Two Reformations, two constitutions

Zurich: a Reformation decided by the Council

The Zurich Reformation was, from its first day to its last, an affair of the city council. When Zwingli took up the post of Leutpriester at the Grossmünster on 1 January 1519, he entered a church over which the urban republic had long exercised control. The State Archives of the Canton of Zurich, in their short constitutional history, stress that the city had laid a controlling hand on the church well before the Reformation, which then completed a process of territorial control that was already under way.¹ The decisive steps followed in rapid succession. In 1521 the council forbade the recruitment of mercenaries on its territory, the first sign that Zwingli’s preaching against the pension system (see Part A) had reached the magistrates. At the First Disputation on 29 January 1523 the council declared that Zwingli should continue to preach the Gospel and the true divine Scripture, and ordered all preachers in city and countryside to do likewise. A Second Disputation followed in October of the same year.²

The practical consequences of the new doctrine arrived between 1524 and 1525. Images were removed from the churches in 1524. In 1525 the Mass was abolished and replaced by a communion service with bread and wine held four times a year. The council also adopted the poor-relief ordinance that is the subject of Chapter B.II.³ Monastic property passed to the city and was placed at the service of schools, the poor and the new church. In the same year, 1525, the council created a marriage court, the Ehegericht, which is discussed below. Every one of these decisions was taken by the Small and Great Councils of a guild city whose constitution went back to Rudolf Brun’s Geschworener Brief of 1336 (see Part A). While the reformer preached, argued and drafted, the council decided. That pattern would remain characteristic of Zurich throughout the early modern period.

The Zurich Reformation also had a violent end to its first phase. After Zwingli died on the battlefield of Kappel on 11 October 1531, the young Heinrich Bullinger, then twenty-seven, was chosen as his successor on 9 December 1531.⁴ The Second Peace of Kappel fixed the confessional map of the Confederation for generations and ended Zurich’s ambition to carry the Reformation by force into the Catholic cantons. Bullinger led the Zurich church until his death in 1575. His long tenure gave Zurich a stability of leadership that Geneva, where Calvin had to fight repeatedly for his position, did not enjoy until the mid-1550s.

Geneva: a Reformation made in a struggle for independence

Geneva’s Reformation grew out of a political revolution. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the city was ruled by a prince-bishop, while the House of Savoy, whose territories surrounded it, exercised growing influence over both bishop and town. The party of the Eidguenots, whose name derived from the German Eidgenossen, sought protection from the Swiss. On 25 February 1526 Geneva concluded a treaty of combourgeoisie with Bern and Fribourg, against the opposition of the Duke of Savoy and of Bishop Pierre de La Baume.⁵ The bishop left the city in July 1533 and never returned. The Reformed preacher Guillaume Farel, who had been driven out on his first visit in 1532, returned with Bernese protection on 20 December 1533. After a disputation at the convent of Rive in June 1535, the Mass was suspended on 10 August 1535.⁶

The religious change was inseparable from war. Savoy blockaded the city from the summer of 1534 until a Bernese army lifted the siege in January 1536, conquering the Pays de Vaud in the same campaign. On 21 May 1536 the citizens, assembled in the General Council, declared their unanimous will to “live according to this holy evangelical law”. A new treaty with Bern followed on 7 August 1536.⁷ The International Museum of the Reformation, in its educational dossier on Reformed Geneva, uses the same formula and places the departure of the bishop in August 1533. Although the precise month varies between sources, the sequence is not in doubt.⁸

Two differences from Zurich are visible from the outset. First, Geneva’s Reformation was the act of a city that had just freed itself from its lord and still had to defend that freedom. Zurich had been a free imperial city and a member of the Confederation since 1351, so its Reformation changed the church while the state remained the same. Geneva became a sovereign republic and a Reformed city in one and the same movement. Secondly, Geneva was in debt to its protector. The Genevan State Archives record that the city owed Bern more than 20,000 gold écus for the costs of the war of 1530 and of diplomacy, payable under the treaty of August 1536 by Christmas of that year. To meet the obligation the authorities created a special fund, the Trésor de l’Arche.⁹ The Genevan Reformation was therefore, among other things, a problem of public finance. It is no accident that the city’s first great confrontation with the question of interest came in the years when it was servicing that debt.

Calvin’s arrival, expulsion and return

John Calvin, a French jurist and humanist from Noyon, passed through Geneva in the summer of 1536 and was persuaded by Farel to stay. His first attempt to organise the church ended in failure: after the election of four syndics hostile to the preachers in February 1538, Calvin and Farel were banished in April of that year.¹⁰ Calvin spent the following three years in Strasbourg, where he served the French refugee congregation and learned from Martin Bucer how a city church could be ordered. When the political balance in Geneva shifted, the council recalled him. He returned on 13 September 1541 and immediately presented to the council the need to organise the affairs of the church.¹¹

The result was the Ordonnances ecclésiastiques, drafted by a working group of ministers and councillors and approved by the General Council on 20 November 1541.¹² The ordinances distinguished four ministries: pastors to preach and administer the sacraments, doctors to teach, elders to watch over the conduct of the faithful and deacons to care for the poor and the sick. The Musée protestant, summarising the text, stresses that the pastors were denied any civil jurisdiction and that the ordinances established a sharing of power between church and state, with the magistrate retaining an appeal over many decisions and a role in the nomination of pastors.¹³ The ordinances also required the creation of a college “to prepare [the young] both for the ministry and for civil government”, a programme realised in 1559 with the foundation of the Collège and the Académie.¹⁴

The two settlements compared

On paper the two settlements look similar. In both cities a council of citizens adopted the Reformation, abolished the Mass, seized church property and placed the new church under the protection and supervision of the state. In both cities the reformer was a salaried employee of the republic and could be dismissed by it, as Calvin learned in 1538. Yet the balance of power differed. In Zurich the magistrate was the head of the Christian community in a very direct sense: Zwingli’s theology assigned to the Christian magistrate the task of governing the visible church, and Bullinger continued that line. In Geneva Calvin insisted, from 1541 onwards, that the church had its own order, grounded in Scripture, and its own officers, the elders and pastors assembled in the Consistory. Although the magistrate chose the elders and could overrule the Consistory on many points, the idea of a church discipline distinct from the civil power was a Genevan idea. Alien to the Zurich tradition, it would travel from Geneva to France, Scotland, the Netherlands and beyond.

A second difference concerns the ruling class. Zurich’s councils were composed of guild masters and members of the Constaffel, the association of the old patrician and rentier families, under a constitution that gave the craft guilds a guaranteed share of power. Geneva had no political guilds. Its government rested on a pyramid of councils: the General Council of all citizens and burgesses, the Council of Two Hundred created in 1526, the Council of Sixty created in 1457, and the Small Council of twenty-five, headed by four syndics elected each year. Over the sixteenth century, and above all through the edicts of 1543 and 1568 and the edict of 1570, effective power passed from the General Council to the restricted councils, which filled themselves largely by co-optation.¹⁵ Genevan society was further divided into legal classes. Citoyens were born to burgess families and bourgeois had purchased or been granted burgess rights, while habitants were admitted residents without political rights and the later natifs were their locally born children. That legal stratification would shape the reception of refugees, as section VI shows.

Notes

1. Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich (ed.), Kleine Zürcher Verfassungsgeschichte 1218–2000 (Zurich: Chronos, 2000), https://www.zh.ch/content/dam/zhweb/bilder-dokumente/themen/politik-staat/recherche-im-staatsarchiv/z%C3%BCrcher-geschichte/zh_verfassungsgeschichte.pdf, section on the Reformation, which describes the pre-Reformation control of the city over the church. ↩
2. Zentralbibliothek Zürich, “Reformation”, Zürich im Mittelpunkt, https://www.zb.uzh.ch/en/fokus/beitrag/reformation, for the mercenary prohibition of 1521 and the two disputations of 1523; the council’s formula is quoted in Kleine Zürcher Verfassungsgeschichte (as above). ↩
3. Evangelisch-reformierte Landeskirche des Kantons Zürich, “Reformation von A bis Z”, https://www.zhref.ch/welt/aktuell/500-jahre-reformation/reformation-von-bis-z, entries for 1524 and 1525. ↩
4. Zentralbibliothek Zürich, “Reformation” (as above), for Zwingli’s death on 11 October 1531 and Bullinger’s election on 9 December 1531. ↩
5. Archives d’État de Genève, exhibition “Crises et révolutions à Genève 1526–1544”, https://archives-etat-ge.ch/page_liste_menu/expositions-crises-revolutions-geneve-1526-1544/, which dates the treaty to 25 February 1526 and notes that Geneva followed the example of Lausanne. ↩
6. Archives d’État de Genève, “Guillaume Farel et Jean Calvin”, https://archives-etat-ge.ch/page_de_base/16-guillaume-farel-et-jean-calvin/, for Farel’s arrival in 1532, his return on 20 December 1533 and the disputation of Rive in June 1535. ↩
7. Archives d’État de Genève, “Crises et révolutions à Genève 1526–1544” (as above), for the relief of January 1536, the General Council of 21 May 1536 and the treaty of 7 August 1536. ↩
8. Musée international de la Réforme, dossier thématique “La Genève réformée – Informations”, https://www.musee-reforme.ch/content/2files/ok-geneve-reformee-informations.pdf. ↩
9. Archives d’État de Genève, “Emprunts et revenus”, https://archives-etat-ge.ch/page_de_base/7-emprunts-et-revenus/. ↩
10. Archives d’État de Genève, “Guillaume Farel et Jean Calvin” (as above), which places the banishment in 1538 during a period dominated by the pro-Bernese party. Wikipedia, “Calvin’s Geneva”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin%27s_Geneva, dates the election of the four hostile syndics to 3 February 1538. ↩
11. Archives d’État de Genève, “1541–1556, retour de Calvin”, https://archives-etat-ge.ch/page_de_base/5-1541-1556-retour-de-calvin/. ↩
12. Archives d’État de Genève, “1541–1556, retour de Calvin” (as above); the Musée international de la Réforme, “La Genève réformée – Informations” (as above), gives the same date. Some secondary accounts, including Wikipedia, give 30 November; the date of 20 November is that of the official Genevan sources consulted here. ↩
13. Musée protestant, “The Ecclesiastical Ordinances (1541)”, https://museeprotestant.org/en/notice/the-ecclesiastical-ordinances-1541/. ↩
14. Archives d’État de Genève, “1541–1556, retour de Calvin” (as above), quoting the ordinances; Musée international de la Réforme, “La Genève réformée – Informations” (as above), for 1559. ↩
15. “La constitution de l’Edit de 1570 à Genève”, forum historiae iuris (2022), https://forhistiur.net/2022-10-cuttat/?l=fr, which describes the councils, the edicts of 1543 and 1568 and the delegation of fiscal authority in 1570, and speaks of an “aristo-democratic” structure. ↩

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.