When Madame Guizot, led by her father Bonicel, arrived in Geneva with her sons in August 1799, the «Protestant Rome» had a population of around 25,000, not much more than Nîmes. The two cities, for mainly religious reasons, had long maintained close relations, and the Guizot family found themselves, on the banks of Lake Geneva, in a land of acquaintances and even cousins with the Peschiers, Dumas, Laurens, and also the famous painter Henriette Rath, whose adopted daughter, Clémentine, inspired young François' first feelings. It was to ensure that her children received a quality education and training that their mother decided on this costly stay, which lasted until the summer of 1805.

The trio lived meagrely at 3, rue Verdaine, but François benefited greatly from the education he received at the college and then at the philosophy auditorium of the Academy founded by Calvin. His teachers Charles-Antoine Peschier and Pierre Prévost opened his mind to reading and thinking that he would never have had access to in his home town, and the cosmopolitan environment in which he was immersed introduced him to foreign languages and influences. As he wrote to a friend in Geneva in 1859: «Geneva is my intellectual cradle». It was also where he forged friendships that stayed with him throughout his life, even though he only returned to Geneva once, in August 1807, to meet Mme de Staël in Ouchy.

These rich years of apprenticeship made Guizot a sort of honorary Genevois, a quality noted by his adversaries. The Genevan professor Auguste de La Rive wrote to Tocqueville in 1845: «M. Guizot is sometimes insulted by saying that he is a Genevan, and I confess that I am proud of it. Three years later, expelled from France by the revolution of 1848, Guizot confided to his old friend Henriette Rath: »I have often said to myself that, when the bad times came, it would be in Geneva that I would go to seek security and freedom... I have memories of Geneva that will never leave me«. But he is writing this from the suburbs of London.