ABSTRACT
Confessional conflicts deeply affected Geneva during the 1530s. The formation of an Evangelical community resulted in the confession-alisation of politics and of factional struggles. By 1534, the Swiss factions (the Eidguenots), now leading Geneva, repressed the Sabaudian-Catholic faction (the Peneysans) primarily through criminal trials and banishments. The Peneysans, entrenched in a number of castles in the Geneva countryside, countered with similar strategies. However, all these trials were motivated more by politics than by religion; the Genevan confessional struggles of these years, preceding the final shift to the Reformation, cannot be reduced to a narrative of people being persecuted for the sake of religion, as sixteenth-century propaganda from both factions often did.
