Genf: Calvin und die Moralökonomie des Kredits

Calvin und die Moralökonomie des Kredits – ein Teil des Buches «Genf als internationaler Finanzplatz» von Dr. Alexander Ressos.

Calvin and the moral economy of credit

Calvin occupies a singular position in the imagination of the Geneva financial centre. He is readily credited with legitimising lending at interest, with the work ethic, with the taste for discretion and sobriety and even, in a more popular version, with the invention of a “spirit” favourable to banking. These attributions mix a measure of truth with a measure of legend. The present part sets out to disentangle them by returning to the texts, the institutions and the practices of sixteenth-century Geneva.

The first chapter retraces the political context in which the Reformation took hold: the struggle against Savoyard tutelage, the alliance with the Swiss cantons, the independence won in 1536, Calvin’s arrival, his expulsion and then his recall in 1541. The second chapter presents Calvin in a light that is often neglected, that of the jurist trained at Orléans and Bourges, author of ordinances and adviser to the legislator. The third chapter is devoted to his doctrine of lending at interest and to the Geneva practice of credit. The fourth chapter describes the institutions of discipline, work and relief that shaped Geneva society: the Consistory, the Hôpital général, the Bourse française, the printing trade and the Academy. The fifth chapter, finally, examines the debate opened by Max Weber on the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, and asks what remains of it for understanding today’s financial centre.

The title of this part borrows a notion coined by the British historian Edward P. Thompson, that of the “moral economy”, to designate the norms in whose name a community judges the economic practices that pass through it.¹ It is used here in a broad sense: the whole body of moral, religious and legal rules which, in Calvin’s Geneva, governed credit, prices, work and relief. This moral economy was the outcome of constant negotiation between pastors, magistrates, merchants and refugees, and it evolved over the generations.

A methodological caution is required. The notion of “capitalism” was coined several centuries after Calvin, whose concerns were theological, pastoral and civic. Historians have, moreover, renewed the reading of his economic positions in recent years. A study published in 2025 in the Revue européenne des sciences sociales recalls that it has long been repeated that Calvin was in favour of lending money for commerce at an interest rate of 5 per cent, and subjects this claim to a fresh enquiry, based on a rereading of the texts and on an examination of every case of usury recorded in Geneva between 1555 and 1557.² The chapters that follow take account of this work and point out where the traditional picture needs to be corrected.

Notes

E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century”, Past & Present, no. 50, February 1971, pp. 76-136 (doi: 10.1093/past/50.1.76). ↩
“Jean Calvin et le prêt à intérêt : de la chaire à la boutique” [Jean Calvin and lending at interest: from the pulpit to the shop], Revue européenne des sciences sociales, 2025/1, p. 155 et seq. (abstract accessed September 2026). ↩

About the book

This part belongs to Geneva as an International Financial Centre by Dr Alexander Ressos, published here in full, section by section.