Philosophy and comics
His name is so closely linked to that of the city that it seems impossible not to dedicate these first lines to him. Beyond the religious question, John Calvin was also a great reformer of the French language, comparable in this respect to Rabelais or Montaigne. From his great work written in Latin, The Institution of the Christian Religion, which he constantly expanded from 1536 to 1559, he translated it, certainly to allow the greatest number of people to have access to theology, but also by initiating a new language, more structured and much more precise. Born in Picardy in 1509, he died in Geneva in 1564. His body was buried in the cemetery of the Kings without the exact location being revealed in order to avoid a cult contrary to his precepts. A stele was nevertheless erected in the 19th century.
Two centuries later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) followed the opposite path, renouncing his Geneva citizenship and dying in Ermenonville, France. In this century of the Enlightenment, the ideas he developed in his first speeches, the one on sciences and arts (1750) and then the one on the origin and foundations of inequality among men (1754) provoked strong controversies, as seen in the reception of his Social Contract in 1762 and ofEmile or On Education published the same year, which would end up making him hated. His autobiographical Confessions and his unfinished Reveries of the Solitary Walker paint a fascinating portrait of an isolated man and lay the foundations for his reflections on the very nature of the human being. Among his strongest opponents was a philosopher who enjoyed the delights of life in Geneva for some time before preferring a town on the other side of the border to which he left his name, Ferney-Voltaire. His castle can still be visited today.
The last year of the century marked the birth of a man who became Swiss on May 19, 1815, when the city joined the Helvetic Confederation. Perhaps more confidential, Rodolphe Töpffer is however the one to whom is attributed the invention of the comic strip; he is at least the first theorist. Son of a famous Genevan caricaturist, Wolfgang Adam Toepffer, he decided to open a school after having traveled. His inherited sense of observation, his taste for pedagogy and his love for the theater incited him to invent a new form, drawn stories in which captions accompany the images that follow. Histoire de monsieur Jabot, inspired by the Bourgeois gentilhomme, was printed in a few hundred copies in 1833, and the editions followed one another, and this "literature in prints" was to be a source of inspiration for a new art form.
A particular identity and a taste for elsewhere
Professor and philosopher, Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821-1881) never ceases to amaze with the volume and sensitivity of his diary, nearly 17,000 pages that were published after his death by the Lausanne-based publisher L'Âge d'homme in no less than twelve volumes. But he was also the author of a thesis, Du mouvement littéraire dans la Suisse romane et de son avenir, emblematic of a question that was agitating the French-speaking cantons at the time, and that was echoed in other countries: how to structure a national literature, a particular demand in a territory close to a particularly fertile "neighbouring France" and which is, moreover, part of a multilingual country?
The life of Charles-Albert Cingria (1883-1954) sheds an interesting light on this issue, because of his multiple roots - his father was born in Ragusa but lived in Constantinople, his mother was a Swiss woman of Franco-Polish origin - and his many travels: he knew Africa, Turkey and Europe, and lived in Paris. Patchwork influences, the love of departure, the fervor of the landscape felt as an adventure, so many elements that can be found in La Grande Ourse, an unpublished work to be discovered by Gallimard, and which could, in essence, define a certain Geneva writing. The international city has indeed seen the growth of some of the greatest authors representative of this particular genre, the so-called travel literature. If the short life of the daring Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904) is now more or less forgotten, although a street bears her name in the Grottes district, that of the whimsical Ella Maillart (1903-1997) continues to live in the memory. From a young age, she had a passion for sports, going so far as to defend the colors of Switzerland in the world championships of alpine skiing. Soon the desire to discover other horizons overwhelmed her. From a stay in Moscow she brought back a first report, Parmi la jeunesse russe (Payot editions) in 1932, then, with a press card in her pocket, she flew to Manchukuo, an independent province of China, where she met Peter Fleming, a reporter and MI6 agent whose brother, Ian, is none other than the creator of James Bond. They decided to travel together for exactly 6,000 km from Beijing to Srinagar. Ella will describe this journey in Forbidden Oases, Peter in Mail from Tartary. In 1939, the young woman will take the road again, in a Ford, from Geneva to Kabul, with Annemarie Schwarzenbach, whom she will try to get out of her drug addiction, a crossing of the desert entitled The Cruel Way. Ella Maillart will eventually find a place to stay in Chandolin, a village in the Valais, but she will never stop writing or spending time.
Her books remain classics, just like those of Nicolas Bouvier, who was born in Grand-Lancy, in the canton of Geneva, in March 1929. Raised in a family resolutely turned towards culture, expressing from his youth an interest in the world, he left for the first time alone at the age of 17, in the direction of Burgundy, then at the age of 20 in Finland, commissioned by La Tribune de Genève, and two years later joined the Sahara at the request of the newspaper Le Courrier. These were the first stages of a long journey to Istanbul, which he undertook with two friends, Jacques Choisy and Thierry Vernet, the latter accompanying him again when, in 1953, Nicolas Bouvier took his Fiat to reach, after several stages, Pakistan. He continued alone in the direction of Asia, and settled for a time in Japan, a destination so beloved that it later inspired his Japanese Chronicle. A rich and abundant life that can be discovered in his works, it is astonishing to learn that L'Usage du monde, a cult book that cannot be ignored, was first published on his own account in 1963. Today, no one is unaware of the value of Nicolas Bouvier's writings, the beauty of his style and the humanism of his thought, even when it is tinged with the gray of depression as in the admirable Poisson-scorpion.
As for Grisélidis Réal, was it love for her lover, the desire to regain custody of her children or the desire to flee a country that she considered stifling that pushed her to leave her native Switzerland in the early 1960s? In any case, the story of her German adventures can be read in one go in Le noir est une couleur, a major autobiography of a woman who had to turn to prostitution to survive and who later became a committed activist. She was such an important and disturbing figure that the transfer of her coffin to the Cemetery of the Kings, four years after her death in 2005, was very controversial. She is now buried next to Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), who, feeling his death coming, decided to return to a city he had loved as a teenager.
A wealth of literature
Today, the diversity of Geneva's publishing offer is impressive, the writers are numerous, as are the publishing houses that strive to cross the Alpine barrier to bring their publications to the French readership. Atrabile, founded in 1997, offers a catalog with "a certain idea of comics", with the work of Fredrik Peeters, born in 1974 in Geneva, whose Blue Pills have touched the hearts of many readers. The city is also home to Philippe Chappuis, better known by his artist name, Zep. Born in Geneva, his career path is flawless, from the Geneva School of Decorative Arts, which he attended as a teenager, through the Journal de Spirou, which he joined at the age of 18, to the creation in 1992 of the character that would ensure his recognition, Titeuf. From now on, the cartoonist explores other paths, from eroticism when he becomes a scriptwriter for Vince in Esmera (Glénat) to realism with Un bruit étrange et beau (Rue de Sèvres).
In literature, fine houses such as Zoé, Héros-Limite, La Baconnière, Slatkine or Cousu Mouche encourage the emergence of new voices. The authors speak of the world, like Daniel de Roulet(Tous les lointains sont bleus, Phébus), Aude Seigne(Chroniques de l'Occident nomade, Zoé), Max Lobe(Loin de Douala, Zoé) or the late Philippe Rahmy who died in 2017(Pardon pour l'Amérique, La Table ronde), and track the small human failings in a sometimes corrosive way, as in Le Beau Monde by Laure-Mi Hyun Croset (Albin Michel), L'Exécrable by Yves Laplace (Fayard), Une famille by Pascale Kramer (Flammarion) or Un amour parfait by Lolvé Tillmanns (Cousu Mouche).
