The refugees seen as a boon

Let us now consider the impact of the sudden concentration in this small country of several thousand men united by the most steadfast and fecund principles in religious and political matters. These people were sound businessmen, principled bankers, persons of deep intellectual culture, pastors and a flock that had foregone all they had rather than renounce their faith. Pushed by the last, the most sweeping and the longest of religious persecutions, the French soon were at one with populations upholding the principles of Reformation, among whom they found a homeland, where they, in return, had a beneficial influence. Indeed the ten or twelve thousand families that settled for good in that valley brought to all aspects of Swiss society a most spirited impulse.

Jean GABEREL, Les Suisses romands et les réfugiés de l'Edit de Nantes [The Swiss of Romandy and the Edict of NantesRefugees]. Read at the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, Paris, 1860, p. 22-23 (extracts from paragraph 3).