AN INTERVAL OF QUIET
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 of Savoy on the ground that
he had no coat of mail. In his new office, however, Simon needed no
armour, for the period from the Escalade of 1603 to the Revocation of
the Edict of Nantes in 1685 was quiet and uneventful. The great name
of the epoch was that of Jean Diodati, Milton’s friend, the theologian
who pulverized the Arminians at the Synod of Dordrecht. Other names
are those of Trembley, Tronchin, Turretini, and Calendrini; and
there is not a name among them which need detain us. The town was at
peace with its neighbours; commerce and industry flourished; and the
ecclesiastical discipline gradually lost its grip upon the city, or
was, at least, restricted to a narrower field of usefulness. We hear of
a good many new sumptuary laws, but we also gather that many of them
were only a means of accentuating class distinctions, and that there
was a growing difficulty in enforcing them. We find persons burnt alive
for witchcraft at the beginning of the period, but not towards the end
of it; we hear of doubts diffusing themselves as to the efficacy of
torture in extracting the truth from witnesses; and we find even heresy
dealt with less rigorously than of old. A heretic who was sentenced
to be ‘strangled in the usual manner’ had the sentence, without
difficulty, commuted into one of ten years’ banishment.
[Illustration: NYON CASTLE, LOOKING ACROSS THE LAKE TO MONT BLANC]
The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes inevitably brought a fresh flood
of immigrants--1,450 in a single week, 800 in a single day--but Geneva
was by no means disposed to welcome them so hospitably as in the time
of M. de Bèze. Seventy years of prosperity had sapped some of the
primitive virtues of the people; they had conceived a dread of foreign
competition, and of the pauper alien, even though the pauper alien was
an exile for conscience’ sake. Their disposition was rather to seek
excuses for passing the pauper aliens on, and make them chargeable upon
the hospitality of their Swiss allies, or of the Germans or the Dutch.
To some extent they succeeded; but a considerable number of the
immigrants settled in the town in spite of the political disabilities
imposed upon them, and soon became a source of trouble. All through the
eighteenth century--or at all events from 1707 until 1794--there was
intermittent political turmoil. A detailed account of the agitations
and disturbances hardly falls within the scope of such a work as the
present; but it may be as well to sum them up, and describe their
general character.