A recent historian, Alain Dufour, has written of ‘The Myth of Geneva’, by which he means the idea held by Calvinists of Geneva as the Holy City: the mirror and model of true religion and true piety, as the Englishman, William Whittingham, described it; ‘the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in the earth since the days of the apostles’, in the famous phrase of John Knox, the Scot. Certainly it was in this sense a myth which inspired Calvinists everywhere. To them Geneva was the Protestant Rome, and indeed it meant more to them in one sense than Rome did to Catholics, since, however firmly he might believe in the aura of the see of Peter, the candid Catholic had to admit the scandals of Rome as a city even after the Catholic Reformation had taken effect, whereas Geneva claimed, with some justification, that it presented a model of morality and piety as well as of pure doctrine. Nevertheless, as Dufour points out, there was also a counter-myth of Geneva as the throne of error and narrow heartless discipline which influenced Catholics and also those Protestants who were disgusted by the burning of Servetus in 1553, resented the restriction of evangelical freedom by the Genevan discipline, or thought of the lakeside city as the home of sedition where doctrines dangerous to civil obedience were taught.

There was a core of solid fact behind the myth. For Geneva was a religious centre to a degree which Luther's Wittenberg and Zwingli's and Bullinger's Zurich never became, influential as they were. Not only was Geneva the home of a systematic Protestant theology embodied in Calvin's Institutes, and of a church organisation and discipline increasingly thought of as what Calvin claimed them to be, the pattern set out in the New Testament and the primitive church.