The History of Sex: Geneva -- A Decadent Playground -- (Chap. V, Pt. 10)

Strolling through Geneva today, you'd need the eyes of a Protestant sin-spotter to glimpse its puritanical past—or its Rousseau connection, for that matter.

Every December, the city celebrates the defeat of a Vatican-backed attack on its walls in 1602, but the Pope eventually had the last laugh as the city continued to welcome refugees and immigrants.

By 1863, Geneva was majority Catholic.

That year, one of the city's Protestant elite founded the International Committee of the Red Cross, inspiring the first Geneva Convention on the tercentenary of Calvin's death—and the formation of its Muslim counterpart, the Red Crescent, some sixty years later.

Geneva is now home to the largest United Nations' office outside New York, the World Council of Churches, the headquarters of more than fifty multinationals and countless NGOs, as well as CERN—the research center where the World Wide Web was invented and physicists have conducted experiments in search of the 'God particle.'

These are all the legacies of Calvinism, even if the tourist bumf is reluctant to link them to the dour, foreign God-botherer who believed in self-sacrifice, torture and the eternal hereafter.

SIN CITY?

And as hard as it is to make Geneva sound sexy, that doesn't mean the city's boring.

On the contrary, my advice is: Don't go there at all! Save your eternal soul!

For Geneva's stately grey architecture and restrained elegance hide all the makings of a decadent playground, depending on your bank account and sense of self-control.

Every creature comfort can be catered to, with countless vices to stave off boredom.

Modern Geneva really is a 'Petit Paris,' without the poor to nag your conscience.

In fact, if it weren't for the atavistic Calvinism, Geneva would probably be Sin City.

Prostitution and gambling have been legal for years, and strip bars and casinos brazenly advertise on billboards and bus stops, including posters for a joint called Moulin Rouge showing a woman's naked legs and backside, accentuated with red stilettos and a bloom clutched somewhere that doesn't naturally smell of roses.

The History of Sex: Geneva -- Rousseau and the Soulmate -- (Chap. V, Pt. 9)

Two centuries later, all these conflicting elements crystallized into one contradictory philosopher, a proud 'Citizen of Geneva' who applied Calvin's doctrines about fate and destiny to sex and romance and also invented the celebrity kiss-and-tell.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau didn't actually coin the term 'soulmate'—Plato famously claimed that Zeus had bisected humans so that we would spend our lives searching for our 'other half'—but he did give it legs.

Born in 1712 to a Genevese watchmaker, Rousseau claimed his parents had such 'a natural sympathy of soul' that they were destined for one another.

In his bestseller, Julie, or The New Heloise, Rousseau updated a true story of castrated love from the age of the troubadours to tell of two lovers on Lake Geneva who are kept apart by civilization's conventions.

In modern talk-show parlance, It's like, society's hang-ups mean they can't be true to themselves, y'know? 

Tragically, Rousseau had more than a few hang-ups of his own.

Rousseau, aged about 54

Toward the end of his life, he bared his soul in an autobiography far more introspective than the saucy anecdotes recorded by contemporaries like Casanova.

In his Confessions, Rousseau admitted to indulging in masturbation, exhibitionism, masochism and homosexuality, as well as borderline incest with his surrogate maman.

He also forced his lover to abandon all five of their children to an orphanage.

Nevertheless, he still found time to tell his beloved Genevans where they were going wrong, preaching against the corrosive effects of vice and luxury.

When Geneva banned his writings on religion, Rousseau mocked the city's pastors for having gone soft: 'One knows not what they believe, nor what they do not believe, not even what they pretend to believe.'

James Boswell, who met Rousseau during his Grand Tour, had a similar reaction when he visited Geneva in 1764 and saw men playing cards on a Sunday—with a minister among them:

'O, Calvin,' he wrote, 'where art thou now?'

The History of Sex: Geneva -- Calvin and the Age of Consent -- (Chap. V, Pt. 8)

What really made Reformation Geneva different, though, was that it had begun to punish men and women equally for sexual transgressions.

As the charge of incest against Cossonex shows, Protestant Geneva also cracked down on sex crimes against children.

Calvin opposed arranged marriages and believed that the marrying age for individuals should be decided on a case-by-case basis, depending on their maturity.

When this proved impractical, the Genevan authorities set the age of consent at eighteen for boys and fourteen for girls.

Adults who crossed this boundary were sentenced to death.

Although the defendants would often try to bribe and threaten their victims, one researcher into Deviance in Geneva (1535-1650) has noted that kids living under Calvin's laws apparently didn't feel intimidated in telling their parents that they'd been abused—or in testifying face-to-face against their abusers.

At their core, all of Calvin's laws stemmed from his harsh (and thoroughly depressing) conviction that if God was all powerful, He must have decided everyone's fate before the world was created: in other words, a Chosen Few were predestined to be saved, while most were born to die in the eternal fires of hell.

The catch was that you could never know in this life whether you were one of the Elect, so the best you could do was examine your soul constantly, confess your sins regularly—not to intermediaries but directly to God and your peers—and hope that you found yourself in Jehovah's Good Book on Judgement Day.

Until then, you could look forward to a lifetime of Protestant guilt (arguably worse than Catholic guilt because there's no penance).

Alternatively, if you felt instinctively that you weren't one of the Elect, you were effectively damned if you did and damned if you didn't—so you might as well do everything (and everyone) you could in this life.

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