The La Grange estate was created in the 1660s by Jacques Franconis (1622-1702). Between 1768 and 1773, three of the sons of the banker Marc Lullin, who had purchased the estate in 1706, built a French-styled mansion there, along with various outbuildings. In 1800, François Favre (1736-1814), a Genevan shipowner who had made his fortune in Marseilles in trading with the East, acquired La Grange in turn from the banker Jean Lullin (1745-1803), who had been ruined by the French Revolution.

The La Grange library is the work of François’s son Guillaume Favre (1770-1851). Destined for a life in business, Guillaume Favre never studied at the university and yet this scholar developed a taste for the sciences and notably mineralogy, his first passion, while he was still quite young. He made three tours of Italy and often traveled to Paris. A friend of Sismondi and Schlegel, he kept company with Madame de Staël and her circle in Coppet.

A member of the directorate of the Bibliothèque publique for 40 years (1809-1849), he was the first to have studied the incunabula printed in Geneva. Favre published very little in his lifetime, save for the scholarly articles he contributed to the Bibliothèque universelle of Geneva, but several of his studies appeared posthumously in Mélanges d’histoire littéraire, viz., the Vie de Jean Marius Philelfe (an Italian humanist), the Recherches sur les histoires fabuleuses d’Alexandre le Grand (studies of various legends), the Essai sur la littérature des Goths (the Song of the Nibelungs), and a Notice sur les livres imprimés à Genève dans le 15e siècle (a monograph on the books printed in Geneva in the 15th century).

Guillaume Favre is one of the founders of the Société de lecture (Reading society, 1818) and the Société d’histoire et d’archéologie of Geneva (History and archeology society, 1837), and one of the leaders of the philhellenic movement, alongside Jean-Gabriel Eynard. He sat on the Representative council (1814-1841), the Constituent assembly, and the Grand council (1842-1851). When he inherited the La Grange estate, he first had the two small salons that now form the library’s antechamber redone in the Empire style in 1814, then converted a rectangular wing housing a vast library in the Italian style into an annex in 1821.

In 1917 Guillaume’s grandson, William Favre (1843-1918), donated to the City of Geneva the villa, which city officials were to use as a venue for receptions, the annexes and the surrounding park of some 20 hectares. One year later, he willed to the City of Geneva the La Grange library. Since that time, the Bibliothèque de Genève has been responsible for maintaining this exceptional cultural treasure.