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Stefan Zweig's Castellio Against Calvin Essay

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Stefan Zweig’s Castellio against Calvin (1936) narrates the story of how John Calvin takes over Geneva not only by imposing his tyrant and fanatic religious beliefs but also by proclaiming himself as highest figure of the city. Consequently, Calvin closed the previous Protestant period established by Martin Luther. Zweig is believed to have written this book as a parallelism of Hitler’s dictatorship in Germany (without any explicit word on Adolf Hitler) so that he could tell his contemporaries how an autocrat gets to the most absolute power over a territory. Therefore, Castellio against Calvin is provided with different steps that lead to a totalitarian way of ruling Geneva, also known as dictatorship. This essay is focused on explaining every single move made by Calvin to get to the power. First of all, Calvin introduced (by force) his religious beliefs and made sure that all the inhabitants in Geneva followed what he preached: “if you want to teach men a new religion, …show more content…

Therefore, he had men who watched every step that any Genevan would take. “At every moment, day or night, the ecclesiastical police can knock the door to do a ‘visitation’ with or without the citizen approval” (1936: 40). Nevertheless, that is not the only atrocity that would take place under Calvin regime. The ecclesiastical police examined the children to know if they had learnt the prayers, groped the women’s dresses to know whether they were long enough or had a provocative design, controlled the haircut of both men and women, interrogated the servants to find out if the landlords where loyal to Calvin. They even waited at the entrance of the Church to know who was late or wanted to leave earlier. Thus, “omnipresently and insatiably these official protectors of the good customs worked (1936:

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