As Alain Alcouffe and I mentioned in our previous post, the rather mysterious-sounding “Syndic Turretin” is mentioned in passing in John Rae’s biography of Adam Smith (Rae 1895, p. 191). According to Rae, this particular individual was one of the many leading lights whom Smith met and befriended during his extended sojourn in Switzerland, but who was this “Syndic Turretin”, and what might Smith have learned from him?

In summary, he was most likely Marc Turretin (1712–1793), a career politician who was appointed to Geneva’s Conseil des Deux-Cents (Council of the Two Hundred) in 1746 and who would eventually rise to the highest ranks of power in the Swiss city-state, elected one of four “syndics” or chief magistrates of the Republic of Geneva, a powerful legal-political post going back to the days of John Calvin. Turretin was also a husband and a father — he wed Françoise Boissier (1716–1797) in 1733 and had one son, Jean Alphonse Turretin [Jr.] (1735–1779), who predeceased him in 1779 — and was descended from a distinguished Swiss-Italian brood, the Turrettini family (see generally Tripet 2012). The syndic was the son of Jean Alphonse Turretin [Sr.] (1671–1737), one of the leading “enlightened orthodox” public intellectuals in Geneva during his day (Klauber 1990, p. 328).

Among other things, his father Jean Alphonse was a professor of theology at the Academy of Geneva (appointed in 1705 to replace his mentor, Louis Tronchin), had led the movement to abrogate the formulaic and outdated Formula consensus ecclesiarum Helveticarum (see here, for example) in 1706, and “was also instrumental in building a more secular curriculum at the Academy through the addition of a Chair of Mathematics in 1704 and a special two-year humanities course in 1722” in order to make the Academy more competitive with other more secular universities to draw more foreign students (Klauber 1990, p. 327). Jean Alphonse [Sr.] was also a prolific scholar; among his most important works are his Cogitationes et dissertationes theologicae on the principles of natural and revealed religion (2 vols., Geneva, 1737; in French, Traité de la vérité de la religion chrétienne). (See Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th ed. (1911), Vol. 27, p. 483, available here; see also Gargett 1991.) In short, given his father’s theological background and scholarly credentials, it is safe to assume that Marc Turretin was brought up in a pious and highly-educated household.

But what did Adam Smith and Marc Turretin, the Scottish moral philosopher and the Swiss statesman, discuss during their encounters in Geneva in late 1765/early 1766? (Alain Alcouffe and I assume they met more than once given the length of Smith’s sojourn in Geneva and the small size of the Swiss city-state.) Several possible topics of conversation come to mind. Perhaps they talked about the Dillon Affair of December 1765, for Turretin himself, in his capacity as syndic, might be called on to decide the legal dispute between Voltaire and Charles Dillon. Possibly, they compared notes on a much-discussed essay that must have hit close to home for Turretin, d’Alembert’s controversial entry for “Genève” in the 7th volume of the Encyclopédie (available here, by the way), an article that according Friedrich Melchior Grimm had “caused much uproar” (Grimm 1758). Or maybe Turretin filled Smith in on the latest developments in the ongoing political tug-of-war over taxation among Geneva’s main factions (see, e.g., Whatmore 2012).

But the one topic that could not have escaped their attention was the whereabouts of Geneva’s most famous native son, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It was, after all, the syndics who just three years earlier (1762) had condemned one of Rousseau’s most recent works, The Social Contract, and issued a warrant for his arrest! What was Turretin’s role in this affair, and whose side was Adam Smith on, Turretin or Rousseau’s? Rest assured, Alain Alcouffe and I will address these questions and revisit the troubled Rousseau and his relationship to the Republic of Geneva in our next post.

WORKS CITED

Graham Gargett (1991), “Jacob Vernet’s ‘Lettre à Monsieur le Premier Syndic’: a reply to Voltaire and the Dialogues Chrétiens“, Modern Language Review, Vol. 86, No. 1, pp. 35-48.

Friedrich Melchior Grimm (1829) [1758], “Geneva, the Encyclopedia, and Rousseau”, in Correspondance littéraire, philosphique, et critique, Vol. 2.

Martin I. Klauber (1990), “Reason, Revelation, and Cartesianism: Louis Tronchin and Enlightened Orthodoxy in Late Seventeenth-Century Geneva”, Church History, Vol. 59, No. 3, pp. 326-339.

John Rae (1895), Life of Adam Smith, London: Macmillan.

Micheline Tripet (2012), “Turrettini”, in Dictionnaire historique de la Suisse (DHS), version du 23.04.2012. Online: https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/025570/2012-04-23/.

Richard Whatmore (2012), “Geneva’s Long Shadow”, History Today, Vol. 62, No. 4, pp. 37-43.