The Reform triumphs in 1535. Politically, the city is now a republic. Calvin settles there in 1536. Its genius carries Geneva to the row of Protestant Rome. Since 1550, a bunch of Protestants, in particular French and Italian, persecuted in their country, find an asylum there. Under the aegis of Calvin and of Theodore de Bèze, they get for their new hearth a great religious and intellectual radiation, marked in 1559 by the foundation of the Academy, ancestor of the current University. The refugees also help to rectify the economy, in recession since the decline of the fairs at the end of the previous century.

In 1602, the duke of Savoy, Charles-Emmanuel, tries a night attack against Geneva. This “Climbing”, as it is called, fails; its commemoration, the 11 December 12th, is the principal patriotic festival of the Genevese. The measurements taken by Louis XIV against Protestantism in France make flow a second large wave of refugees at the end of the XVII E century.

XVIIIe century
The XVIII E century was one time of great prosperity. Genevese industries - of which most known is the clock industry - the trade and the bank are flourishing. Jean-Jacques Rousseau is born in Geneva in 1712, Voltaire lives near 1755 to 1778. It has scientists of reputation, the such biologist Charles Bonnet, the physicist and Horace-Bénédict de Saussure geologist.

On the other hand, it is torn by civil disorders, which oppose classes and parties. The Genevese revolution of 1792 destroyed the aristocratic government of Former regime and proclaims the political equality.

In 1798, Geneva is annexed by France and becomes the chief town of the department of Léman. The defeat of the Napoleonean armies returns its freedom to him on on December 31st, 1813. The magistrates of the restored republic are conscious that their city cannot form one isolated State any more; they ask its entry in the Swiss Confederation, obtained definitively in 1815.