Cambridge: University Press, 1842; catalogue record at HathiTrust, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008304369. ↩
9. Wikipedia, “English Congregation in Geneva”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Congregation_in_Geneva. ↩
10. Swiss National Museum, blog, “The Protestants of Locarno” (February 2024), https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/en/2024/02/the-protestants-of-locarno/. ↩
11. Wikipedia, “Grande Boutique”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grande_Boutique, citing Walter Bodmer, Der Einfluss der Refugianteneinwanderung von 1550–1700 auf die schweizerische Wirtschaft (1946) and Liliane Mottu-Weber, Economie et Refuge à Genève au siècle de la Réforme (1987). ↩
12. Wikipedia, “Francesco Turrettini”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesco_Turrettini. ↩
13. HLS, Danièle Tosato-Rigo, “Protestantische Glaubensflüchtlinge”, version of 12 December 2014, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/026884/2014-12-12/. The article records that Geneva admitted almost 8000 Protestant refugees “als Habitanten” between 1549 and 1587, some of whom obtained the bourgeoisie, and that the refugees’ enterprises served the authorities’ mercantilist aims and their fight against poverty. In Zurich, by contrast, the “mächtigen Zünfte” opposed settlement for fear of “die Konkurrenz der hugenottischen Unternehmer im Textilsektor”, while families such as the Orelli engaged in silk weaving and wholesale trade. The HLS makes the point about guild opposition with reference to the later Huguenot refuge. The standard monograph is Walter Bodmer, Der Einfluss der Refugianteneinwanderung von 1550–1700 auf die schweizerische Wirtschaft (1946). ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of September 2025.