Société de Lecture

The Société de Lecture of Geneva is a private non-profit association founded in 1818. Over the last two centuries, it has preserved and developed an encyclopaedic library of 200,000 volumes. It is an active cultural centre of European renown (Prix Europa Nostra in 2020). Located in the heart of the old town of Geneva, the Société de Lecture was originally an exclusive meeting place for scholars. Nowadays, it is no longer the "salon de conversation" of Geneva's patrician society, as it was during the Restoration, nor, the thinktank of political refugees and would-be revolutionaries as it was at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Today, it is a place of exchange, research, conferences and learning open to the public, mainly in the fields of literature, as well as music, science, geopolitics, history and the fine arts. In 1947, the novelist Robert de Traz defined it as "a haven of grace for the body and the mind, a flight path for the imagination, a kind of intellectual hammam, a fabulous cave where the treasures of literature accumulate". Under the impetus of John Calvin, from the Reformation onwards, Geneva became a city of theologians, lawyers, humanists and printers. Its fame extended far beyond its walls. Two centuries later, the influence of the Age of the Enlightenment gave Geneva's scholars an encyclopaedic desire to learn and exchange everything. The tensions arising from the revolutionary unrest and the French occupation under Napoleon in 1798 drove the well-born sons of wealthy families from Geneva into exile and to the discovery of Europe. After fifteen years of French annexation, this republican aristocracy returned. They wanted to create a literary society like those that existed elsewhere, in order to share knowledge, ideals, and reading. Geneva regained its independence in 1813 and joined the Swiss Confederation in 1815. It then became a city of scientists, men of letters, and artists. The Société de Lecture was founded in April 1818, under the patronage of botanist Augustin-Pyramus de Candolle, a member of a hundred European academies.