In the aftermath of Napoleon’s deposition in 1814 a significant political and religious renaissance among French and Swiss Protestants gained disciples across Western Europe, in the German states, and even in the Russian Empire. The very limited anglophone historiography of the Réveil, as the movement came to be known, treats it largely as a pietistic movement. The movement’s initial influence in Geneva led young clerics—almost all de-facto Evangelicals—to break with the Genevan state church and found Geneva’s Evangelical Society. What influence the French and Swiss divines of the Réveil have in the English-speaking Protestant world comes from their interaction with Scottish ministers who helped found the Free Church and their exchanges with Welsh Calvinist-Methodists. [1]
The limited influence the Réveil had with English-speaking Protestants did not mean the movement’s influence was negligible in Europe. Geneva’s status as an intellectual center where the French Empire governed with a relatively light hand allowed theological inquiry to flourish. The same liberality of spirit created the circumstances for the rise of embryonic theological liberalism that eventually controlled major Protestant seminaries in Western Europe, particularly in the German states. Liberalism, both political and theological, seemed far from the minds of Protestant clerics who participated in the Réveil. The collapse of the French Empire and the ostensible failure of Enlightenment secularism convinced devout Christians across Europe that a return to public faith was necessary for the souls of men and for the cultural, political, and social health of states. Modern Protestants, the men of the Réveil believed, turned away from the Bible and scriptural truths in pursuit of what one Swiss minister, Henri-Louis Empaytaz, called philosophy. In 1816 Empaytaz published his Considerations on the Divinity of Christ, a polemical screed aimed at the rise of unitarianism and Arianism in Genevan Calvinist circles. [2]
Empaytaz explained to Swiss seminarians throughout the 182os that the decaying state of Genevan morals—private and public—was due to the downfall of orthodox Christianity in the historically Calvinist city. Irreligion and what Empaytaz termed “philosophy” appeared, he warned, even in the pulpits of Geneva. Empaytaz appealed “to his own knowledge, and that of the other students of Theology, whether Socrates and Plato are not oftener named by their professors than Jesus Christ.” The invasion of the pulpit by philosophy led some young religious thinkers to embrace unitarianism. Another minister warned that the Calvinist state church in Geneva risked becoming “nothing more than a mere philosophical assembly, or literary society.” [3]
Warnings about philosophy and rampant infidelity in the established Genevan church eventually led conservative Genevan pastor-intellectuals to walk out of the state church in 1831 and form the Evangelical Society of Geneva. Empaytaz, along with contemporaries César Malan, François Gaussen, and Frenchmen like Adolphe Monod retreated to Biblicist readings of Scripture in spite of Geneva’s long tradition of Protestant Scholasticism that developed in the 17th and 18th centuries. Francis Turretin’s works sustained Geneva’s Protestant scholasticism until the middle of the 18th century when the Enlightenment thinkers like native Genevan Rousseau rocked the European intellectual milieu. Influential Genevan cleric and intellectual Jacob Vernet took up the cause of rationalism and Rousseau and fundamentally changed the intellectual, religious, and political foundations of the Genevan republic. Protestant liberalizers nonetheless retained a capacious place for the infusion of Classical thought form the Protestant Scholastic tradition even as their innovations affected soteriological commitments as well as natural and political theology. [4]
The formation of the Evangelical Society foreshadowed the Great Disruption in the Church of Scotland twelve years later. Genevan ministers and their Scottish brethren certainly appreciated the goodwill of American Protestants, particularly Evangelical Presbyterians and Congregationalists who gave money to the society regularly in the form of what one American Evangelical magazine called “prayers and contributions.” But Empaytaz, and later the Scottish Free Churchmen, saw a deep interconnection between public and private—state and individual—morality and right theology. Empaytaz termed the seminarians and future ministers willing to fight unitarianism and Arianism the “hope of their country and the church.” [5]
The surprising degree to which Empaytaz believed the church and the state both needed right theology, and the degree to which he saw a necessary symbiosis between church and state, was evident in his associations. After being denied ordination by a Unitarian-leaning consistory in 1813, Empaytaz traveled extensively. He befriended Juliana von Krüdener, a Livonian Lutheran and Russian subject who practiced an Evangelical and pietistic form of Lutheranism and who maintained a close friendship with Tsar Alexander I. Empaytaz, Krüdener, and others formed a phalanx of close Protestant friendship that deeply affected the Russian emperor. Krudener’s evangelical tone convinced Alexander to consecrate his life to the protection of Christianity. Krudener herself seem convinced that monarchy held special power to help regenerate the world for Christ, and that Alexander had been undoubtedly appointed by God to carry out some great putpose. Alexander’s status among the gathered sovereigns in Paris after the initial defeat of Napoleon seemed to Krüdener divinely ordained. “This solemn spectacle, where so many great sovereigns have bowed before the tsar of tsars, already appears as if it were leading the universe in to different times and as if it were a living prelude to that sacred history, which should regenerate the world.” Alexander wasted little time taking up the gauntlet Krudener threw down. He began forming the foundations of what became the conservative monarchist league know to history as the Holy Alliance, a diplomatic pact between the Austrian emperor, the king of Prussia, and the Tsar. Alexander told Krudener and Empaytaz the alliance would be a homage which we owe to God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit for the protection he has granted us and invite the peoples to obey the Gospel.” Interestingly, the tsar asked Krudener and Empaytaz if there were any provisions in the Holy Alliance they disapproved of; he wanted to know. [6]
Neither Krudener nor Empaytaz recorded any disagreement with the emperor at the time, or later. Krudener went further than mere affirmation. The Lutheran evangelical recorded a series of adulatory exultations that bordered on sacralizing the Russian Orthodox emperor.
“Yes! Glory be to the God of our armies! At last a man lives who is sufficiently great to be able to acknowledge openly, at the head of his army, which is already so splendid and so strong, according to all human standards, to acknowledge, I repeat, the Saviour who has blessed him, and the God who has given him as an example to the world!
Krudener’s wedding of messianic imagery with the autocratic personification of Russian state displayed the durable Constantinian dispositions of Protestants outside the United States.
Ah! who, in seeing that blessed day, did not entertain with us every hope; who, in watching Alexander standing beneath the great banners, was not reminded of all the victories of faith, of all the lessons of charity? Who dared to doubt the presence of divine inspiration? and who did not repeat with the Apostle: “Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new”
This specific celebration of monarchy displayed an eschatological edge. For Krudener the Restoration—not only Alexander’s but the resurrection of Europe’s monarchical order in Paris and then at the Congress of Vienna, finally put monarchy back into its rightful place over and against elected politicians bureaucrats in the divine economy amidst the desolation of nearly a quarter century of European wars. Krudener asked rhetorically “who but felt the need of something new in the midst of all these ruins? Men placed by their sagacity at the head of affairs have foretold this epoch by the light thrown upon it in the majesty of the Scriptures, by which it has been revealed to them.” Nature, she declared, “confided it to her students; science suspected it; politicians, covered with shame, foresaw it in their own disasters.” For Krudener, it was impossible to divorce politics from religion and a transcendent notion of the good. Even “the most mediocre of men learnt from their own misfortunes what true Christians have always said when they saw Right, not only as beauty, but as the highest conciliation of all interests.” [7]
Like Krudener, Empaytaz didn’t choose to register any complaint with Alexander I, monarchy, or the Restoration. He owed his influence in Geneva to Krudener’s status, and she selected him to lead the conservative opposition in what became the Evangelical society. He was never a cypher, however, and the religious and political closeness between the two was not coerced. American observers considered him a follower of Krudener who had been “won to her views” after some time, not an unthinking toady. Empaytaz’s admonitions about seminarians being the hope for their country lay downstream from his exposure to Alexander of Russia. Someone had to rescue Christianity in Geneva for the good of society, not merely for the good of souls. In a republican oligarchy like Geneva, seminarians and elite pastors would have to do the job of the tsar.[8]
[1] Kenneth J. Stewart, Restoring the Reformation: British Evangelicals and the Francophone ‘Reveil’ 1816-1849 (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2006).
[2] T.W.M., Developments of Protestantism, and other fragments, reprinted from The Dublin Review and “Tablet.” (Londo: Richarson and Son, 1849).
[3] The Christian Spectator II (January 1828), 89-90; T.W.M., Developments of Protestantism..
[4] Evangelical Christendom, Christian Work, and the News of the Churches, Also A Monthly Record of the Transactions of the Evangelical Alliance XXXIV (1880): 218; Helena Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva: from the first discourse to the social contract, 1749-1762 (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 1997), 229; Martin I. Klauber, “Theological Transition in Geneva from Jean-Alphonse Turretin to Jacob Vernet” in Carl R. Trueman and R. Scott Clark eds., Protestant Scholasticism: Essays in Reassessment (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2005), 256-270.
[5] “Switzerland: Evangelical Society of Geneva,” in The American Foreign and Christian Union VIII (January to December 1857): 320-321; The Christian Spectator II, 89-90.
[6] Isaac Nakhimovsky, The Holy Alliance: Liberalism and the Politics of Federation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024), 100; Clarence Ford, The Life and Letters of Madame do Krudener (London: Adam and Charles Black), 217; Andrei Zorin, Marcus Levitt trans., By Fables Alone: Literature and State Ideaology in Late Eighteenth—Early Nineteenth Century Russia (Academic Studies Press, 2019).
[7] Ford, The Life and Letters of Madame do Krudener, 217.
[8] ‘Theological Review,” The New Evangelical Magazine, and Theological Review (1824): 218; John McClintick and James Strong eds., Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, Volume 5 (New York: Harper Brothers, 1891), 167-168.