Welfare as institution: the Hôpital général and the Bourse française

The Genevan Hôpital général

Welfare reform came early in both cities. In Zurich the council adopted the Almosenordnung in January 1525, centralising the alms of the city and funding them from the property of the dissolved monasteries (see Chapter B.II). In Geneva the General Council decided on 14 November 1535, only a few months after the suspension of the Mass, to create a single Hôpital général. It was installed in the Bourg-de-Four in the buildings of the Poor Clares, who had left for Annecy, on the site of today’s Palais de Justice. The council endowed it with the property of the older hospitals and with the goods of churches, convents and confraternities formerly devoted to pious uses. The ordinances of 1541 provided for four procureurs to administer the hospital and a hospitalier to run it, with a physician and a surgeon paid by the city. The hospital cared for the sick and the poor, served as an orphanage and a home for the elderly, and through its branch of the Saint-Esprit lodged and fed poor travellers: between October 1538 and October 1539 it received between 90 and 366 persons a year in that function.¹

The parallel with Zurich is close. In both cities the Reformation transferred ecclesiastical property to a public welfare institution under the council’s supervision, replacing a plurality of charitable foundations with a single public administration. In both, too, the funding came from confiscated church assets, a one-off endowment that had to be managed prudently to sustain a permanent service. The Zurich Obmannamt and the Genevan procureurs faced the same problem that every endowment manager knows: how to preserve capital while financing current needs.

The deacons and the Bourse française

Geneva added a second institution that had no Zurich equivalent. The Bourse française was a private welfare fund for French refugees, administered by deacons drawn from the refugee community itself and financed by gifts and legacies from wealthy refugees and their friends. Jeannine E. Olson, whose monograph remains the standard study, describes it as institutionalised in the 1540s.² The International Museum of the Reformation dates its creation to the end of the 1540s and describes its functions: it paid travel money and provided assistance to refugees who arrived in growing numbers.³ Similar funds were established from the 1550s for the Italian and the German refugees.⁴

The Bourse française is of interest to the historian of finance for three reasons. First, it was a fund managed by trustees for defined beneficiaries, outside the direct control of the state, financed by private capital and accountable to its donors and to the church. Its deacons kept accounts, assessed applicants, placed orphans with families and sometimes paid their apprenticeship fees. It was, in a modest way, a fiduciary institution. Secondly, it was a transnational institution: its donors included wealthy French Protestants who lived outside Geneva, while its beneficiaries often moved on to other cities or returned to France. Thirdly, it was an institution of a community of foreigners within the city, run by that community for its own members. The interpretation offered here is that the Bourse française anticipated a characteristic of the later Genevan financial centre: the close association between finance, a network of exiles and families, and the management of money on behalf of others across borders.⁵

Zurich did not need such a fund in the 1540s, because it did not receive refugees on the Genevan scale. When the Locarno refugees arrived in 1555, they formed their own congregation and supported their poor through their own collections. Few in number, they found their integration into the Zurich economy slow and contested (see Chapter B.V). The public welfare system created in 1525 remained the central instrument of Zurich social policy, a system for the city’s own people.

Notes

1. Archives d’État de Genève, “L’Hôpital général”, https://archives-etat-ge.ch/page_de_base/4-lhopital-general/. ↩
2. Jeannine E. Olson, Calvin and Social Welfare: Deacons and the Bourse française (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1989), catalogue description at https://books.google.com/books/about/Calvin_and_Social_Welfare.html?id=556IUtxWjzcC; see also the review in Renaissance Quarterly, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/renaissance-quarterly/article/abs/jeannine-e-olson-calvin-and-social-welfare-deacons-and-the-bourse-francaise-selinsgrove-pa-susquehanna-university-press-londontoronto-associated-university-presses-1989-341-pp-55/B7BCC00368FA0E9A542FCFB33C760175. ↩
3. Musée international de la Réforme, “La Genève réformée – Informations” (as above). ↩
4. Musée international de la Réforme, “La Genève réformée – Informations”, https://www.musee-reforme.ch/content/2files/ok-geneve-reformee-informations.pdf: “Dès les années 1550, des institutions analogues furent créées en faveur des réfugiés italiens ou allemands.” ↩
5. Musée international de la Réforme, “La Genève réformée – Informations” (as above), on the placing of orphans in families and the payment of apprenticeship fees, and on contributions to the fund “provenant de la ville elle-même et de l’étranger”. The fuller account is in Olson’s study (as above). ↩

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.