Both local agency and French intervention created the Helvetic Republic. The events of 1789 in France affected the debate elsewhere in Europe, and the presence of French troops in the Pays de Vaud had a coercive effect, but fundamental political changes were also made according to traditional cantonal norms and responded to ongoing Swiss debates and repertoires of action. Local Swiss patriotic elites’ shaping of a hybrid or blended republicanism adds to the wider discussion on the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. Political actors in the old Swiss Confederation had debated concepts of (Swiss) freedom, individual and collective liberty and liberties since the late seventeenth century. Many who were excluded from the Old Regime hoped to be welcomed with an expansion of a conception of liberty. When this entry was rejected, these spurned local elites often sought to overturn the Old Regime in the Swiss Confederation and elsewhere.

The Swiss Confederation remained an enigma for the Frenchman John Calvin, and with good reason.1 This collection of territories was a unique and rather confusing political and cultural entity that had emerged piecemeal in the late Middle Ages. The very term Swiss, which makes sense to modern ears, hardly applied in the sixteenth century in a place where there was little sense of national identity.2 Humanists had begun to valorize Helvetia, and the wars against the Habsburgs and the Burgundians had done much to incite forms of patriotism, but loyalties remained largely local. Huldrych Zwingli had embraced a sense of the Swiss as the elect people of God, and even the young Heinrich Bullinger wrote of his countrymen as the Israelites of the covenant. The reality, however, was much less harmonious. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the newly expanded Confederation (with the addition of Basel and Schaffhausen) was a collection of 13 members bound by a series of alliances but divided by internal tensions. Not least was the problem posed by Zurich, which during the previous century had made repeated, and unsuccessful, attempts to expand its hegemonic interests.3

The mottled confessional map of Europe at any of the major junctures of the Reformation, say in 1555 or in 1648, hints at the complex tangle of political alliances, military campaigns, and dynastic aspirations that led to Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed territorial holdings. Throughout the course of the Reformation, contingent political and military circumstances established the parameters of religious reform. In the early 1520s, for example, Charles V’s need for support among German princes against enemies foreign and domestic enabled Lutherans to gain traction in Saxony and Hesse. Decades later in the fall of 1588, storms in the North Atlantic blew ships in Spain’s Armada into the coastlines of Scotland and Ireland, helping preserve the Elizabethan settlement in England. And in 1620, the Count of Tilly’s imperial forces overran Bohemian troops at White Mountain, a victory that cleared the way for the recatholicization of Czech lands. Strokes of (mis)fortune at courts, on seaways, and on battlefields such as these carried unforeseen and far-reaching implications for the religious map of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It makes sense, therefore, when considering John Calvin and Calvinism in their fullest contexts to reflect on the conditional political and military incidents that befell the Republic of Geneva in the Reformation period. Calvin’s leadership in propagating his brand of Reformed Protestantism with such vigor and success derived in no small part from the independence Geneva achieved among regional powers.