In July of 1536 Calvin passed through Geneva, where the reformer Guillaume Farel persuaded him to stay. He introduced into the city, now an independent republic, a discipline which, like his Institution, may easily be misunderstood. His supervision of morals and expenses and amusements was no new thing; there is practically no detail in that field which had not been insisted upon by orthodox mediaeval theologians for centuries past, and written in town statute-books, and sometimes even enforced in practice. Here, Calvin's innovation was to substitute stern regu larity for impulse and caprice. For the matter was now in the hands of business men ; the bishop having been driven out, this enforcement of discipline devolved upon the town council as wielders both of ecclesiastical and of secular authority.
And behind that was another revival from the past. Anxious as Calvin was to revert to the Christianity of the earliest days, and finding as he did in the Lord's Supper the central Christian rite, he insisted on the rejection of unworthy communicants. This regulation proved too stringent for many others besides the "libertines"; and Calvin, with his two chief colleagues, was ban ished in 1538. The city recalled him in 1541, and he obeyed, most unwillingly, for the sake of what he regarded as a great public work. His Ecclesiastical Ordinances and his institution of the Consistory, became in one sense the parents of Presbyterianism (q.v.). The discipline which had always been advocated was now actually enforced ; and nonconformists were punished, sometimes even to the death; the world will never forget how this rebel Calvin burned the Unitarian Servetus. But he saw that a Protes tant ministry could never hold its ground without solid learning; therefore he wrote a catechism which should teach even children to give reasons for their faith; moreover, he founded a grammar school and an academy which attracted able men from all lands, and which sent missionaries out in all directions.
In France, as in Switzerland, the germ of the Reformation is pre-Lutheran. The concordat of 1516 had put the French Church practically under royal authority; the Renaissance (q.v.) was rapidly sapping mediaeval conventions ; and one very remarkable man devoted himself with equal enthusiasm to religious reform and to learning. This was Jacques Lefevre (Faber Stapulensis), who in 1512, at the age of about 55, published a Latin transla tion of the Pauline epistles, with a commentary which roughly anticipated Luther's theory of grace and his denial of transub stantiation. In 1524 Lefevre revised a French translation of the New Testament, as a foretaste of the whole Bible. He was now under the protection of his old pupil Briconnet, bishop of Meaux, who had set his heart on the reformation of morals and religion within that diocese. With the help of other pupils, such as Guil
laume Farel, Lefevre created a whole school of students and evangelical preachers.
Meanwhile Luther's doctrines were spreading in France and had been formally condemned (1521) ; and in 1523 the bishop of Meaux found himself obliged to fulminate against Luther by name, and against certain doctrines held by Farel and other extremists. Then the parlement took strong measures against the innovators : Lefevre's Testament was burned, while he and his friends found safety in flight. Heresy spread rapidly, and Francis I. favoured or punished it according to the changes of the political weathercock. At the end of 1533 he decreed instant burning against any man convicted by two witnesses of being a Lutheran ; but the next January he signed a secret treaty with the Protestant princes of Germany.
Then the excesses of the wilder reformers, who placarded Paris with an offensive broadside against the mass and the priests, caused a natural reaction among the people and at court. In two months, nearly 200 heretics were in the Paris prisons, and eight had been burned. When Lefevre died (1536) "partly from the timidity of the leaders and partly from the rashness of the rank and file, the first or Evangelical phase of Protestantism in France had failed to bring about a reform of the Church" (A. A. Tilley in Camb. Mod. Hist., vol. II.).
In that same year Calvin published his Institution, with which the second, or Calvinistic, phase began. The book supplied the Protestants with a clear and detailed theory of religion; on the other hand, it involved a considerable recoil from two most im portant principles : it set definite limits both to free enquiry and to individualism. Thenceforward French reformers shared the strength and the weakness of institutionalism. More truly in France than in any other great country, Geneva now became "the Protestant Rome." The Waldensians.—After a lull, persecution became more severe again (I538-40). The theological faculty of Paris drew up 26 articles of faith in answer to the Institution, which Calvin had now published in French, and which was solemnly burned in 1544; meanwhile, many Calvinists were burned here and there. In 153o, the Waldensians (Vaudois) who had survived from mediaeval persecutions in a group of 3o remote mountain villages along the Durance, affiliated themselves to the Lutherans; there fore in 1545, after varying negotiations, an army was sent against them without warning; 22 villages were burned and 3,00o men, women and children were killed.