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BIOGRAPHY OF SISMONDI

HELMUT O. PAPPE

I.

Jean Charles Léonard Simonde was born on the 9th May 1773 into a Genevan family. In later life he changed his family to de Sismondi after an old Pisan aristocratic family from which he believed the Simondis to be descended. Charles’s parents were the pasteur Gèdèon François Simonde and his wife Henriette Ester Gabriele Girodz; a sister, Sara, called Serina by the family and her friends, saw the light of day two years later. The families of both parents were du haut the Simondes being on the borderline between nobility and upper bourgeoisie, the Girodz being members of the well-to-do upper bourgeoisie. Both the Simondes and the Girodz had come to Geneva as members of the second éimgration after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, that is, both families were Protestant fugitives from religious persecution in France. The Girodz had come to Geneva from Chàlons-sur-Saône in 1689. Henriette’s father, Pierre Girodz, became a successful and highly respected businessman engaged in various commercial enterprises connected with the watchmaking trade. He owned a substantial town house close to the cathedral in the Bourg-de-Four and an imposing country seat ‘Tourant’ at Chênes, both to be the residences of Sismondi after his return from exile in Italy. On the occasion of the marriage of his daughter on the 12th

January 1770 Pierre Girodz was able to give her a dowry his town house worth 30,000 Livres as well as 10,000 Livres in cash and 2,000 Livres worth of jewellery. The Girodz were evidently a substantial and highly respected family.

The Simondes too were exiles from French religious repression. François Simond, as he then spelled his name, was Squire of Fernon in the Bas Dauphiné. By his marriage to Gabrielle de Monthion he had a son, Aymar (or Emar) who became a citizen of Geneva in 1692. This son was a merchant; though he never achieved any great

2 distinction, he was successful and well regarded as may be gathered from the fact that from 1712 he held two private seats in the Temple de St. Gervais in .....? behind those of the mayor Mastrézat. He was able to give his daughter Isabelle (Marvit) a dowry of 12,000 Livres and the use of the 4th floor of his town house as well as settling 6,000 Livres on her children. His heir was his son François who, following a family tradition, became a soldier, ending a distinguished career in the French Winward Islands a sea Captain. After his return to Geneva in 1739 he married Marie Anne Sartois, the daughter of one of the leading families of Geneva. He became a member of the Genevan parliament, the conseil des deux centrs, and died in 1770. His eldest son Gédéon François was Sismondi’s father.

Both the Girodz and Simonde families belonged to the many immigrants who, since the time of Calvin and Theodor de Bèze, suffered for and were instrumental in developing and maintaining the Protestant ethic as well as the spirit of capitalist enterprise. The Simondes were proud of their military connections though engaged in commercial activity; The Girodz acquired the cultural aspirations of landed gentry. The connection with the family Santoris brought them into touch with the first wave of emigration to Geneva. It was this wave - caused by the counter-reformation - which had attracted Calvin and Bèze from France and the Burlamaquis, Diodatis, Turretinis, Fatios and others from Italy. They were refugees from persecution and often martyrs in the fight for liberty. The Sartoris belonged to the Italian section. Jean Léonard

Sartoris, a distinguished lawyer and statesman in Piedmont in the first half of the sixteenth century, had died in the dungeons of the Inquisition. His family fled to Lyon in 1551, and from there to Geneva in 1580. In 1598 they acquired a property at Châtelaine, beautifully situated on the hills overlooking the confluence of the Rhône and the Arve. Members of the family attained to the highest honours of the state; amongst them were various mayors and a professor at the Academy of Calvin. Marie Anne Sartoris who married François Simonde, Sismondi’s grandfather, was the daughter of David Sartoris who was three times elected Lord Mayor (premier syndic).

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From him the property of Châtelaine passed to his daughter, Madame François Simonde, and later to her son Gédéon, Sismondi’s father. It was thus that Sismondi came to grow up in the graceful and comfortable late seventeenth century country house surrounded by undulating grounds above and leading down to the river - in the words of his grandmother Sartoris “not as beautiful as Versailles, but resembling St. Cloud like two drops of water”. The whole district was inhabited entirely by leading Genevan families, the Constants, Gallatins, Caylas, Vieusseuxs and Pictets, all of whom, by virtue of the distinction they achieved in different fields, have won renown beyond their native frontiers. They were closely allied by their common interests in their land and its administration, in politics, and literature. Prosperity, leisure, the simple love of life in the countryside, and wide cultural interests provided the background in which the young Sismondi grew up to manhood.

Sismondi’s mother, Henriette Girodz, born on the 31st December 1748, had enjoyed a carefree upbringing as a beloved only child who was treated by her parents almost as a grown-up. They kept a hospitable open house both in town and in their country seat ‘Tournant’ at Chênes. “We are a band of six girls” she wrote in 1767, aged 18, from ‘Tourant’, “sometimes only three, and three or four young men”. The friends of the family belonged to the same circule which the Simondes frequented, including the families Vieusseux, Mallet, Picot, Prévost, Bonnet and especially Henriette’s lifelong friend, Dolly Perdriau. Dolly was the daughter of the ‘bon M. Perdriau’, who as successor to the great Jacob Vernet, was forced to resign the chair of literature at the Academy because he was too gentle a disciplinarian. The pasteur Gédéon Simonde was among the visitors to ‘Tournant’. Literature was the dominating interest in the life of these charming girls. Henriette’s extant letters and diaries are documents of this time and bear witness to her understanding of art, history and politics. At the age of twenty, Henriette went on a trip through the Vaud and the Valais, which she described vividly in her first diary. She visited convents, factories and mines; she was particularly attracted by the Roman mosaics and the amphitheatre of Avenches. The

4 journey ended at Bex where she stayed with M. de Copet, an eccentric amateur botanist who owned a garden full of rare plants as well as a fine library. His younger brother, a country parson, happened to be there and seemed to personify Henriette’s ideal of the good life as it had been formed under the influence of Rousseau: “oh, what a good, what a happy character! The beautiful, the excellent soul, he is as simple and intelligent as his brother, he is well satisfied with his mediocre lot, much more so than all the kings in the world, never does anger make him frown, he has an exquisite sense of firm principles... he wouldn’t change his parish for a bishop’s seat, he is father to his flock... (if it were necessary to live in worldliness and dissipation in order to gain paradise, then he would sacrifice all worldly pleasure”. This was the view of life in which she would educate her children. The good clergyman was not her only ‘angel’ during her stay at Bex. Soon they were joined by another visitor, M. Simonde, “the botanist”, pasteur at Bossey at the foot of the Salève, the scene of Rousseau’s early paradise and disenchantment. A year later, Henriette and Gédéon were married and settled at ‘Châtelaine’.

Throughout her life, Henriette remained faithful to the ideals expressed by her as a young girl. Her diaries and letters have considerable literary value. Although she led a secluded domestic and rural life in Geneva, in England and in Tuscany, and never aspired to social glamour and success, the penetration of her mind and the warm charm of her personality impressed discerning people of the time as outstanding.

When she came to stay with Madame de Staël, whom Sismondi loved and admired, he was happy to observe that the elegance and gravitas of his mother’s conversation outshone the great authoress and celebrated society woman.

Gédéon Simonde, besides being a pasteur in the established Calvinist church, was a botanist. He took his religion reasonably seriously, but did not find it easy always to live according to its precepts. From his mother he had inherited the gay temperament and the sunny nature which shines through her letters. In him this attitude was

5 associated with a somewhat reckless approach to life; he found it difficult to reconcile the call of duty with the temptations of the world of the senses. His scholarly attainments were considerable. He was a good classical scholar and, moreover, a botanist with original and advanced, though somewhat confused, ideas of his own. He had wanted to be a professor at the Academy, had entertained high hopes of an appointment which did not materialise. The times were not favourable then in Geneva for the establishment of new teaching posts at the university unless a candidate could count on powerful family connections in the councils responsible for appointments. Neither the social sciences nor the biological sciences were thought worthy of a place in the academic curriculum, being suspected as potentially subversive by the orthodox representatives of the theological establishment. was a botanist. It was not until 1802 that Botany became recognised as an academic subject, more than a generation too late for Gédéon Simonde. All the same he underwent an examination for the Chair of Philosophy in 1766 for which he was considered as the most likely candidate. However, he was drawn into a noisy argument with a fellow candidate, and the incident led to the disqualification of both men and the appointment of another applicant.1 He always resented this rejection and was never completely reconciled to his role as a clergyman for which he was temperamentally unsuited. He had no mind for the minutiae of his office and, having been suspected of maladministering the parish funds, felt compelled to resign in 1778 and to return to Châtelaine where his wife and children had been residing while he worked at Bossey. The summary of these two disappointments weighed heavily on him throughout his life. After his resignation as pasteur, he undertook a journey to England where he formed friendships which were to stand him in good stead later on when he and his family went there as temporary émigrés in 1793. In 1782 he joined the Conseil des Deux Cents, the Genevan parliament, in the aristocratic interest, and, had it not been for the subsequent political events in France, he would have led the life of a well-to-do landed gentleman for the rest of his life. Yet he always remained a gambler with a gift

1 Pierre Picot, letter 17/9/1810 to Sismondi.

6 for losing, became involved in various amorous adventures, and imposed upon his family a burden of uncertainty and the need for continual forbearance.

Sismondi spent his early years amongst scenery of great beauty. The elegant house in which he was brought up was approached through a finely proportioned courtyard flanked by an old farmhouse. The southern terrace of the house opened onto a tree- studded lawn from which a steep path led down to the river Rhône. The view was magnificent, embracing the pleasant garden in the foreground, and the landscape beyond the Rhône and the Arve in the distance, a landscape in which the ....? background of the ....? framed the silhouette of the haute ville with its prominent cathedral. In the west the garden bordered on French territory; a garden house had back door opening directly on to this adjacent land. The property was surrounded, except for the river prospect, by farm land and other gentleman’s houses with the owners of which the Simondes were associated by friendship; one of these families, the Sartoris, were their close relations. The other neighbours included the Cayla family, whose had was Mayor of Geneva at the time of the Revolution, the Pictets, Vieusseuxs, Gallatins, and Constants; members of all these families were to play important parts in Sismondi’s life. The Gallatins and the Pictets traced their origin to noble medieval origins; unlike most of the other leading families they had been Genevan citizens long before Calvin.2 Abraham Alphonse Albert Gallatin, born twelve years before Sismondi, attained fame as American minister of finance during the Napoleonic period, and as plenipotentiary minister to France under the Holy Alliance. The Pictets had continuously played a leading role in all public functions of the city state. One of the Pictet girls, Charlotte, had been the young friend of Voltaire. She and her husband, the baron Samuel de Rebecque-Constant, a retired general in the French forces, were among the other neighbours. Samuel was a novelist; he had also translated William Godwin’s novel Caleb Williams into French in 1795, and he was an ardent admirer of Rousseau. One of his two daughters, Rosalie, took an active

2 Albert Choisy, Genéalogies Genevois, Families admises à la Bourgeoisie avant la Réformation. (Lullin Rilliet)

7 interest in the young Sismondi, the close friend of her young brother Victor. Benjamin Constant was their cousin and came to stay with them on visits. The families living at Châtelaine St. Jean were representative of the intellectual elite of Geneva’s nobility, people with strong literary, political, and agricultural interests and world-wide connections extending beyond Europe to England, Scotland, America, and as travellers, as far as China.3

One of the neighbouring families had close ties with Italy, not because, like the Sartoris, they originated from that country, but because the had of the family had emigrated there after taking part in an abortive uprising in 1782, however, giving up his foothold in Geneva. The Vieusseuxs belonged to the second wave of Huguenot emigrants from France, who in 1702 had been admitted into the Genevese bourgeoisie against a payment of 4,500 florins. Pierre Vieusseux, a friend of Sismondi’s parents and later of Sismondi himself, was the father of Gian Pietro Vieusseux, a close friend of Sismondi who was to play an outstanding part in the intellectual risorgimento in Italy. (Pierre had been a lawyer and, since 1775, a member of parliament. He took part in the disorders of 1782, during which citizens of Geneva fought for a more democratic constitution, but were defeated with the help of foreign armed forces from France, Sardinia and Berne. A number of distinguished Genevans emigrated in protest against the aristocratic reaction, amongst them Pierre Vieusseux. Etienne Dumont, Bentham’s alter ego, and Sir Francis D’Ivernois as he later became. Pierre and his son became apostles of genévisme in Italy, that movement that was to combine an enlightened religion with the ideal of political and individual freedom in the Italian risorgimento. For Gédéon Simonde, on the other hand, 1782 had witnessed the beginning of his participation in Genevan politics on the aristocratic side.

These events, of which more will have to be said later, occurred when Sismondi was 9 to 10 years. They must have been widely discussed in his circule, and there is ample evidence that they helped to arouse and shape his political understanding. Obviously,

3 Pictet

8 apart from his innate qualities and propensities, he was formed by his environment, the cultural tradition of Geneva, the character of his parents, his friends and his teachers. Later on he was to undergo the impact of England, of Italy and of France. But it was at Geneva that he foundations of the man, the historian and the economist, were laid. Throughout his life, Sismondi remained a true citizen of Geneva though in no narrow or exclusive sense. His was the cosmopolitan and enlightened Geneva of the great republic while he fought, and suffered from, the parochial society of the small city state.

Apart from Holland and the Scotland of the eighteenth century, no small state, indeed hardly any state, can lay claim to a richer cultural and political attainment in modern times than Geneva, this smallest of the city states. Ever since the middle of the sixteenth century its historians had described the republic of Geneva as a reunion of brothers and equals, in fact a democracy.4 Its cultural achievements had won it the titles of the “Protestant Rome” and the “modern Athens”, while for is smallness and pettiness it has been called an antheap or a storm in the teacup. D’Alembert singled it out in the Encyclopédie of the 1750s as worthy of one of the main articles and held it up as a model for the new emerging civilisation of the Enlightenment. Because of its administrative, legal, social, economic, cultural and religious institutions the republic had earned the right to be treated in greater detail than many large monarchies. It offered the model of a perfect political administration and had attained for its citizens the optimum of happiness that could reasonably be hoped for in this world.

D’Alembert’s admiration for Geneva’s constitution was sincere. However, at the same time he exaggerated its virtues because he wanted to hold up foreign merit as an inducement for his own French countrymen to follow its example. In this approach he followed in the footsteps of Tacitus’s Germania and Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes and anticipated the polemical excess of Madame de Staël’s De l’Allemagne. Twenty years later, another of the great Frenchmen of the epoch, Du Pont de Nemours, denied

4 Pictet de Sergy, 25

9 that Geneva possessed “all the advantages and none of the drawbacks of democracy”, as D’Alembert had claimed. Such a contention was possible only if “one counted the people for nothing”. Actually, the liberties assured to the Genevans by the law were being flouted by the ruling citizens and bourgeois who excluded the large majority of the natifs (and habitants and subjects) from office as well as from lucrative occupation. “In Venice and Genoa”, said Du Pont de Nemours, “the Citizens call themselves Nobles; and... in Geneva the Nobles call themselves Citizens and Bourgeois”. They represented a nobility who kept the finances of Geneva, which they controlled, an impenetrable mystery. Yet despite his criticisms the author acknowledged the puritan virtues and personal modesty of Geneva’s magistrates: “if this people has not yet attained the rights, it has at least acquired the habits of liberty”. In the fight for and in the realisation of civic liberties, of democracy and participation, Geneva was in the forefront of European development, and in this it was akin to England, Scotland and Holland.

Geneva then united both elitist and democratic elements in its constitution and in its way of life. Accordingly there were not only political factions but also distinctive moral and social attitudes to be found in the state, namely aristocratic elegance and leisure as well as puritan industry and respectability. Whereas in the England of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries elitist views of society remained dominant, in Geneva, as well as in Holland, Scotland and Switzerland, the Calvinist (and Zwinglian) religion and the Presbyterian clergy weighted the scale in favour of equality and sober probity. Their outlook on life heralded what Max Weber has called the Protestant ethic and the capitalist spirit. Although Geneva had an established religion, the egalitarian composition of its clergy enabled it to preserve the characteristic, moral severity of a sect rather than the Catholic attitude of an established church. The rise of the Protestant way of life and the distinction between the moral teaching of sects as distinct from that of churches are themes associated with the names of Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch. Actually, like most of present-day interpretative sociology, these concepts were analysed by Sismondi’s masters, the

10 great Scottish sociological historians. Adam Smith supplied thus both the sociological analysis and its application to the Genevan situation in the Wealth of Nations: In every civilised society, in every society where the distinction of ranks has once been completely established, there have always been two different schemes or systems of morality current at the same time; of which one may be called the strict or austere; the other the liberal or, if you will, the loose system... The degree of disapprobation with which we ought to mark the vices of levity, the vices which are apt to arise from great prosperity, and from the excesses of gaiety and good humour seems to constitute the principal distinction between those opposite schemes or systems.

While the Lutherans and the Church of England preferred episcopacy and gave the disposal of benefices to the sovereign and other lay patrons who thus called the tune in moral matters, the Zwinglians and especially the Calvinists preserved the influence of the citizens in the election of the clergy. There was a mutual surveillance between the people and the clergy resulting, in Smith’s words, in a more learned, decent, independent and respectable clergy in Holland, Geneva, Switzerland and Scotland than was to be found anywhere in Europe.5 In England and France clerics and scholars aimed at being bishops within the establishment or independent men of letters. In Geneva and similar countries, their ambition was to distinguish themselves as university professors or as successful and therefore influential leaders of the community.

Geneva had been of some importance already in Roman times, a Bishop’s seat since 400, a royal residence under Burgundy, and under Episcopal sovereignty since 1032.

In 1287 the citizens organised themselves into a commune and corporation, and a hundred years later their franchises, rights and privileges were guaranteed by Bishop Adhemar Fabry in what may be termed the Genevan Magna Carta. Since the fifteenth century Geneva had entertained ties with the Swiss confederation and especially with Berne. It did not join Switzerland, however, until after the Napoleonic wars, a fact which explains why Sismondi never identified himself with Switzerland but rather

5 762

11 with Geneva. In 1535 it adopted Protestantism and became a haven for religious refugees from France and Italy, including some 500 families from France and some 30 from Lucca, that is from Sismondi’s later region in Tuscany. Geneva was situated on important European cross-roads between the Channel and the Mediterranean as well as between France and Italy (via Simplon). Thus from early times Geneva had been an important entrepôt linking the various parts of Europe.

At the time of Sismondi’s birth Geneva had rid itself of much of the poverty, the recurring famines, the pollution, the illiteracy and cruelty of earlier times. People were well dressed, skin diseases had diminished, a health died of vegetables and fresh meat had replaced salted meat and dried fish; there were now wide streets and well- aired houses.6 The following is Rousseau’s portrait of Geneva in his Lettre à D’Alembert of 1758:7 It seems to me that what must first strike any stranger on his arrival at Geneva, is the air of life and activity which he sees everywhere. Everyone is busy, everyone hustles, all are absorbed in their work and their affairs. I don’t think that there is another small city in the world which offers a similar image. Visit the quarter of Saint-Gervain: all the watch-making industry of Europe appears to be there. Stroll through the Nôlard and the streets of the lower town, and the display of trade on a grand scale, piles of packages, barrels all over the place, the scent of India and of its spices call a seaport to your mind. At the Pâquis and at Eaux-Vives, calico and coloured linen seem to transport you to Zurich. The town grows somehow with the activities which go on there; I have met people who, on first blush, believe its population to amount to 100,000 [Geneva then had 24,000 inhabitants]. The way people work and use their time, their prudence and their austere frugality, these constitute the treasures of Geneva.

Geneva’s greatness, said Rousseau, was based, not on wealth, but on hard work, thrift, moderation, obedience to the law, and a sound communal infrastructure excelling in mutual help and interaction. Geneva was neither large nor rich enough to become enervated through luxury and loose morality, nor poor enough to have to look for outside help rather than to its own exertions.8

6 Senebier, MS Satistique, Note 2 7 198 8 Lettre and Préamble to 2nd Discours 1754

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The self-image of the Genevese was formed in this spirit, particularly, it appears, amongst the inhabitants of Sismondi’s district, which today has the Rond Point Jean- Jacques for its centre with such street names as Vicaire-Savoyard, Ermenonville, Warens, Confessions, Contrat Social, Devin du Village [named after Rousseau’s opera], Héloise, and Promeneur Solitaire. In the early nineteenth century the young painter Amélie Romilly, to whom we owe the best portrait of Sismondi, wrote from Paris to her teacher Firmin Massot: Here (at Paris) everything appeals to the eye and to the intellect. All the time one lives without regard to one’s soul. One lives in order to enjoy, and not to learn to die. Reflection is kept at arm’s length; there are too many diversions. To look, look incessantly and then to lie down without being able to say: “I have done some good for my fellow-men, I have been useful to my friends”. I shouldn’t like to spend my life here. Oh Geneva, my dear Geneva!

An austere morality was ingrained in the Genevans. But the aristocracy, while steadily losing its privileges, held closely on to a looser morality. Though not frivolous, it kept its exclusive hold on the affairs of Geneva, on the Academy and the clergy. It equated the public interest with family matters, it excluded less distinguished citizens from the leading posts as long as it could do so. Outstanding men like the general Dufour and the economist Antoine-Elisée, Cherbuliez never attained a chair at the university at Geneva, and such foreigners as were appointed like Pellegrino Rossi, the later prime minister of the Vatican State, had to suffer from social ostracism.9 Even Sismondi, after the fall of Napoleon, was to find himself exposed to the pitiless parochialism of the Genevese society.

However, the Geneva of his family background was that of the religion de Genève, a Calvinism tempered by Anglophilia, Enlightenment, the morality, though not the political principles, of Rousseau. The intellectual and moral tradition of enlightened eighteenth century Geneva maybe summarised by such terms as Protestantism, cosmopolitanism, natural law, liberty, Anglophilie, Bacon-Newtonian empiricism,

9 Monnier, Toepffer 246

13 and utilitarianism along the lines of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. It combines the critical attitude of the philosophies with the moral fibre of the Scottish Enlightenment. There is no need to emphasise the Protestant character of Calvin’s city. It is, however, worth recalling the cosmopolitan element in the formative, heroic period of Geneva in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. “Frenchmen, Scots, Italians, and later, Germans ascend continually to chairs of the Academy, and by becoming Genevese they make Geneva what it is”.10 This door to the outside world was largely closed in Sismondi’s time. However, Geneva remained a haven for refugees as well as a Protestant Rome. Its scholars and authors looked outwards, and it attracted distinguished people from abroad, such as Voltaire.

Calvin’s great legacy to Geneva was in the fields of theology, law, and the social order. The law school of the Academy was outstanding and culminated in Jean- Jacques Burlamaqui, a descendent of one of the émigré families from Lucca. His teaching consolidated the Natural Law school of Grotius and Pufendorf. Sovereignty was conceived of as residing in the people, all of whose members have an equal share in it and partake in the natural rights of man. This teaching, reinforced by Rousseau’s Contrat Social, found its practical outcome in the emancipation movements of the lower orders, the natifs and habitants, resulting in armed disorders through the eighteenth century.

The tradition of independence and liberty was one of the mainsprings of Genevan Anglophilie which, despite the linguistic affinity to France, emphasised the common elements with British political, religious, cultural and commercial attitudes. Like Montesquieu and Voltaire, Geneva looked to Britain as the great example. It was a Genevese lawyer, Delolme, who in 1771 wrote the first sociological evaluation of the English constitution, a work still today of great significance, and which was to become an important source of Sismondi’s political and historical views. There was a steady stream to and fro between Geneva and Britain (including Sismondi’s father).

10 Note 32 Statistique

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No wonder that in 1814, in his Considérations sur Genève, Sismondi described Geneva as “some sort of an English city on the Continent... where one thinks, where one feels in English, but where one talks, where one writes in French.”

Genevese scholarship was closer to Bacon, Newton and Locke (and the Encylopédic) than to Descartes and Condillac. Observation and analysis, that is Bacon-Newtonian empiricism was the hallmark of its philosophical thought. At the same time, in the words of an historian of Cartesian philosophy, “in contrast with French and English empiricism, Genevan empiricism is associated with the respect for the principles of morality and religion.11 In this conversion, the thinkers of Geneva did not differ from their Calvinist cousins in Scotland. In the natural sciences observation was the chief element in achievements of such great scientists as Charles Bonnet and his nephew Horace-Benedict de Saussure, Georges-Louis Le Sage, the brothers De Luc, Jean Trembley, Michel Varro as well as Sismondi’s teachers and friends Marc Auguste Pictet, Pierre Prévost, and Pyramus de Candolle. In practically all of these men moral and aesthetic elements were closely allied to their scientific success. This combination of science with moral preoccupations was paralleled by such great achievements of Scottish scientists like Black, Hutton and Monro with whom the Genevese were linked by professional and personal ties. In particular, Genevan doctors, who could not graduate at Geneva, went to Protestant universities for their studies, (that is, apart from)Montpellier, Leyden, and Edinburgh,

Like the biological sciences, the social sciences were neglected in Geneva; there was no provision for the teaching of economics and politics, except for their legal aspects. Again, the Scottish universities proved to be attractive both to students as for instance Sismondi's friends Boulette and Benjamin Constant, and scholars like Sismondi's teacher M. -A. Pictet. When the actions and principles of the French Revolution came to cast their shadow over Geneva, and the city lay under the threat of French domination and annexation, the members of Geneva's intellectual elite turned towards

11 N.34 Statistique

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Britain as their 'reference group', the country which had developed and preserved the institutions which they would have wished to see upheld in Geneva. They described themselves as Anglophiles while the partisans of the Revolution accused them of Anglomania. The impact of these tendencies on Sismondi was to become one of the decisive ingredients in his intellectual formation.

We have little information as to the details of Sismondi’s years at school. The collège, which he attended, concentrated on moral and scientific studies while it neglected the classics in which Sismondi had a good grounding. He was not popular with his schoolmates. He was ungainly and not naturally athletic although he was strong and gifted with a stoic heroism which he had ample opportunity of displaying in his life of exile. Sir Francis Palgrave, who had first-hand knowledge from Sismondi's wife, speaks of his "most touching and as we should say feminine disposition" and "extreme sensibility which exposed him to the constant bullying of his rude and coarse comrades. This persecution threw him, as it were, upon the resources of the imagination...."

Not that he was without friends of his own age. There is no doubt that his mother was closest to him until her death in 1821 when Sismondi was 48 and only recently married. However, the families of the neighbourhood were in constant and close touch. Girls from the Sartoris, Gallatin and Pictet families were Serina's friends, and the boys played together. There were Victor Constant and Jean-Aimé Gaudy, both the same age as Sismondi. There were Gratien and Jean Louis Gallatiseys, 4 and 5 years younger. Victor introduced his brother's tutor, Charles Bourrit, 2 years his senior, and there was another boy of the same age, Jean-Antoine Vautier. Victor's sister Rosalie, several years older, kept a friendly eye on the group. She, Victor and Jean Louis Gallatin remained life-long friends of Sismondi; Victor became a general in the Dutch service, and Jean Louis a gentleman farmer. Sismondi's imagination, nourished by his classical studies under parental guidance, marked him out as the intellectual leader of

16 the group. They roamed the wide gardens and fields, a microcosm which they sub- divided into the provinces of the Constantiade, Simoniade, Galatide, and Gaudirie. They formed themselves into a republic called Consigal after the names of Constant, Simonde and Gallatin. These republican games gave rise to the first work of Sismondi, L'Histoire de la République de Consigal12 which dates from 1785 when its author was 12 years of age.

Thucydides and Taitus supplied the model after which Sismondi fashioned his history. Plain and detailed evidence and reasonably accurate conclusions, "make the speakers say what, in my opinion, was called for by each situation"; factual reporting and the absence of a romantic element - these were the lessons drawn from Thucydides. Civic history dealing with the insignificant "events of peace and the constitution rather than war, the lessons that history, the experience of others, holds for the self-understanding of man and for the future, the impact of democracy, aristocracy and autocracy, the Roman example - these elements were taken from Tacitus. The history of Geneva up to the turbulent upheaval of 1782 and the ensuing restoration, the conflict between the ruling class and the natifs, and the literature on Geneva including D'Alembert complete the background of the events in the Republic of Consigal.

The work of the young historian consisted of two parts. The first part set out the topographical and social setting of the Republic (including an enumeration of the features of the Simoniade), the constitution featuring a General Assembly and a Legislative Council, and finally their personalities, beginning with Victor Constant, the founder and legislator of the Republic, but omitting a self-portrait of the budding historian. These character sketches, written in a classical style, may amuse an adult reader, but they nevertheless reveal an uncommon, though derivative, mastery of language and considerable psychological insight. For instance, in later years, when Jean Louis Gallatin and Sismondi had unhappy love affairs with the sisters Lucile and Jenny Patron, Jean Louis proved with what great lucidity Sismondi had assessed his

12Candaux

17 character: "...gentle, but with little firmness, courage or stubbornness, much goodness and a gift for friendship, but a weakness... which led him to accept anyone's lead...".

The second and main part of the history proper of the Republic. This part dealt with the speeches made by Constant and Sismondi on the subject and the problems of the Constitution, its Councils, its seals, its monies, its arms, and its oaths. All these subjects were treated in ample and painstaking detail. The topography of the region, the profusion of arms, as well as the seals are accompanied by Sismondi's own finely executed sketches. (Later on he was to design himself the illustrations to the first work that brought him fame, the Tableau de l'Agriculture Toscane). The ideals which emanate from the speeches and resolutions, are those of "Justice, Reason, Equity and the Rights of Man", that is that "each be given his due, that no one be oppressed, that one submits only to legitimate power, and that not everyone has the right to command".

The Republic of Consigal was based on a social contract which delegated power to the magistrates, a power, however, limited by regular rotation of office. There was a constitutional right to popular rebellion in case of a take-over by the partisans of oligarchy, aristocracy or despotism. Geneva's tradition supplied the guide-line:

In all states which are free and more or less democratic, there exists a recognised, a sacred right of the people to decide on the laws by the majority of the voters or their representatives. Even in Geneva where the Aristocrats have just achieved victor, they have not dared to deprive the people of their sacred right. The election of the magistrates, the making of the laws, everything depends still on the people.

And in prophetic mood - it is 1785, four years before the French revolution - Sismondi's speaker continues:

If in other countries near to us the people does not enjoy this privilege, how do we know if in France for example soon the people will not enforce the right for its representatives to change the laws and to make new ones.

18

The foremost of the four places of the Consignal assemblies was a rotunda in the garden of the Constants which was distinguished by a famous sculpture of Argand depicting the Emile of Rousseau and dedicated to Rousseau with the inscription Homo erat. Not everything, however, in the Constitution of Consigal was according to the precepts of Rousseau. Corporal punishment was provided amongst the sanctions of the Republic in the interest of pure and good puritan habits, a sanction deeply deprecated by Rousseau and later by Sismondi himself. As Madam Sismondi applied Rousseau's ideas in the education of her children, the insertion of corporal punishment may have been due to the influence of the dominant spirit of Victor Constant.

The Constitution of Consigal was that of a free and, in some ways, a democratic republic. However, the democratic rights were the privilege of the citizens belonging to leading families. They did not apply to Charles Bourrit whose election to citizenship without its full voting rights supplied the chief episode in the History of the Republic. Much space is devoted to the requirements of tact with which the bitter pill of second-class citizenship was to be sweetened, but here as elsewhere, Consigal proved itself to be formed in the classical image and the image of the republic of Geneva. the rise and the maintenance of free republics, the limitations necessary in a democracy, together with the protection of the weak, and the honour of individual, independence - all these leitmotifs of Sismondi's later oeuvre are represented in embryo in the History of the Republic of Consigal.

Sismondi owed his education to his family and to his home environment. School had little to offer to him although the Collège of Geneva was more advanced than many, probably most, schools at the time. Its shortcomings, however, contrasted with the background of what his home had to give him, were to supply Sismondi with a standard by which to measure education in Geneva and in Italy and to enable him to suggest reforms. Although Geneva was an aristocratic republic, its Collège was a democratic institution for some 500 pupils where higher and lower ranks

19 intermingled. It was a grammar school with nine forms for pupils from six to fifteen. There were five lessons a day for each form, four of which were free; the last lesson had to be paid for but hardly any pupil found himself excluded. There was keen competition between the pupils in the times before the upheaval caused by the French Revolution. All the same, Sismondi was unhappy at the Collège. The curriculum was pedantic and deficient, concentrating as it did on the rudiments of Greek and Latin, on grammar and composition rather than on the literature of the great Greek and Latin authors.13 The historical sciences including natural history as well as science were neglected; the only important subject besides the ancient languages was Protestant and natural religion.14 Innovation was out of the question though it must not be forgotten that most schools elsewhere at the time were even more backward. The Collège, through its egalitarianism as well as its corporate spirit, educated citizens and gave to the pupils some preparation useful in the pursuit of the professions. But it failed to develop the spontaneity and sensitivity of the individual which Rousseau had desired and which was to find its way into education under his pupil Pestalozzi and his assistants. Thus, while school failed to enrich Sismondi's youth, it did not leave him deprived of the stimulus that is exerted by remarkable personalities and by great literature. His home, his parents and his friends provided him with all the inspiration, both intellectual and emotional which his eager mind and his affectionate constitution required.

After completion of his course of studies at the grammar school, the Collège, Sismondi went on to the university, the Académie. He enrolled in 1788 as a student of philosophy but was soon compelled to interrupt his studies. His father had invested his liquid funds in French State bonds. M. Necker was then Director General of Finances in France; although debarred as a foreigner, a Genevese, from holding a cabinet post, he was the powerful force behind the government. On his advice many of his countrymen at Geneva had entrusted their funds to the guarantee of the French

13Westminster Review 14Statistique

20

State and, like Gédéon Simonde, saw themselves deprived of their savings in the inflation which heralded the onset of the French Revolution. Charles was sent to Lyons as an apprentice in the Lyons branch of the Genevan firm of Eynard et Compagnie. There he worked side by side with the owner’s son, Jean-Gabriel Eynard, who later was to acquire wealth in Italy and to become a leading statesman in Geneva. No doubt the young Sismondi learnt a good deal by way of business activities, methodical arrangement of work, and financial calculations. Yet he hated every bit of his slavery in the offices of the firm. His biographer, Mademoiselle Montgolfier who had first-hand information, tells us that he abhorred his occupation which he found desiccating and without appeal to his intellect or his heart. At Châtelaine there had never been enough time to follow all his interests. Now time weighed heavily on the young apprentice. He bore his fate stoically but he implored his parents to let him return to his cherished studies, to the cultivation of thought and beauty. The revolution proved to be his salvation. His employers, whose business was disorganised by the upheaval in France, found themselves compelled to dismiss their staff. Charles returned home after about one year of apprenticeship. In October 1789 he was able to take up his old life at Geneva once more, though it was never to regain the tranquillity and free enjoyment of pre-Revolutionary times.

His apprenticeship at Lyons provided Charles with an indelible experience. He had tasted the life of dependence. He knew now what it was like not to be able to organise one's day oneself, to work at someone else's beck and call, to do repetitive tasks, and to work anonymously while the master pocketed the profit produced by the worker's effort. Always in his later life he took the side of the apprentice. He must of course have known the story of the apprentice Rousseau whose suffering had led to his flight from Geneva. He was deeply impressed by the strictures which his master Adam Smith had levelled against the institution of apprenticeship in his Wealth of Nations:

Long apprenticeships are altogether unnecessary... a young man would practice with much more diligence and attention if from the beginning he wrought as a journeyman, being paid in proportion to the little work

21

he could execute... His education would... be more effectual and always less tedious... The master, indeed, would be a loser... But the public would be a gainer... ( 123)

In order to do away with the need for apprenticeship that Sismondi in 1803 was to propose the establishment of a trade school which would prepare young people and would make it possible

to abolish a practice which was paralysing the learning power of young people rather than stimulating them, which was numbing them in body and spirit, and which, by reducing them to servile dependence, exerted its depraving influence on their morality. (Statistique 52, 124)

Moreover, Sismondi's social conscience was generally stimulated. Already in the constitution of Consigal one of the declared purposes of the republic had been to aid and emancipate the oppressed. At Lyons at the time of the revolution he came to understand why the people had stormed the Bastille in 1789. At Lyons "a food riot took place... and... we saw a tip-cart passing our house filled with 7 or 8 prisoners who were taken to be hanged, perhaps even to be broken on the wheel, for one was then not content to make people die without suffering". The impact of this scene and the compassion which it aroused were so strong that Sismondi recalled the experience 44 years later in his diary.15 We are not quite certain concerning the dates of Sismondi's stay at Lyons. He probably kept a diary at the time as he did all through his life. However, his diaries were unfortunately burned by his widow some years after his death. Sismondi was back in Geneva not later than December 15, 1789 when he started following the introductory course in Experimental Physics given by Professor M.A. Pictet, a course which lasted until 25 March, 1790. He kept a painstaking record of the forty lectures, summarising the contents of each as well as keeping an account of the experiments carried out and adding diagrams and illustrations, filling altogether well over 200 pages. Pictet's was a famous lecture course by the most brilliant professor of the Académie. Twenty years later the great

15Montgolfier 82 and 14/7/1833

22

German geographer Karl Ritter was to follow the same course and to cherish it as the most valuable souvenir of his studies in Geneva.16

Education at the Académie was then semi-paternal; teachers and students were in close touch, and it was not until well after the French Revolution that a larger number of students from France and elsewhere cause the university to go over to the system of impersonal lectures.17 Teaching by tutorial had been introduced at the university by Pierre Prévost, the professor of philosophy who, apart from Pictet, was Sismondi's principal teacher. He had pursued his studies at the Académie in 1756 as a contemporary of Gédéon Sismonde who had started one year earlier. Prevost was a life-long family friend and, in particular, enjoyed long discussions with Sismondi's mother. Both Prévost and Pictet left a lasting mark on Charles's interests and achievements. Both remained his friends throughout life.

Apart from some remarkable teachers, the Académie possessed an outstanding library of which Sismondi made full use at various periods of his life. Johannes von Müller, the great historian of Switzerland and one of Sismondi's models, spent the years 1776- 1782 in Geneva assisting Paul-Henri Mallet, another of the great historians Switzerland has produced, and himself one of Sismondi's masters. Müller described the library thus to his (and, later, Sismondi's) friend Charles Victor Bonstetten:

Montesquieu, Tacitus, Titus Livyus, Blackstone, Machiavelli, all the great and useful works of ancient Greece, of eternal Rome, of Nordic energy and English liberty, of French civilisation and the laborious erudition of Germany; all that the revolutions and the barbarians have spared in the course of 2500 years; all that has been left us of the genius and the wisdom of so many great men, all that, my friend, is displayed before our eyes and offered for our instruction. All those past centuries have done their work for ours; he whose invisible hand has conserved these riches for us, calls to us: Read and learn!18

16Genève et Italie N.6 17Sismondi's letter to Rosalie Constant of 23/12/1808. Pescia A 5/162 18Letters de Jean de Müller à ses amis de Bonstetten and Gleim, Zürich 1910, 63- ex Borgeaud I 583

23

The unfolding of European civilisation was embodied in the vaults of the Library, as it was to be integrated in all its fullness in the oeuvre of Sismondi.

Sismondi had been brought up on the classics, and natural history by his father, on literature and history by his mother. Yet his teachers Marc-August Pictet and Pierre Prévost were to widen his horizon in a way his family could never have done. Both men were widely travelled, entertained close connections with the leading thinkers and public men of their time, and were themselves outstanding scholars of European repute. Pictet's younger brother Charles Pictet de Rochemont, agriculturist, writer and statesman, was another of the seminal influences upon Sismondi's development. Prevost who, in Sismondi's words, was a follower of the Scottish school19, introduced him to economics and sociological history, M. -A. Pictet to experimental (in contrast to Gédéon-Simonde's speculative) science as well as to the world of politics, while Charles Pectet, apart from politics, initiated him into the theory of scientific agriculture.

The Pictet brothers were personally associated with the small world of Châtelaine. They were the brilliant sons of a remarkable father, Colonel Charles Pictet, who in 1762 had been publicly rebuked and suspended from parliament for his protest against the burning of Rousseau's Emile and Contrat Social by the authorities in Geneva; he had preferred a life of inner exile to compromising his ideals. Charles Pictet de Rochemont retired to the countryside in Lancy after the Revolution and became one of the acknowledged leaders in the fields of European agricultural and pastoral reform. Apart from his own publications, especially on agriculture, he translated into French Henry Thornton's Enquiry into the Nature and Effects of the Paper Credit of Great Britain (1802) and William Paley's Natural Theology (1804). Later on, especially at the time of the post-Napolenonic re-drawing of the European political map, he was to emerge as Geneva's leading statesman. Together with his brother Marc-Auguste he entertained personal contact with friends and relations in England

19Letter to Rosalie Constant 23/12/1808 A 5/162

24 and Scotland which he had first visited in 1785 while Marc Auguste had preceded him 10 years earlier. Moreover, both were deeply interested in the scientific, social and educational reform activities of Count Rumford in Munich, who, as Sir Benjamin Thompson, had founded the British Institute in London, and of Philippe Smannel Fellenberg in Hofwyl. Fellenberg, like Froebel, had been an assistant master of Rousseau’s pupil Pestalozzi; he founded a system of progressive schools at Hofwyl which inspired Lord Brougham to undertake his educational reforms in Britain as well as inducing Robert Owen to send two of his three sons there to be educated.20 While Charles Pictet de Rochemont’s impact on Sismondi occurred mainly in the years following his studies at the Académie, Marc-Auguste and Pierre Prevost were actually his teachers there.

M. -A. Pictet held the chair of experimental philosophy following in the footsteps of the great Horace- Bénédict de Saussure and Charles Bonnet whose names are still prominent in the history of science. He was a polymath of wide culture, a literary critic, musician, astronomer, mineralogist, physicist and distinguished writer.21 In 1793, at the height of the revolution he made a courageous call to his compatriots to preserve their old institutions of representative government. In 1803 he became a member of the French Tribunat as representative of Geneva which had been incorporated into France by the Treaty of Reunion of 1798; he replaced the radical Benjamin Constant in this position. In Paris he played a highly influential part as an intermediary between Geneva on the one hand and the imperial government and Napoleon personally on the other hand, a task in which Sismondi was to assist him. Pictet’s close and notorious relations with England singled him out as a potential intermediary between that country and France, and as such he was able to bring pressure to bear in Paris on behalf of Geneva in a manner well beyond the actual significance of the small city-state in the imperial policies. When he died in 1839,

20 Robert Dale Owen 21 Statistique N.38

25 three years before Sismondi, his obituary notice by Pyramus de Candolle portrayed him in terms which could have been equally applied to Sismondi:

His guiding tenet was to do all the possible good under an established government, by gradually improving the institutions, by spreading enlightenment and religious feelings, by working for the well-being of the lower classes... always he aspired to the happiness of being useful...!22

Pierrre Prévost was a less scintillating personality than Pictet. Yet as a scholar and teacher he was outstanding. He had introduced the tutorial method to the Académie, and, since the 1780’s, he had been the first teacher of economics at Geneva, a discipline which was then not given official standing in the university. He too was widely travelled; he had been a member of Frederic the Great’s Academy in Berlin; he was a corresponding member of the Royal Society of London and Edinburgh. He had been in personal touch with Rousseau. He entertained the closest relations with many of the leading scholars of Prussia, France, England and especially Scotland. He was the translator of Hugh Blair’s Lectures, Malthus’s Essay on Population, Adam Smith’s Philosophical Essays, Dugald Stewart’s Life and Works of Dr. Smith, and Mrs Marcet’s (his sister-in-law) Conversations on Political Economy.23 Prévost, too, was a Genevese patriot who, like Constant, Sismondi and Tocqueville later, and Rousseau before him, fought the spirit of uniformity and centralisation; he stood for the judicious reconciliation of tradition and innovation. He was steeped in the pioneering works of universal and sociological history and thus made a lasting contribution to modern historiography as the teacher both of Sismondi and Guizot. As an economist he taught both Sismondi and Antoine-Elysée Cherbuliez.24 In the methodology of the social sciences and, in particular, the philosophy of language he had crossed swords with Condillac; he was closely allied with the anti-doctrinaire,

22 Statistique N.38 23 Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres 1783; Adam Smith published by Mrs Marcet 1816 24 Riche et Pauvre; Tocqueville

26 experimental as well as systematic, eclecticism of his friends Dugald Stewart and Degérando, and his linguistic philosophy influenced Maine de Biran.25

It was Prévost who introduced Sismondi to the teaching of Adam Smith, and probably to Delolme as well as the political aspects of the thought of Rousseau, Montesquieu and the Greeks. In 1783 he had published a highly perspicuous work L’économie des anciens gouvernemens comparée à celle des gouvernemens modernes, in which he developed the theory of ‘the two liberties’ which was later made famous by Sismondi and Benjamin Constant, and is represented in our days by Isaiah Berlin.26 Prévost wrote in a terse, dry style which came easily to his austere character, and which he recommended to Sismondi.27 His maxim in this respect, which Sismondi adopted, was taken from Georges-Louis Lesage: “A forceful expression is necessarily exaggerated. A metaphorical expression is necessarily imprecise.”

We have no detailed information concerning Charles’s activity in the years 1790 and 1791. In 1792 Sismondi enrolled as a student of Law at the Académie. But before he was able to get far with his legal studies in Geneva, his journey to England intervened. We possess his mother’s diary of July and August 1792 which throws some light upon Sismondi’s character as well as the family’s life in those troubled times. Obviously they were already preparing to escape to the shelter of England. They practised their spoken English, and “We have been at work... have read much of our History of England in English”; it is fair to conjecture that it was Hume’s History which kept them busy. In Geneva the old forms of civilised life and conversation were breaking up. The Figaro situation occurred in the house, a chambermaid became saucy and disrespectful, and Madame Simonde could hardly assert her authority. After a visit by a young friend, M. Trembley, she wrote:

25 Prevost blamed Condillac for basing his philosophy of language solely on a logic of transformation, in which transformed sensation and mathematical construction prevailed to the detriment of a logic of things. 26 27 e.g. his letter 1800 on Agriculture Toscane

27

Fortunately I haven’t heard a word mentioned of politics... one cannot discuss things coolly any longer... one deals with contemporary history, all aspects of religion and morality are questioned: formerly one could talk of government as one talks of physics and meets people who rejected the form which you preferred without bitterness - an aristocrat could take pleasure in debating with a democrat like a follower of Corneille with an admirer or Racine... today no one can say that he is a moderate democrat, that is a contradiction in terms, as if one said of a hot iron that it was of moderate temperature.28

This little passage is representative of Sismondi’s mother’s style and approach. The similes are taken from literature and science, the style is concise and clear. The aristocratic families, it appears, were living in a state of siege. At a whist party at Madame Simonde’s with her friends, Mesdames Vieusseux, Fallatin, Mallet and Barde, there was much talk of young Sismondi’s political difficulties. One Lorguier, obviously of the popular party, had been harassing him for some time. Mrs Barde’s son had advised him not to argue back, but in vain. Sismondi’s mother took the point up with her son who declared that, for over a year, he had not provoked political discussions but, when asked point-blank, he confirmed that he was an aristocrat. His parents, on discussing the matter, disagreed:

Mr.S. felt that he (Charles) had been very wrong to answer that he was an aristocrat although it had been in reply to a direct question; he should have dissimulated; we disagreed. I felt that he should actually avoid all occasions of expatiating on the subject but never feign opinions which he did not really hold, nor equivocate when put on the spot. He (Mr.S.) said it was prudence. I called it hypocrisy, we’ll never see eye to eye on that...29

The episode puts their characters into relief. Gedeon emerges as colourless and conventional, Henriette as chivalrous and romantic, and Charles as frank and rational. This highly informative diary of Madame Simonde’s, written in 1792, is unfortunately preserved only in parts, with burnt edges and darkened pages, obviously spared by the fire which was intended to keep it out of the hands of the revolutionary hordes two years later in 1794 after the family’s return from England. Even so, the diary contains

28 Perscia MS inedit 29 ibid.

28 a good deal of information concerning many Genevan families and gives an idea of the extensive social intercourse the Simondes had with the leading families of the place. At the same time, it offers a glimpse of the siege conditions which the incipient revolution imposed upon Geneva’s citizens. The Simondes at that time kept in practically daily touch with their neighbours at Châtelaine, the Sartoris family, the Gallatins and the Vieusseux (who were to remain their close friends in the Italian exile), as well as the family of Pierre Prévost.

It was a time of trails and worries. It was a time, too, for falling back on one’s own resources. The political situation was threatening, but as yet there was no Terreur with its resulting atmosphere of panic. Fearful anticipation was mingled with rational evaluation. The revolutionaries might have their justifiable grievances, but at the same time they were pathetic fanatics blinded by prejudices. Everyone who has lived through a revolutionary situation knows the ambivalent feelings which it evokes; the suspense due to im...... ? doom does not blot out the calmer emotions and higher interests. The family, as we saw, practised their English and studied English history. They carried on with their literary pursuits, reading aloud together and acting plays. It is probably to this period that we must attribute Sismondi’s ventures as a playwright. The manuscripts of two plays in verse are preserved in the Pescia archives, Le Mari distrait and La Mairie, both playfully combining individual with political problems. Le Mari Distrait was written in various versions: in one act, in three acts, in verse, and in prose. Its theme was the fate of a émigré hidden by his sister from his persecutors and thus becoming the target of her husband’s jealousy. La Mairie is the more substantial piece, an epic poem in eight canos with a précis of each canto added to make clear the course of the argument. The civil war plot sets the factions of the Nationaux against that of the Aristocrats. Its execution reveals the influence of Homer, of Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Rousseau’s Le Devin du Village. The poem starts thus:

29

Je chante les exploits et les terrerurs de ce Maire Dont le nom glorieux fait retentir la terre Du zélé Guillotin, de ses municipaux Loin de moi d’employer lâchement sur mes rimes Ces neuf fameuses soeurs ces flatteuses des crimes Qui n’ont jamais chanté que la gloire des Rois Mais qui n’inspirent point la nationai les lois C’est un Dieu plus chéri qui guidera ma lyre La seule liberté veut et doit me conduire Gantons par son secours ses cmbats glorieux.

(I sing the exploits and the terrors of the mayor Whose glorious name rebounds all over the world, That of the zealous Guillotin, of his police, His valiant guardsmen, his gallant Patriots. Far be it from me cowardly to shield in my rhymes Behind the nine famous sisters, these praisers of crimes Who have always vaunted only the glory of kings But who don’t inspire the people nor the laws of the land. A greater God shall guide my lyre: LIBERTY alone shall and must be my lodestar - Let us sing, with her help, her glorious battles.)

As in Consigal, some of Sismondi’s guiding ideas are foreshadowed here: The description and rejection of fanaticism and terror, the renunciation of a purely aesthetic approach, the denunciation of epic history with its concentration on royalty rather than the people, and the extolling of liberty as the great agent of history. The hero of the epic poem, apart fro the ominously named Guillotin, is Delermon, a French aristocratic émigré whose castle has been burned to the ground by the revolutionaries (or nationals or democrats) and who has found refuge in Geneva. He discovers four suits of armour, gathers three of his friends, mounts his illustrious horse Himphale and sets out to take vengeance on the rebellious people of his hamlet. Guillotin is forewarned by the appearance of the ghost of a Democrat, arms the villagers, evacuates women and children and prepares for battle. The Aristocrats arrive, and the villagers take at once to flight, calling out the national guards from the surrounding villages and hamlets. In the ensuing pursuit the horse Himphale is killed and buried with superb ceremony. The Aristocrats set them out on their return to Geneva while the terror-stricken national guard refuse to move. They recover their

30 spirit though on hearing that the Aristocrats have left, appoint Guillotin their commander-in-chief and move towards Delermon’s old hamlet. Some shots arouse panic as well as fury; they join valiantly in combat until they discover that their furious charges were directed against each other as well as trees. They return triumphantly to the hamlet, dig up Himphale’s corpse; finally they celebrate their ‘victory’ and return to their hamlet with fireworks and a parade.

All this is written in good humour, in fluent verse and with good psychology, though it does not announce a great poet. It is versification rather than poetry. Obviously, Sismondi’s spirit was undaunted. All the same, there seemed to be no point in staying at Geneva for the time being. It was better to hibernate or rather to live elsewhere until the storm should blow over. There was one country shielded from the revolutionary unrest which pervaded the Continent: England had preserved its traditional liberties. England was the natural place for the more fortunate émigrés to aim for. Many upper-class families preferred to stay at Geneva and did not consider emigration until after the revolution of 1794. The Simondes however felt it advisable to make use of their English connections and to arrange for a sojourn in England until the hoped-for early return of stable conditions. The family made suitable arrangements at Châtelaine with their relatives, the Sartoris, to look after their place with the help of Francis, the Simonde’s footman, and Fanchon, their parlourmaid. Another maid, Suzette, soon to be called Susan in England, accompanied the family on their journey. Detailed preparations for their stay were made with the help of a botanist friend of Gédéon’s.

Thomas Martyn was one of Britain’s most eminent natural scientists. His father John Martyn, a friend of Blair and Sir Hans Sloane and a correspondent of Linnaeus, had preceded his son in the chair of Botany at Cambridge. He was a student of history and modern languages as well, and he also practised medicine; he attained to some minor measure of immortality by introducing valerian, peppermint water and black currants

31 into pharmacy. Thomas had studied classics under Richard Hurd at Cambridge, and like his father, was one of the first followers of Linnaeus in England, an interest which closely associated him with Gédéon Simonde. He was a fellow of Sidney Sussex College at Cambridge, Trinity College Reader in Botany, and University (later Regius) professor at Cambridge for 63 years from 1762 until his death in 1825. During an extended tour of the Continent he had settled some time at Vandoeuvres near Geneva in 1778 or 1779, and he had translated Rousseau’s “Letters on the Elements of Botany”. He felt warm friendship for the Simondes, as we know from his letters. He procured for them the house of a friend who, like him, was soon to be on amicable terms with the family.

The house was the vicarage in Peasmarsh in East Sussex close to the Kentish border; the friend was the eccentric Rev. John Lettice, a poet and divine of distinction. Like Mr Martyn he was a fellow of Sidney Sussex College at Cambridge which was the patron of the living at Peasmarsh. Mr Lettice had spent an evening with Dr Johnson in 1765. He had published religious poetry, translations from the Latin, sermons, including one on “the present state of our Universities”, and, later in the Napoleonic period, “A plan for the safe removal of inhabitants, not military, from towns and villages on the coast of Great Britain in the case of threatened invasion”. His two most important publications were “The Antiquities of Herculaneum” which he published together with Thomas Martyn in 1773, Martyn having acquired a copy of the opus of the Neapolitan Accademia Ercolanese di Archeologia for £50; following an injunction by the Neapolitan court however the publication remained restricted to a volume of 50 plates. In 1794, during the Simondes’ stay in England, Lettice published “Letters on a Tour through various parts of Scotland, in the year 1792”, a work which Sismondi was to quote in his first letter to Madame de Staèl in 1801, the first extant letter in fact of his correspondence. These two outstanding men made the family welcome in England, introduced them to their friends, and did much to ease their access to English life and customs.

32

The family arrived at Dover from Calais on Friday, the 15th February 1793. It was a bad crossing with most people on board seasick. The captain lost his bearings, feared shipwreck on the rocks, and was compelled to manoeuvre for 4 hours outside the harbour before he was able to land. It was not until 3 a.m. that the family found some rest in an ugly room at an uninviting inn. After the Customs control in the morning they had to see the mayor about their passports; they were surprised to find that the mayor did not know a word of French. However, they received permission to proceed to Peasmarsh and to take up their residence there. Shortly before noon they set out by carriage along the coastal road. The rolling country, green and full of sheep, was beautiful. At Hythe, where they had to stop for a change of horses, they met another émigré from Geneva, M. Salabrouche, who told them of a new government decree forbidding foreigners to live within 10 miles of the sea. However, they decided to proceed all the same and in the late afternoon got as far as Romney, where they stayed for the night. The was inferior and expensive, the night badly disturbed by a troop of soldiers. According to their habit, immediately after arrival, they went to explore the place, admired the castle and were surprised to find a stone-paved street in a mere village. Certainly they possessed the qualifications which Gibbon deemed most essential for a traveller, “an active, indefatigable vigour of mind and body, which can seize every mode of conveyance and support with a careless smile, every hardship of the road, the weather, or the inn.”30

And so to Peasmarsh. Alas, the vicarage was closed; Mr. Lettice was away in London and would not return for another month. There was no room at the inn, no room in any of the neighbouring villages. They set out once more and spent the night at Hawkhurst, having decided to go the 20 miles to London and stay there until Mr Lettice’s return to Peasmarsh. The next day, on passing through Tunbridge Wells (or was it Tonbridge) they observed troops of schoolchildren, boys and girls separate, coming from Church and noticed with Rousseau-inspired shock that the children were

30 Autobiography, 124

33 led by their teachers carrying rods in their hands. But the countryside was “exceedingly” pleasant, fine prospects of trees, large orchards, neat houses and country seats. At nightfall they reached London, “the first appearance is truly beautiful and striking”. The inns at Piccadilly and Charing Cross and elsewhere were full up, but finally they found lodgings in Jermyn Street. At 8 o’clock in the evening Madam Simonde was able to sit down to bring her diary up to date.

For the first time she wrote it in English though she reverted to French for the rest of their stay in London. English was soon to become the language in which her diaries were written, first as a token of assimilation, and later, in the revolutionary Geneva and the Italian exile, as a means of keeping its secrets from prying eyes. Though they had to wait a fortnight for the arrival of their trunks from Dover, the family soon felt at home in the English world. The elegant life fascinated them. Elegant coaches and four passed their house from noon until 2 o’clock in the morning. There was St. James Park for early morning walks, the streets were beautiful, the shops were neat with large windows, “on lave tout ici”, even the pavement in front of the doors. The ladies bought a dress for 45 shillings, they bought Humphrey Clinker for 2 shillings, they got history books from a circulating library. Under Mr Martyn’s guidance they explored Haymarket, Somerset House, Temple Bar, Blackfriars Bridge, the Museum. On Sunday they went to St James Church, disappointed to see only a dozen people at the 7 a.m. service. In St James Park one day they met the King’s carriage, and

Henriette was deeply moved; they also visited Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. At Covent Garden they had their first theatrical experience in England, when they saw the Midnight Wanderer. However, most of their time was spent in a whirl of social life.

They moved in an English and a French-speaking circle. There were a number of Genevese with whom they were soon in touch; the names of Thellusson, the great merchant, Cazenove, the banker, Chauvet, Du Roveray, Reverdin, Gourgas and

34

Fauchette occur frequently in the diary. On Englishman who belonged to this group, took a family interest in the Simondes and saw them frequently. He was William Wickham, Superintendent of Aliens, who, after his schooling at Harrow, had become intimate with William Wyndham Granville, later Lord Granville, prime minister in the “ministry of all the talents”, and with Bentham’s half-brother Charles Abbot, later Lord Colchester. Abbot had spent some time in Geneva in 1778 and had been in touch with such outstanding men as Bonnet, Tremblay and Delolme; he had stayed in the house of the pasteur Romilly, a contributor to the Encyclopédie who had known Rousseau, Diderot, and Helvétius. Wickham had followed in his footsteps and went to Geneva in 1782 where he studied under le bon professor Perdriau, the friend of Sismondi’s parents and grandparents. In 1788 Wickham had married Madelaine Bertrand whose brother was the husband of Suzanne-Julie Sartoris, a cousin o Gedeon’s and the elder sister of a close friend of Serina’s. He was then embarking on his distinguished diplomatic career, foremost as a negotiator between Britain and Switzerland, in fact England’s principal spy on the revolutionary and Napoleonic continent and a “formenter of insurrection”.

The English friends were Thomas Martyn and his family whom the Simondes were able to practice their English. Mr Lettice was not in London. He had gone to his College in Cambridge and would not be back in Peasmarsh until the end of the month. He had recently been through a sad time, as Mrs Martyn told Madame Simonde. He had been happily married but lost his wife who died while giving birth to a daughter. This had deeply afflicted him, but a year or two later he fell in love with a pretty Yorkshire girl who was sufficiently romantic (“Romanesque”) to imagine happiness to lie in wait for her in rustic solitude with a man she loved. Reality was otherwise. She could not bear the loneliness of Peasmarsh although her husband invited friends and relatives to stay with them. She returned to Yorkshire where she gave birth to a girl, and she refused to re-join her husband who generously maintained her and the child which she kept from him. His elder daughter being at boarding school, Mr

35

Lettice had become a sad, lonely man. Did Peasmarsh hold out the promise of a happy stay for the Simondes?

They arrived at Peasmarsh on 25th March at nightfall. Mr Lettice welcomed them warmly, kissed Serina and a blazing fire and tea and coffee were waiting for them. A few days later the most prosperous farmer of the neighbourhood, Mr Smith, came to greet them and invite them to his home. “Good farmer Clark” brought the presents of vegetables; Henriette liked his “good natur’d roughness”. Charles went to Mr Smith’s place to watch the sheep shearing, but these good country people had little to offer to the Genevese visitors by way of common interests. Serina pined for Châtelaine. Henriette was unable to turn her gloomy thoughts from the unhappy state of affairs at home. The only congenial people were Mr Lettice who, however, was away most of the time, and the Cornwallis family.

William Cornwallis was the rector of Wittersham, a village about 3 miles to the north- east of Peasmarsh, endowed with a noble 12th century church. He was a cousin of the first Marquis Cornwallis, governor-general of British India from 1786-1793 and Vice- Roy of Ireland from 1798-1801, who was also the unfortunate general who had surrendered to the enemy at Yorktown in the American war of independence. Soon a close friendship sprang up between the two families. Mr Cornwallis was not an erudite man, but his deeply religious wife was cultivated, tender and affectionate., She wrote a generation later to Charles about his family:

There was a warmth, an openness - a something that it was impossible not to love - and when we were divided we felt as we were deprived of much that made life pleasant to us, and we were under great anxiety for your safety.31

There were two daughters, Sarah and Caroline, both gawkish country girls. Sarah was to die in child-birth a few years later. Caroline proved to be her mother’s daughter; she developed strong literary interests and became Serina’s life-long friend, to whom

31 Letter 24/10/1826, A/6/78 Pescia

36

Sismondi was to propose marriage in 1805. In 1826, after Caroline had been ill, she came to stay with Serina at Pescia in Tuscany for several months.

However, Henriette was little impressed by the products of English education. She found the young Smiths and Cornwallises stiff, without grace, and incapable of making intelligent conversation. Mrs Smith on the other hand prattled politely which was little better. At parties men and women kept aloof from one another, except for dance nights when the young men were too familiar with the girls.32

English cooking proved intolerable - in particular, gooseberry pie and apple pie, made from unripe fruit. Loneliness, nostalgia and fears for Geneva, the alien ambience, made life difficult to bear for Henriette. However, Charles pointed out to her how ethnocentric her views were becoming, and how wrong it was to see their own country in a rosy light to the detriment of their present home. He soon converted his mother who, like all the family, came to see increasingly more merit in the English way of life. Tough she felt that English poetry and plays were inferior to those in the French tradition, she envisaged with “fond regret” the parting from “everything and every person” in England; “the people in general are here extremely kind to strangers”.33 However, the prospect of a winter in the seclusion of Peasmarsh was insupportable. It was not until they left Peasmarsh for Tenterden after half a year that she came wholeheartedly to embrace English life.

While the ladies suffered from the uniformity of rural life, Charles was soon deeply immersed in his new world. Not only did he take an interest in the agricultural pursuits of Mr Smith, but he participated in social and political events as a keen observer, and he studied English political and legal literature with is his accustomed thoroughness. He learnt a good deal about England from Mrs Cornwallis with whom he was soon on intimate terms. They went on long walks together, and she wrote to him thirty-two years later about this time:

32 33 Sept. 22

37

as all disputes do, by each retaining our own opinion...34 to Charles’s mother who in turn, had to learn to share her son's trust in ....?

Mrs Corwallis's religion was too formal for the family's and Charles's liking. Though his theological discussions with her helped to form his understanding of Anglicanism and its role in English life. Her preferred poet was Edward Young, he together ??? of the glorious side of romanticism; the family read his 'Night thoughts; together. But they found themselves more at home in Blair's Sensuous, and at the same time they enjoyed reading novels by Fanny Bursney and Charolotte Smith.

The family's main interest centred on history. They read volume after volume of the General History of Europe.

This friendship with an older, maternal woman was the first in a long line in Charles's life. He was used to putting his trust in his mother as well as regarding her as his equal or even his superior in moral and intellectual maters. Older women had the advantage of posing no sexual challenge to his naturally temperate passions. It was not until old age that Charles entered easily into friendships with young girls, that is, at a time when any sexual intimacy was out of the question. There were exceptions to this rule that have been mentioned later. The warmth of his feelings of unselfishness endeared him to women, just as he was deeply attracted to them and never patronised them. Women confided their innermost thoughts to Charles, and they were able to rise to the high con... which he entertained of his intellectual and moral qualities. Mrs Cornwallis and her many successors had the reason the fretful???

It was not only the English word that Mrs Cornwallis helped to improve for Charles. They also read Italian together, and soon Charles started writing to her in Italian.35 He was able to borrow a copy of Metastesio from Mr Lettice and to study this author

34 Letter 6/6/1826 inedit Perscia 3522 July

38 together with is mother. This grounding in the Italian language (the rudiments of which must have been familiar to them) was to be of great use to them when later they found themselves compelled to emigrate to Italy. They got Mr Martyn to send them from London Dr Robertson's Histories of America, Scotland, and Charles V. The latter work was to be of lasting importance for Sismondi, including as it did "A View of the Progress of Society in Europe from the subversion of the Roman Empire to the beginning of the sixteenth century". With its "proofs and illustrations" it was the first sociological survey of the history of the Middle Ages. While of little attracting to the ordinary run of readers, this social analysis, as Robertson himself remarked, might "to some... appear the most curious and interesting part of the work".36 As it did on Gibbon, there is no doubt that the work made the deepest impact on Sismondi. It was a "History of Humanity", as Walpole had suggested its proper title should be, a narrative which brought to fruition the new sort of history which Voltaire had first mapped out in his Essay sur les Moerus of 1754.37 Robertson's was not the only seminal work that Sismondi studied during his English exile, as we shall soon have occasion to show.

While his mother and sister made a permanent record of their stay in England through their diaries, Charles spent much of his time drawing and painting water colours. He made charming likenesses of the view from Mr Lettice's vicarage, of the rectory at Wittersham, of coastal scenes in the vicinity, and landscapes at Tenterden where the family lived after leaving Peasmarsh. Meticulously as ever he procured a book of illustrations from which he transcribed rules of painting. On the other hand, Peasmarsh offered no opportunities for listening to and the playing of music. altogether the summer was uncongenial, despite the serenity of the luscious East Sussex landscape, the flowers seemed to be less fragrant than at Châtelaine, and the lack of society held out no distraction from the depressing thoughts concerning

36William Robertson, The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V, 1769, Works Vol.III (1824) p.7. 37Dugald Stewart, Account of the Life and Writings of William Robertson, D.D. Works vol.X, 130, 143).

39

Geneva. The family decided to move and finally found a reasonably suitable house in Tenterden across the Kentish border, some 8 miles from Peasmarsh and 5 miles from Wittersham.

For the menfolk Peasmarsh was less of a prison than for the women. Charles walked far and wide and often went out on horseback. He visited Winchelsea, Tenterden, Hastings, and time and again Rye, where shopping could be done. Charles talked to fishermen and sailors to satisfy his curiosity: And it was at Rye that he got his first experience of political life in England. He and his father attended a parliamentary election as well as the election of a new mayor. On June 18, 1793 they walked to Rye in the morning and unexpectedly were invited to take part in the Election dinner. Charles returned the 8 miles home to get properly dressed. Afterwards he gave a detailed account to his mother:

He related how they had entered the town hall and were sent for in by the Ushers, then Mr Tom Lamb mov'd down among the Magistrates, they declin'd the honour but sat close by him. All was already voted and notice being given of it to the Assembly. Mr Jenkinson the reelect'd Member (he was a Member already but a Charge that was lately confer'd to him of co-inspector on the East India Company depriv'd him of the place in parliament unless he was reelect'd and so was), Mr Jenkinson then arose and made a speech of acknowledgement, then came down form the erected Arm'd Chair and went round the Assembly shaking hands with great part of 'em, invited to dinner, Mr Lamb going round with him, he then approached Mr S and Charles and spoke to them and invited them. Mr Lamb urging them they gladly comply'd but Charles thought proper to change his coat I dress'd his head and he return'd when Mr Jenkinson and Electors went out the Town's house they went round the town preceded by music playing God save the King and four women dress'd in white who held uplifted faisceaux made round a staff with silver utensils of all sorts ribbons and flowers attended by men also dress'd in white. In the hall they din'd were dressed 3 different tables one where sat the Member and Mayor, Mr S sat there. Another more numerous where Mr Tom Lamb was he call'd Charles to sit by him and 3rd where Mr Davenport was president the entertainment was fine and plentiful, when they toast'd the Town of Rye (after King's health) they hurra'd three times, three that's an old custom they have resumed last year they all stood up and drank the toast then the President in each table ask'd have you all don? when he sees it is he held up the glass uttering 3 times hip, hip, hip, and then all cries aloud Hurra, Hurra, Hurra that

40

was perform'd another time for the Election, and another time for Mr Pitt and Lord Granville. Mr S and Charles left the Board at 5.

The passage gives a good example of Madame S's English style and bears witness to Charles' keen curiosity and detailed observation. Some time later, on the 23rd August, Mr S was present when a new mayor was elected at Rye. The new mayor was their friend, Mr Tomb Lamb, who took over from his father who "gave into his hands the white rod that is a mark of his dignity Mr Tom took the oath and made a speech he was afterwards attended home by the whole Assembly which he invited to dine with him." The Lamb family were not the only friends of the Simondes at Rye; they knew also the families Wooller, Watson, Chamberlain, Proctor, Dalton and Megaw.

On the 24th September they bade farewell to Peasmarsh. As Mr Martyn had written to Charles a month earlier, they were, according to Mr Lettice, well beloved there. However, Tenterden proved to be a far better place for them. Set in the same type of landscape as Peasmarsh it was a beautiful and generously laid out old town with fine houses, with shops, clubs, a hotel the 'Woolpack' and Assembly rooms (today the town hall). There was a grocer, a fishmonger, a greengrocer, a milliner, there was a circulating library as well as a musical and a literary club. There were regular card evenings at the Assembly rooms, there were dances in which the customary reserve of the young English people was forgotten and led to greater intimacy than Henriette could approve of. The townspeople took then to their heart.

The leading family of Mr Curteis became close friends, and the parson, Mr Coysgarne was on intimate terms with them. Miss Ellis, who kept a boarding school, Squire Blakemore, Captain Ball, Louise Woodham, Elisa Thomson, the Mace family, Mrs Children, their landlady, all these names and many others keep cropping up on the diaries. The family took to reading the Kentish newspaper and soon were part of the community; after some difficulty the were able to procure a pew in the Church. They lived in the outskirts of the town in "a small, ill furnished house" in a rural setting with walnut and pear trees and three or four cows grazing on the lawn, a prospect

41 which Charles made the subject of one of his water-colours. Serina made friends of her own and Charles, soon quite at home, continued his studies as well as having a good time. On day

Charles in a frolic rode my horse in the woman's way and cut the most comical figure that could be seen and we were laughing heartily when we saw a chaise coming with a Lady and Gentleman riding in it and a servant on horseback attending: they look'd amaz'd, but we could not help it and laugh’d the more for it.

Charles showed himself a "truly good brother"; when Serina was ill he looked after her, and it was he who was successful in applying a leach to her. When Serina was thrown by her horse while attempting to mount it, Charles "attended her leading her horse by the bridle in the dirtiest heaviest rods that can be imagin'd." AS well as being gentle and considerate he could also be firm. On February 18th 1794, there was a Music Assembly evening. At 10 o'clock Charles saw the ladies home and returned himself for supper which lasted until 2 in the morning.

There was a clergyman Mr Bennet... he was so much tipsy that he behaved very indecently, he and one Mr Hope... who was drunk also had taken into their heads to let nobody go out and when Charles was resolv'd to go they both arose and would prevent him. Hope turned the key and push'd Charles backward but Charles was determin'd that whenever he had got up he would not be prevented, put on his hat forc'd his passage and told him with some warmth that he intended to go and should go; meantime he repuls'd Hope's arm and as they both stood amaz'd Michelson arose and turn'd them from the door, Mr S. Mr Curteis and Mr Coysgarne followed...

On another occasion at a dance "Charles sang a song or two."

The Simondes became increasingly identified with English life. They read the Annual Register, but also Ariosto and works on Roman and American History.

On the whole, life at Tenterden was a happy episode. Yet from time to time the French Revolution cast its shadow over their life. Letters from Geneva, from Mrs S's sister, Madame Juventin, Madame Visusseux, Mademoiselle Gourgas and others kept

42 the family informed concerning the situation at home. Henriette was unhappy about the behaviour of fellow émigrés.

I am sorry to say that so few of the Emigrés I have seen seem to be what they ought there is a thoughtlessness and levity in their manners I cannot like in their situation.38

The English were kind and helpful, but did they really understand what was happening on the Continent?

Mrs Cornwallis will have it that the revolution is a judgement of God against Catholic faith which she looks upon as a great sin... my children were apt to answer a little pertly...

Time was running out. The family felt they had to return to Geneva to look after their affairs. They had not come to England as refugees but rather as temporary émigrés from home during a time of upheaval. On March 15 Henriette wrote:

I leave it [Tenterden] with so much regret that is such a pang to my hurt that I congratulate me and indeed us all for not having spent last summer here; a longer stay would make the parting still worse. I say for us all, it is plain we are all affected with the same feeling, but we don't trust it to words and we don't say one to the other how sorry we are that would only increase the melancholy.

They paid farewell visits to Peasmarsh, to Rye, and above all to Wittersham. The leave-taking from the Cornwallis was heartbreaking.

We could not speak of what engaged our thoughts nor could we divest ourselves of it. At length Mrs Cornwallis left the room and when I thought that the moment would step in I should take my leave of her I felt myself unequal to the task and while the three girls Mr Cornwallis and Mrs S were engaged in examining some plant I snatch'd my cloak and stole away with Serina. We met Charles who had just seen the horses ready; we mounted the gentlemen soon follow'd us with Mr Cornwallis his wife had sent down a note Mr S deliver'd me. She beg'd I would excuse her taking a personal leave but she would stay upstairs till we were gone. away we rode with heavy heart and moisted eyes.39

3829 Dec. 39March 18)

43

At Tenterden they got a send-off at the Assembly Rooms. They received presents, and the tears were flowing; the farewell from the Curteises was not less touching than that from the Cornwallis family. They left at 7 o'clock in the morning on the 25th March and got as far as Sevenoaks. Henriette wrote there in her diary:

T's done. we have parted with our own Tenterden where we were so much at home... our neighbours and all the shopkeepers in our way thro' town came forth and beckon'd us affectionately... when we reach'd the Curteis house and beheld for the last time the windows of that comfortable parlour we have spent so many agreeable evenings in we all gave way to a gush of passion that we could not restrain... Oh my dear old England.40

The following day took them to London where they stayed for a whole month. The first night they slept at an inn in Fleet Street. On the following morning they went to look for lodgings at Charing Cross, the Strand, Temple Bar, and Southampton Street. Finally, tired and discouraged, they came across the right place in Henrietta Street, off Covent Garden, a parlour, two bedrooms on the second floor, and another on the third, which they rented for 5½ guineas for one month. The variety of exotic fruit in the shops was fascinating, pineapples, coconut, mango, and so on. Next evening they went to Covent Garden theatre and were well satisfied with a new play and an opera. On Sunday they attended service in ST Paul's; it was impressive though the choir was too shrill. Then they took a coach to Westminster Abbey and walked home through the park.

Their good friends from the Genevese colony came to visit them and invited them to their houses, the Cazenoves, Chauvets ("I was at a loss how to speak French to them as I am used to speak English”), the Blanchevays, Mouthions, M. Fazy, M. de Luc. At the Chauvets they met Sir Francis d'Ivernois and Etienne Dumont, the two famous refugees from the abortive Genevan revolution of 1782, when Mr S had opposed them as a member of the aristocratic party. D'Ivernois was an agreeable surprise; "whatsoever ugly sound that name once brought to the ear, I was rather gratified by

40March 25

44 his presence and conversation." Charles was invited to visit the distinguished political writer, and there were some meetings with him. But "that hateful fellow Dumont" did not pass muster, "I felt my face glow as he bow'd and address'd to me I was afraid it had betray'd my disgust but my folks tell me I kept a pretty good countenance." Twenty years later Dumont was to become Charles's beloved friend until his death in 1829, while d'Ivernois became a stern critic of Sismondi's economic views.

Mr and Mrs Wickham were again very kind to the Simondes. He procured admission to a session of parliament for Mr S and Charles. Though it was no special occasion, they heard Mr Pitt speak as well as Mr Fox, Mr Gray and Sir James Murray. They were inveterate theatre goers. Mr S took at once the first row of a box at Drury Lane for three nights, they went to Covent Garden and the Haymarket. At Drury Lane they saw Mrs Siddons in Macbeth and the Virgin Unmasked, but "I cannot tell I have admired Mrs Siddon"; they saw also L'Allegro and Il Penseroso. They read novels by Mrs Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith and Fanny Burney. Mr S attended service at the Helvetic Chapel in Soho where M Abouzit was the preacher, but Henriette and the children preferred to go to St Paul's.

On April 8th Charles was able to be present at a meeting of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts and Agriculture, sponsored by its secretary, Mr Moore. However, like any foreigner at a British meeting, he was not impressed as the committee system caused the proceedings to be stiff and pre-occupied with formalities, "they seemed to be fond of mimicking the constituted body (parliament)..." There were other diversions apart from the theatre and social occasions. The ladies went on shopping expeditions; they were kept waiting in London's most fashionable shop because so many fine ladies made their purchases, with more than ten coaches waiting for them outside. They went to Wedgwood's warehouse, where they were politely shown round, and bought eight white plates. (Twenty-five years later Charles, through his marriage, was to become a member of

45 the Wedgewood family). They went on excursions. One took them to Greenwich where they admired the chapel, the hospital and the observatory; they went by boat and returned on "the Machine... a long coach with a bench each side and small wheels and contains sixteen or seventeen perches".

The highlight was a two-day excursion to Windsor, Eton and Slough. At Windsor they saw the king set out on a hunting party; "when he passed us he look'd at us with some attention as we were the only standers by, and touch'd his hat, t'was with difficulty I forbore curtsying and uttering aloud God bless you". The men and Serina walked the two miles to Slough to see Dr William Herschel and his telescope. Unfortunately he had just left for London, but they were allowed to have a close look at the large telescope in the garden; Serina, though she gives a clear and detailed description of the mechanism, was somewhat disappointed that the telescope was not as large as she had been led to expect from her reading about it.

Yet temus fugit, as the motto on the sundial over the entrance to St Mildred's at Tenterden pronounced. On April 24, 1994 the family's stay in London came to an end. They received costly presents from the Martyns including golden necklaces for the ladies and had an affectionate and moving parting from them and other friends. The next morning they set out for Canterbury and Dover.

46

II.

The stay in England was the beginning of a life-long love affair for Sismondi. Land, people, history, laws, customs, literature, and religion - all these exerted a strong attraction which was never to die though it was to wear thin over the years. The English constitution and the lessons it held in the field of political philosophy and practice left a seminal and lasting mark on Sismondi's thought. Moreover, as well as in politics and jurisprudence, he grew more deeply interested in modern historiography and in literary history and criticism. We have little indication of his growing concern with questions of economics, but inevitably his life in rural surroundings led to a deepening of his interest in agriculture which he had first developed at Châelaine.

We know from his mother's diary that he gathered some knowledge of the practical aspects of farming. Mr Smith at Peasmarsh was his mentor in this respect, and equally Mr Cornwallis who combined his rectorial functions with those of a farmer. Indeed, when, after his return to Geneva, the revolutionary situation compelled the family to emigrate, Sismonde formed his plan to set up as a farmer in England. It was solely because of lack of capital that they were unable to carry out this project. While in London, as mentioned, Charles procured an invitation to attend a meeting of the 'Society for the Encouragement of the Arts and Agriculture'. But we can only guess to what extent he studied the theoretical aspects of agriculture. When a few years later he started writing himself on this subject, he proved to be well acquainted with the work of Arthur Young and Sir John Sinclair, the great British leaders in the field. It is possible that his acquaintance with their writings was derived from the perusal of the volumes of the Bibliothèque Britannique from 1796 onwards. However, it is hardly conceivable that the family's friends in Peasmarsh and Tenterden should not have discussed such questions with their visitor. English agricultural conditions were going through crisis at the time. The effects of the enclosures of common land as well as

47 new and better methods of cultivation had made many members of the agricultural population redundant. Wages as well as the available diet were hardly sufficient for cottagers, squatters, and farm servants. There were wide-spread food riots in England in 1795, the so-called revolt of the housewives; the Poor Law Reform was then in hand, and it was widely discussed. The malaise was finally to come to a head in the Sussex riots of 1830, precisely in the Eastern part of the country which the Sismondes had inhabited. Though better off than the small farmers of France, the lower agricultural classes in England were in a less favourable position than their Genevan counterparts; to compare their conditions must have been natural to people with the curiosity and background of both father and son.

Agriculture practical, theoretical, and historical, was to be one of the life-long preoccupations of Sismondi. The scientific reform of methods as well as the improvement of tools of cultivation fascinated him. The sociology and morphology of agriculture was to occupy a foremost place both in his economic and historical writings. Moreover, from an ethical viewpoint the cultivation of the land represented, in his yes, the good life, in which the individual could develop his faculties and best aspirations. Both Rousseau and Adam Smith had been agreed on this point.41 However, under the conditions of urbanisation and industrialisation this question had grown increasingly complex. What were the actual political and legal preconditions under which the good life could prevail, the life in which the individual could exercise his creative powers and yet remain a loyal member of the community? The class struggle in Geneva and the French Revolution had cast doubt on the compatibility of individual aspirations with the requirements of society. Could they be reconciled by means of philosophical understanding and legal-political measures? How had they come into being, and through what stages of development had they passed? The study of jurisprudence and political philosophy would help Sismondi to analyse the problems of liberty, equality, and order. A knowledge of history would enlighten him

41Lettre à D'Alembert Wealth of Nations

48 as to what men had done, and accordingly, were able to do, namely to develop a civilised state of affairs in place of a Hobbesian, chaotic world. During his English stay Sismondi read widely on history as well as on constitutional theory and practice. The available information enables us to follow the scope of his interests and the methods by which he deepened and consolidated them.

He had learnt the rules of evidence from Thukydides and the significance of civil history from Tacitus. He probably had read Voltaire's History of Louis XIV and the Essai sur les Moeurs by that time. But beginning with his English period, when, for the first time he was free from guidance of school and university, he concentrated increasingly on the great writers of the Scottish Enlightenment, including the English member of that school, Edward Gibbon. Apart from Rousseau, Gibbon and Adam Smith were to become the two weightiest influences on Sismondi's development and work. However, the two names which were paramount in his mother's diaries at the time were those of Dr Robertson and Hugh Blair, one of the writers whom Sismondi's teacher, Pierre Prévost, translated into French.42 During their stay at Peasmarsh and Tenterden the Simondes read the main works of William Robertson, his History of Scotland, the History of America, and the History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V. Blair is represented by his Sermons in Henriette's diaries. However, in his first extant letter (of June 21, 1801 to Madam de Stael)43 Sismondi quoted Blair's Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian44 and mentioned his connection with Adam Smith, on whose Edinburgh lectures Blair's own famous Lectures of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres45 were partly based. Blair had been a friend of John Martyn, the father and predecessor in the Cambridge Chair of Botany of Thomas Martyn, the Simonde's friend and mentor in England. Also Mr Lettice, their landlord at Peasmarsh and a friend of Thomas Martyn, had come across traces of Ossian in the Scottish isles and had talked with Charles of his findings which he was then about to publish.

42Pierre Prévost 43Pellegrinin I, No.2 p.7 44first published in 1763 45first published in 1783

49

Blair's Lectures were very popular at the time both in Britain and in France.46 In that first letter of his to Madame de Staël, in which Sismondi showed himself well versed in the history of literature, he adduced the writings both of Mr Lettice and of Blair to support his case. Evidently it was with these names that he connected his early involvement with literary history of which he was later to become a founder as an independent discipline.

Hugh Blair, Scottish Divine and Regius Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Edinburgh since 1762, belonged to the circule of the great masters of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, William Robertson, and John Millar, the teachers and predecessors of Pierre Prevost's great friend Dugald Stewart, to whose pen we owe masterly assessments of the lives of Adam Smith and of Robertson.47 Blair was not of the same paramount stature as his immortal friends. One needs only compare his Lectures with another contemporary work of genius on literary criticism, namely Gibbon's Essai sur l'Etude de La Littérature, to see how comparatively pedestrian his accomplishment was. But for that very reason we may take the Lectures as a representative statement of contemporary opinion. As such, despite its limited scope, the Lectures anticipate basic ideas which were to serve Sismondi in his epoch-making work on literary history; moreover, they are surprisingly modern. Blair's Lectures set forth a systematic and structured account of literature, dealing with the concepts of taste, criticism and genius, the rise and historical progress of language, its structure and its modes. Like (though independent from) Hamann, Blair treated language and reason as the same phenomenon; like modern structuralists, he proceeded from the meaning of words to that of sentences. His textual criticism, mainly of Addison and Swift, was thin, but he gave a useful, though primitive, classification of types of poetry and prose writing. This latter account included 'Historical Writing'48. There Blair sounded a warning against the

46Prevost was not the first translator of the Lectures; the first translation, by Conwell, dates from 1793. Prevost's translation went into many editions. 47Dugald Stewart X; Stewart's Life of Dr Smith was translated into French by Pierre Prévost. 48Lecture XXXVI

50 esprit de système; rather than philosophising and speculating in the first place, the historian should instruct his reader by fair and judicious narration. Apart from clarity, order, logical connection, and gravitas, Blair insisted on the necessity for the narrative to be interesting; this required a proper selection of material from the mass of general facts. He elaborated on the problem of unity posed by histories dealing with the development of large units such as a state; this problem was to become crucial for Sismondi in his History of the Italian Republics. Blair expected a skilful historian to "be able to trace all the secret links of the chain that binds together remote, and seemingly unconnected, events". He extolled the great Italian historians, Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Davila, Bentivolglio and Gather Paul (Fra Paola) who had both carried on from and, he said, surpassed the ancients. These Italian historians were greatly to influence Sismondi at a somewhat later date. Following Voltaire and his Scottish friends, Hume and Robertson, as well as Gibbon, Blair extolled the "recent great improvement" introduced into historical composition in the eighteenth century:

I mean a more particular attention than was formerly given to laws, customs, commerce, religion, literature, and every other thing that tends to show the spirit and genius of nations... assuredly whatever displays the state and life of mankind in different periods, and illustrates the progress of the human mind, is more useful and interesting than the detail of sieges and battles".49

Blair's account pinpointed the standards of achievement which the historian Sismondi would have to satisfy. History had to be interesting and internally connected by a great theme; it had to concentrate on the cultural life of the people, and in particular, their contribution not "the progress of the human mind"; by this he meant the attempts at taming the instincts as well as the flights of the imagination.

If the Lectures were a pedestrian piece of writing, Blair's Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian had the authentic ring of originality. His work made Ossian's poetry an immense force in the development of literary criticism and, moreover, the romantic

49p.496 (1833 ed.) Blair gave the Lectures first in Edinburgh in 1759 in a private character, since 1762 as Regius Professor; see Note p.2; they were first published in 1783.

51 movement. Although basically a Scottish utilitarian, Blair followed Shaftesbury rather than Francis Hutcheson in his assessment of literature as a force which fundamentally appealed to the emotions and the imagination rather than the values of truth and moral goodness.. Ossian's Fingal, Blair said, makes the reader "glow, and tremble, and weep".50 Ossian indeed was the equal of Homer "in strength of imagination, in grandeur of sentiment, in native majesty of passion". Blair made it clear that his assumption of the authenticity of Ossian was merely "conjectural". Authentic or not, Ossian became, as Hazlitt said, "a feeling and a name that can never be destroyed in the mind of his readers".51 In fact, his fierce, passionate and deeply imaginative poems became, not less than Shakespeare, the symbol of a peculiar Nordic approach to poetry and art which separated it distinctly from the classical, rational and formal texture of the Mediterranean tradition derived from the classical world. This distinction of the literatures of the North and South of Europe became widely accepted following Madame de Staël's De la Littérature of 1800. Her remarkable work was based in this respect on Blair's Critical Dissertation (and following Blair, on Rousseau, Henri Mallet, another of Sismondi's forerunners, Hamann and herder). Sismondi too owed his appreciation of the dichotomy between the literatures of the peoples of the North and the South of Europe directly to Blair. After the publication of De la Littérature he wrote to Madame de Staël that in her book "I encountered my own ideas so well elucidated, so well developed in yours".52 Blair gave Sismondi the inspiration which enabled him later to become, together with Ginguené, Friedrich Bouterwek and the brothers Schlegel, the founder of literary history.53

William Robertson was one of the great masters of the Scottish Enlightenment. He too left a lasting mark on Sismondi's historical work. Robertson's histories still make good reading irrespective of the wealth of new source material since unearthed. The finest of his masterpieces was the History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V, published

50Wellek I:120 51quoted in TLS 19/4/74, 392. 52Pellegrini I No.2, 12 53see Wellek I, 29

52 in 1769 after ten years of research and writing. He felt that the historical period treated by him, i.e. the time of Reformation and Renaissance, could be understood only if seen against the background of the continuity of European history; modern history had to be understood as the result of the forces which had shaped the Europe of the Middle Ages. For this reason, he preceded his work by a separate study, A View of the Progress of Society in Europe from the subversion of the Roman Empire to the beginning of the sixteenth century". This book is the first scholarly history which we possess of the Middle Ages. Moreover, it is one of the first 'goal-directed' histories, in the sense that its criterion of relevance was derived from the result which its elements had produced. The factors which it surveyed were those which its author believed to have shaped modern Europe. Similarly, Adam Smith's historical section of the Wealth of Nations derived its unity from the formation of the Protestant, capitalist world. So did Max Weber's historical sociology while Marx visualised the goal of socialism.

Robertson supplied essentially the skeleton for Sismondi's History of the Italian Republics; he paralleled, too, a good deal of the historical part of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations as well as of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, both of which became momentous secondary sources for Sismondi. The idea and design of this history of the European Middle Ages was not Robertson's own. It had been taken over from Voltaire's ingenious Essai sur les moeurs at sur les principaux faits de l'histoire depuis Charlemagne jusqu' à Louis XIII, first published in Geneva in 1754, and preceded by earlier versions under the titles Nouveau Plan d'une histoire de l'esprit humain (in the Mercure de France, 1745,-1746) and Abrégé de l'histoire universelle depuis Charlemagne jusqu' à Charles quint, 1753. These works were to prepare the ground for Voltaire's Siècle de Louis XIV as in the same way Robertson's Progress of Society laid the foundation for his history of Charles V. Both Voltaire's and Robertson's ideas on the subject of the Middle Ages as well as of the role played by Italy will be dealt with in more detail in a subsequent chapter devoted to

53

Sismondi's History of the Italian Republics, and also in the context of his youthful Recherches sur les Constitutions des Peuples Libres. What I wish to emphasise here, is that it was during his stay in England that Sismondi read that first history of the Middle Ages which was to provide a sketch for his own masterwork. The guiding ideas of ....P.60? of the unity and continuity of European civilisation, the leading role played by the rise of the Italian city states, the reliance on the work of Italian historians, including those of the eighteenth century (in particular Muratori), the emphasis on comparative cultural history, and the concept of civilisation as the spontaneous product of the creative and disciplined liberty of the individual.

After his return from England in 1794 Sismondi soon became a victim of the hideous effects of unbridled liberty. The revolution at Geneva led to his own and his father's imprisonment, the impoverishment of the family, and the death by execution of beloved friends. The question of the proper relationship between liberty, equality and order had exercised him already before he came to England. His classical education had imbued him with the pride of a Roman citizen, as witnessed by Consigal. He had grown up in a tradition of the class struggle in Geneva and, as an intelligent boy, had witnessed the uprising and the debates of 1782. Finally, he had been educated in the sprit of Rousseau's Emile, which extolled the freedom from the shackles of tradition and the liberty of the individual from domination by other men. But Rousseau combined these principles with an affirmation of the ultimate power of the community over the individual. His political ideas were obviously contradictory. They begged the question which had to be investigated with a fresh mind and with greater intellectual vigour. In fact, it was to the relationship of the liberty of the individual with his simultaneous subjection of the law that Charles's conscious efforts of study were directed in England. He is popularly known as the historian of liberty, as if he had been a German idealist philosopher, a precursor of Hegel and Lord Acton. It is important to retrace his steps in this context. Fortunately we have the précis of the course of studies which he had set himself during his stay in England; these notes

54 represent his first efforts at transforming the results of his studies into his own formulations based on his own selection of what appeared relevant to him.

Charles wasted no time before putting in hand a systematic course of study. He decided to carry on with the study of law on which he had embarked at Geneva. We do not know if any of his Genevan teachers advised him in his choice of works to be pursued, nor what help he had in this respect after his arrival in London. The family arrived there on the 17th February, and subsequently were exceedingly busy visiting friends and sight-seeing, not to mention the formalities which had to be attended to prior to their going to Peasmarsh. Yet as early as the 8th March 1793 Charles set himself a formidable programme, namely the study in depth of three major works, two of which were deeply to influence his later thought and writing: One of these works embodied the best tradition of English jurisprudence, the other was one of the great pioneering works in political sociology.

Charles set about his task with a firm purpose. He wrote three volumes of respectively 150, 136, and 158 pages, which on the first page of volume I he entitled:

Abstracts on the constitution of England from the Books of Delolme Woodeson and Blackstone 1793 Abstracted by J.C.L. Simonde, student in Law at the academy of Geneva. begun in London the 8 of March 1793

Volume I was commenced on the 8th of March in London, Volume II "at Peasmarsh the 2nd of May 1793"; volume II "the 15th of June 1793". The first volume is devoted to Delolme’s masterwork, Constitution de l'Angleterre, first published in Amsterdam in 1771, and which Charles pursued in an English translation of 1790 under the informative, though ponderous, title Constitution of the English Government in which it is compared both with the republican form of government and the other monarchies in Europe. The second and third volumes were abstracts of Blackstone's four-volumed

55

Commentaries of the Laws of England in its eleventh edition of 1791, supplemented by notes on Richard Woodeson's Systematical View of the Laws of England, a worth textbook which will concern us no further.54 These abstracts set the pattern for the procedure which Sismondi followed in his study of many works which were to become integral parts of his own thought. He had not the photographic memory of Macaulay who had the gift of total recall of the pages he had read. Sismondi had to work his way slowly and persistently through his texts, and he had to make their ideas his own by summarising them largely in his own words, and often his own arrangement. Therefore his précis contained detailed tables of contents which brought into view the imminent links between the various parts of a historical work. Eventually, he was to apply this method in his own works which excel in formative arrangements and summaries.

From Delolme he learnt a new approach to constitutional law, namely the sociological integration of how it actually worked rather than through merely studying the letter of the law. From Blackstone he gained a thorough grounding in the history as well as they systematic classification and analysis of law. Both authors combined British and Genevan learning. Delolme in fact was a native of Geneva and had originally written his work in French. Under Blackstone's guidance Sismondi was initiated into the great European tradition of jurisprudence. The Commentaries expounded not only British legal thought, the lex et consuetude Angliae, particularly following Hale's Analysis of the Law and History of the Common Law55, but incorporated also the work of such great Continental writers as Pufenforf, Crotius, Montesquieu, and Beccaria.56 In particular, Blackstone's momentous Introduction, "Of the Study, Nature, and Extent of the Laws of England", was largely based on the relevant passages in the Principes du

54Richard Woodeson's book, first published in 1777, consisted to 60 lectures which he gave as Venetian professor at Oxford. They were meant to supplement Blackstone's Commentaries, "but they lack the grasp of principle, the historical sense, and the literary deftness and tact, which made bLackstone's Commentaries a classical book". William Holdsworth, A History of English Law, Vol.XII, 1938, 421). 55 56

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Droit Natural57 of Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, the most eminent of the Genevan lawyers, and himself a descendant of one of the great Italian families of the first wave of immigration into Geneva, the Burlamacchi from Lucca. What Charles may have missed in his disturbed academic pursuits as a law student in Geneva, his study in depth of Blackstone was amply to make up.

Today Blackstone is known mainly as the target of Bentham's devastating attack in his A Fragment on Government of 1776. It was in fact Blackstone's introductory disquisition on the nature of law which aroused Bentham's ire and thus gave rise to this his first treatise, intended "to pluck the mask of mystery from the face of Jurisprudence",58 apart from wishing to destroy Blackstone's versions of the original contract and of the law of nature by making use of Hume's philosophy of utility59. It was from Hume, and not as so often asserted, from French philosophy, that Bentham derived his philosophy of utility. "... no sooner had I read the part of the work [of Hume] which touches on this subject, that I felt as if scales had fallen from my eyes. I then for the first time learnt to call the cause of the people the cause of Virtue".60 Bentham aimed at exposing the superficiality of Blackstone's optimistic interpretation of the British constitution as something falling "little short of perfection".61 However, precisely because Bentham is above any suspicion of partiality in favour of Blackstone, we may well turn to him for an elucidation of the explanation of the immense influence the Commentaries were exercising in the legal and political thought of the time. According to Bentham, Blackstone's "works have had beyond comparison a more extensive circulation, have obtained a greater share of esteem, of applause, and consequently of influence... than any other writer who on that subject has yet appeared... He it is, in short, who, first of all institutional writers has taught Jurisprudence to speak the language of the Scholar and the Gentleman... if he has not

571747; Principes du Droit Politique 1751 58p.19 59see Hume's Treatise of Human Nature of 1739 60p.50 n.2 61Blackstone I, 126

57 enriched her with that precision that is drawn only from the sterling treasury of the sciences, [he] has decked her out, however, to advantage, from the toileete of classic erudition... and sent her abroad in some measure to instruct and... to entertain."62 Even though his censorial or critical approach was found wanting, Blackstone's mode of demonstration by means of historical narration and systematic arrangement commanded Bentham's admiration: The historical "part he has executed with an elegance which strikes everyone". In the most important function of the lawyer, the "business of arrangement..., our Author has been thought, and not, I conceive, without justice, to excel; at least in comparison of anything in that way that has hitherto appeared. "This to him we owe such an arrangement of the elements of Jurisprudence, as wants little, perhaps, of being the best that a [purely] technical nomenclature will permit of".63 High praise indeed from the author's greatest adversary, and in particular from one steeped equally in the English and French literature on the subject.

In his own words, Blackstone's aim was "to investigate the elements of the law, and the ground of our civil polity... the general spirit of laws and the principles of universal jurisprudence, combined with an accurate knowledge of our own municipal constitutions, their original, reason, and history..."64. The analysis of institutions, and in particular, of constitutional law, the rise and development of political society as well as the aims it was to serve - in all these aspects the study of Blackstone unfolded for Sismondi a panorama which brought into view the interconnection of history, law, politics and civilisation. As Blackstone expressed it:

sciences are of a social disposition and flourish best in the neighbourhood of each other: nor is there any branch of learning but may be helped and improved by assistances drawn from other arts.65

62p.22 63pp.23-24 64I, p.II 65Comm. 1, 33

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It was this interdisciplinary approach which Sismondi was to expand and to bring closer to perfection in his own work which deliberately embraced the whole compass of the social sciences.

There were other lessons which Sismondi learnt from Blackstone. "Blackstone first rescued the law of England from chaos".66 He fulfilled for jurisprudence the same function which economics owed to Adam Smith. Likewise, Sismondi was to establish from fragmented and unsystematic sources the unity as well as the periodisation of the histories of Italy and France as well as of the literature of Southern Europe. Like Blackstone he was to explain political, and, going beyond Blackstone, economic principles by reference to heir history. Historical narrative for both writers found its rationale in its use as a basis for pragmatic step-by-step-reform or social engineering. Thus Blackstone became the begetter of the Historical School of Jurisprudence as Sismondi was to be the founder of the Historical School of Economics of the nineteenth century. There were two important truths which Sismondi found incorporated in Blackstone's work, "first that effective legal history involves comparison, and, secondly that it is a history of ideas".67 Finally, both scrutinised and extolled the role of liberty and the protection which it enjoyed under the English constitution.

Blackstone distinguished between natural and political or civil liberty. Natural liberty "consists properly in a power of acting as one thinks fit, without any restraint and control...".68 This natural liberty, however, was "a wild and savage liberty", part of which every man had to give up the price for partaking in the benefits of society.

Political therefore or civil liberty, which is that of a member of society, is no other than natural liberty so far restrained by human law (and no farther) as is necessary and expedient for the general advantage of the public.69

66Fitzjons Stephen, Hist. of Crim. Law II, 214-215. Holdstworth 716 67Maitland quoted by Holdsworth 725 68Comm. Bk.I, Chap.I, 125 69ibid.

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Laws were justified in diminishing the natural liberty of the citizen as long as they restrained him from doing mischief to his fellow-citizens, and as long as they did not enable the monarch or the nobility or a popular assembly to exercise a wanton restraint on the will of the subject. All three of these institutions were liable to become tyrannous and violate the rule that interference with the individual was permissible only in matters of public, in contrast to private, concern.70 These views were not peculiar to Blackstone. They mirrored the views and (in a simplified form) the classifications of Continental lawyers like Groitius, Montesquieu and Burlamaqui, of the Encyclopedie, of Hobbes, Locke and Hume. However, Blackstone gave expression to them as parts of a social philosophy which Sismondi studied and absorbed, while making a careful précis of what he had read.

Blackstone opened for Sismondi the door to the study of the institutional branch of legal and political thought. The interpretation of law and the constitution, from historical origins to present practice and future trends, were aspects of political thought in which Blackstone excelled. But where he was weak was in the fields of philosophical analysis and sociological observation. His analytical weakness, for which Bentham had chided him, was, it is true, compensated for by his awareness of traditional continuities which were derived from legislation and jurisdiction rather than from the postulates of philosophy. However, his lack of sociological awareness was one aspect in which Blackstone's work, like that of most lawyers, was indeed decidient. He dealt with the institutions of the law and the constitution, but not with their underlying reality. Legislation and jurisdiction gave expression to what citizens and authorities ought to do, but not necessarily to what they were actually doing. In fact, Blackstone's evaluation of the actual working of the English constitution was as unrealistic and dependent on prejudice as e.g. his assessment of the allegedly favourable treatment of women in English law.71

70This distinction corresponds with J.S. Mill's "other-regarding" and "self-regarding" interests in On Liberty. See earlier in Francis Go...? self-preserving and social processions (Achmann 126): also Bentham, Principles and ....? in Legislation, 1769, chap. I,32, chap XVII, 6. 71Commentaries, I, chap. XV, 445

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For a critical thinker like Bentham the British constitution was "the finest and most excellent of any the world ever saw"72, yet at the same time it was full of imperfections and badly in need of reform. Blackstone, on the other hand, could find no fault at all with the same constitution, under which, he said, "the idea and practice... political or civil liberty flourished in their highest vigour in these kingdoms, where it falls little short of perfection...".73 It was not so much that this shrewd lawyer was carried away by native enthusiasm. The origin of his ingenuous opinion was rather to be found in the fact that his concern was predominantly with how people were expected to behave under the law of the constitution. He was no sociologist who asked how people actually did behave, and how institutions actually worked. Most lawyers of the eighteenth, 19th and early 20th centuries would have agreed with Blackstone that such considerations were not really the legitimate business of a political and legal thinker. Yet there were some who asked this sort of question. The Scottish historians made use of a science of human nature dealing both with individual man and society, a procedure which had been developed by Hobbes and Locke and had found its masters in David Hume and Adam Smith. They inquired into the psychological and sociological principles underlying the actual working of politics and economics. However, the first systematic accounts of the British constitution from a sociological viewpoint were due to foreign observers, Montesquieu and Rousseau. Their diagnoses prepared the ground for Delolme, whose masterly work on the English constitution Sismondi studied and excerpted from an English translation in his own, far from impeccable, English.

It is a commonplace that the concept of liberty is elusive because the term is used in many different ways.74 In Consigal the young Sismondi had portrayed it as the patrician privilege of a proud Roman citizen to take his part in the government of the

72A Comment on the Commentaries, p.211, quoted Holdsworth 733 73Blackstone, p.126 74Montesquieu in the Esprit des Lois gives ten interpretations of liberty and refers to many more. Bk.XI, chp.II

61 republic, and to rebel in case he was denied this privilege.75 In Blackstone Sismondi met with the concept of political or civil liberty which guarantees the security of the individual under the rule of laws which both protected and restrained him. As Montesquieu had expressed it: "Liberty is the right to all that the laws permit".76 In Delolme there was a far more subtle approach to politics which combined historical insight with a shrewd assessment of human nature and the functioning of society. Rousseau, though himself a romantic individualist, had argued in his Social Contract that liberty was identical with sovereignty; and legitimate sovereignty, based on the social contract, rested on the legislative participation of each citizen. For that reason he condemned the representative system of the English constitution which deprived most of its citizens of direct participation in government. He contended that the institution of representation originated in feudalism and perverted the liberty which the ancient republics had enjoyed.

The English people think that they are free, but in this belief they are profoundly wrong. The are free only when they are electing members of parliament. Once the election has been completed, they revert to a condition of slavery: they are nothing. Making such use of it in the few short moments of their freedom, they deserve to lose it.77

Delolme rejected this conception of liberty which, he said, did not correspond with political and social reality. He denied the existence of a general will or community of purpose which unified the citizens of a state. On the contrary, the sovereignty of the multitude could easily destroy that of the individual, as the interests of individuals were nearly always opposed to each other. The individual was "submerged in the crowd" and required protection of his person and the fruits of his industry. His liberty depended upon legal safeguards against unjustified interference by the government as well as by other individuals.

But to contribute by one's suffrage in the establishment of that order, that network, by means of which a man, submerged, so to speak, in the

75This dual conception corresponds with Aristotle's description of liberty in democratic states. See Politics, Bk, VI, chap.II 76Livre XI, chap.III 77Bk.III, chap.XV, Worlds Classics ed.373

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crowd, is safely protected, to set down the rules which must be applied by the authorities charged with the defence of the individual, to safeguard that they don't go beyond these rules - all these are concerns of government, and not at all of liberty... the exercise of the suffrage is not liberty, yet it is a means of establishing liberty.78

Delolme put his finger on a problem which still engages the mind of political philosophers today. there are those who, like Bernard Crick, maintain that "politics is freedom".79 On the other hand, there are the followers of Delolme, though his seminal work has fallen into oblivion; the representative thinker of this group is Isaiah Berlin. He, too, understands by liberty and the individual's opportunity for action within an area free from interference rather than sovereignty, the right to participation and integration in the political process. He terms the former negative and the latter positive liberty. Positive liberty is concerned with the question 'Who governs me?'; negative liberty asks 'How far does government interfere with me?'80 Like Delolme, Berlin deals in detail with the dangers inherent in the exercise of liberty and with the perversions to which it lends itself. His treatment is more subtle philosophically, though less concrete in its application to the English constitution than that of Delolme.81

Berlin attributes the idea that the sovereignty of the people could easily destroy that of individuals to the reaction to the French Revolution in the early nineteenth century; he quotes Condorcet, Benjamin Constant and J.S. Mill as the earliest defenders of the modern concept of negative liberty. However, the distinction between the two types of liberty was fully developed in Delolme. Moreover, Sismondi's teacher Pierre Prevost had made it clear in a similar attack on Rousseau that positive liberty, the right to sit in assemblies and to vote, was appropriate only to ancient society in which privileged warriors dominated an enslaved multitude; by contrast, the liberty of modern peoples

78p.188 79In Defence of Politics, Penguin 1962, 199 80Four Essays on Liberty, OUP 2nd ed. 1969, 130 81Delolme's distinction between liberty and the "means of establishing liberty" corresponds with Berlin's concepts of liberty and "the conditions of its exercise".

63 consisted in freedom fro political interference.82 Modern or negative liberty, according to Berlin, took its rise first at the time of the Renaissance and Reformation. Delolme traced it back to the time of the Norman Conquest. Sismondi, too, was later to locate its origin in the eleventh century. Delolme had supplied him with a potent analytical tool to be applied in his historical and political writings.

The English constitution clearly guaranteed an appreciable measure of liberty. But was it not the product of a transient phase of historical development which could not last? Aristotle had pointed out in Book V of his Politics that all constitutions were liable to excesses and, consequently, would lead to sedition and revolution. Similarly, Rousseau held that "the body politic, no less than the body human, begins to die from the very moment of its birth and carried within itself the causes of its own destruction... Even the best constitution will one day have an end, but it will live longer than one less good, provided no unforeseen accident bring it to an untimely death."83 Rousseau elaborated here on Montequieu's interpretation of the English constitution in his Esprit des Lois of 1748. Montesquieu held that the English constitution was better balanced than any other because of its effective division of the legislative, executive, and judicial powers. In England these powers, far from stifling one another, had reached a high degree of harmony which procured liberty and security for its citizens. All the same, all political institutions were doomed to corruption and destruction.84

As all things human come to an end, so the [English] state... will lose its liberty, it will perish. Rome, Laceedaemon and Carthage have perished. It will perish when the legislative power becomes more corrupt than the executive.85

According to Delolme, however, there was no true historical parallel between Rome and England. Montesquieu was wrong in reading Rome as a free country; like

82L'economic des anciens Gouvernemens comparee a celle des Gouvernemens modernes, Berlin 1783, 39-40 83Social Contract, Bk III, chap.XI 84Esprit des Lois, Livre VIII 85ibid. Livre XII, chap. VI

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Rousseau later, he confused power and liberty. Moreover, though a pioneer of sociological enquiry, he misunderstood the nature of the English people and their constitution. The Romans were not a people of citizens, but a people of conquerors; Rome was not a State but head of a State. It was bound to lose its liberty when it lost the empire which it had exploited. By contrast, in England conquerors and conquered had coalesced into one people.

But England forms a society based on totally different principles. There the whole of liberty and the whole of power are not piled up, as it were, on one side so as to leave elsewhere only slavery and misery... From end to end of the Island you have the same laws, the same interests...86

Moreover, the essential point concerning the English constitution was not that it was based upon democratic virtue, which would be debased and thus lead to the corruption of the legislative power, as Montesquieu had conjectured. Its rationale was rather its representative character which gave appropriate expression to the individual interests of the citizens. The constitution was subject to and capable of change in form and in substance except for its one constant, namely the pursuit of self-interest or happiness. True, English citizens have not the right to appoint the Governors of Jamaica and the colonies, but then, this sort of right is of no interest to them. What counts is that they are free to sit in judgement on one another. It is through the judicial power, trial by jury and habeas corpus, as well as the liberty of the press that they exercise their democratic prerogative. It is by their representatives that their interests are safeguarded in parliament without having to partake in intricate matters of state themselves.87

Obviously, Delolme was rather sanguine in his assessment of the immortality of the British constitution. He was sanguine, too, in his account of the balance of power, an account, though subtle in detail, which hardly improved on those given by Locke and Hume, and, following them, Montesquieu. In his view the executive had to be

86p.269 87p.260(a)

65 undivided in the hands of the monarch, whereas the legislative power should be shared by the two houses of parliament. He overestimated the impact of the aristocracy on the composition of the lower house. Most important, he neglected to take notice of the increasing role of the King's ministers who were finding their base of power in the assent of parliament no less than in the confidence placed in them by the King; executive power thus came to rest largely in the legislative assembly rather than remaining a royal prerogative.

This is not the place to evaluate in detail the views advanced by Delolme. What matters is that through him Sismondi was introduced to the most subtle analysis of contemporary politics. This analysis incorporated the best thought of the time, in particular the thought of Locke and Hume and their follower Montesquieu. The seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries were the time of the predominance of British political theory. Delolme continued this tradition while rejecting the specific modifications which French-writing political thinkers had made in the second half of the latter century. The metaphysical materialism of D'Holbach and Helvétius left no imprint on his pragmatic approach, and he rejected Rousseau's contribution to politics. Yet, though he followed the British path, he was, like Sismondi, a citizen of Geneva.

Jean-Louis Delolme came from a family which went back in the records of Geneva to the fifteenth century and was admitted to the bourgeoisie in 1655. He set up as an advocate in 1763. In 1767 he published a pamphlet taking the side of the popular cause in Geneva,88 which made his further stay in his hometown impossible. He went to England as a refugee from political reaction whereas Sismondi and his family had taken refuge there from revolution. His masterly treatise on the English constitution was published in French in 1771.89 The first English translation was dated 1775, after which the work won great acclaim in England and was quoted in parliament. (Charles

88Examen des trois points de droit 89Constitution de l'Angleterre, Amsterdam 1771. the work is dedicated to Lord Abingdon and signed 'de Lolme', thus making a concession to the vanite nobiliere then usual. Sismondi too used the prefix 'de'; the great philosopher and historian of philosophy Dégérando called himself de Gerando, Dupont de Nemours became Du Pont de Nemours.

66 used the English edition of 1790, which in its title emphasised the fact that Delolme not only analysed the English constitution and government but compared it "both with the republican form of government and the other monarchies in Europe".)

Delolme contrasted modern England with France. Both countries had taken their start fro medieval feudalism; both were neighbouring peoples with virtually the same physical origin and climate. Yet France was a politically fragmented country without internal loyalties; the dissension among their subjects had given the French Kings absolute and centralised power. In England, on the contrary, the Conquest had united the people against the overwhelming power of the usurpers; the aristocracy and the people came to enjoy ever increasing liberties. This was a theme which was later developed by Augustin Thierry in his Histoire de la conquête de l'Angleterre par les Normands90. Delolme's comparison of Britain with Rome has been mentioned. He was the first to introduce Charles to the comparative method in the analysis of politics.

Delolme referred to his Genevan origin as an ideal vantage point for an interpreter of the English constitution. Though a stranger, he was the son of a city state in which the liberties of the citizen had been fought for and largely achieved, no less than in England; he was steeped in the thought of Montesquieu, Burlamaqui, the Encyclopedie - in short, the tradition of Hobbes and Locke. In this regard, he was the true precursor of Sismondi. Both were able to look with pride on their origins, just as Rousseau (whose political principles they rejected) had rightly emphasised the advantage which his native Geneva had given him as an observer of the political scene. But whereas Delolme and the young Sismondi tended to glorify everything English, Rousseau took a more sceptical view not only of British Society, but also of the economic aspects of England and its early industrial and capitalist phase. In his Considerations sur le gouvernement de Pologne et sur sa reformation projetee en avril 1772, he stated:

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I shall admit that the English people is richer than the other peoples: but it does not follow that a citizen of London is better off than a citizen of Paris. People for people, the one with more money has the advantage; but this does not affect the lot of individuals, and it is in their well-being that the true pros perity 91 of a nation rests.

Though his principles were objectionable, Rousseau's perspicacity as an observer of society made an increasing impact on Sismondi. The text quoted as well as similar observations were soon to open up for him a new dimension, namely the economic, in addition to the political, aspect in the fabric of civil liberties.

Apart from Blair and the histories of Robertson and Hume, apart from Blackstone and Delolme, there was one other work which belongs to the period of Sismondi's English sojourn, and which was to influence him. This was John Adams's (the later American President's) A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America92. Charles could have read this work in a French translation which had appeared in 1792.93 However, as in the case of Delolme, he now preferred English texts. He acquired the New Edition, which had come out in London in 1794, probably during the family's stay there after they had left Tenterden.94 Adams largely adopted the ideas of Blackstone and Delolme (apart from the earlier thoughts of Harrington, Swift and Bolingbroke). However, what distinguished his work was its alternative title, History of the principal Republics in the world. Delolme had made comparisons with Rome, France and Geneva in order to throw into relief aspects of the English Constitution. For Adams, too, comparative history was marginal to his main subject- matter, i.e. the interpretation of the American constitutions. However, though marginal, his comparative treatment of the principal republics in the world, namely the Greek, Swiss and other Alpine, the American and Italian republics, was a topic in its own right. Thus it offered Sismondi an early model for the theme of his first major

91388-9 92A reply to Turgot's 'Lettre au Docteur Price sur les législateurs americains', Philadelphia 1787 93Défence des constitutions americaines. Avec des observations de M. de la Croix. Paris 1792 94Sismondi's precis consists of 59 pages. It was written up in Italy in 1795 or 1796 as there was probably not enough time left in London to do more than read the book. The extract is numbered consecutively with others taken from works by Muratori and Carlo Denina on Italian history. Pescia, Manoscritti 25/10 (152 pages).Some of the other precis contained in the same box in the Pescia library belong to the period after Sismondi's return to Geneva.

68 work, the Recherches sur les Constitutions des Peuples Libres, which he wrote in the years 1798 and 99.95

The basis of Sismondi's own oeuvre was laid during his stay in England. His guiding ideas on the subjects of history, politics and literary history took shape there. We cannot be so sure concerning his interest in economics. No doubt as in the other subjects mentioned, he owed his first education to his parents and his teachers in Geneva; in particular, his interesting adam Smith is likely to have been awakened by Piérre Prevost who acknowledged Smith as his master, and who taught economics in Geneva.96 However, there are no written records of Charles's preoccupation with Smith before the subsequent Italian period, in fact until 1798. Smith's Wealth of Nations was among the many books which he took with him to Italy; it as to remain the most important influence pervading all periods of Sismondi's creative life. Altogether, he and his family acquired a well-nigh complete English library which bulked largely among the books which, we know, they took with them to Italy from Geneva. Apart from the histories of Hume, Robertson and Gibbon, apart from Hobbes, Smith, Delolme, Blackstone and Vooddeson, there were the works of Addison and Stele, Tillotson, Dr Johnson, Swift, Richardson, Pope, Sterne, Goldsmith, Fielding, Smollet and Fanny Burney.97 Other significant books included Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Leitewitz, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Pufendor, Burlamaqui, Despreaux, and Necker, as well as proceedings of the Academie des Sciences (109 volumes from 1692 to 1754) and of the Academie de Berlin; all these books accompanied him to Pescia and later home to Geneva.

Sismondi's future role was now mapped out. His after-school education was predominantly placed in the English-speaking world. He was to represent British, and in particular Scottish, ideas on the Continent, not only to expound but to apply them

95Minerbi, 96see p.124 - Previous critique at Agric. Tosane 97Perscia. A note of our library as put in Chests (sic) and sent to Lausanne by the Barge..." in Sismondi's handwriting

69 in his historical, economic and political work. Smith, Gibbon and Delolme were to remain his masters more than any other writers. This peculiar role of an Anglo- Continental thinker accounted both for his initial success in France and Italy as well as for his later eclipse in France. Indeed, the French historians, who followed him and acknowledged him as their teacher, had largely drunk from the same source. Both Guizot and Michelet were deeply steeped in the thought of Gibbon and the Scots sociological historians. But Michelet, unlike Sismondi, conceived of French history as something sui generis, the epos, in fact, of the rise of the kingdom, of the class struggle, and the self-assertion of the people.98 For Sismondi, on the other hand, the histories of Italy and France, like English history, were milestones in the march of European civilisation, the unfolding of the religious and civil liberties of individuals rather than of the collective nation. History was the history of liberty. This history was not primarily concerned with independence from foreign domination nor with the maximal freedom of the individual. The history of liberty, for Sismondi s as well as for his Scottish precursors, was the history of civilisation, the history of the conditions which made liberty possible, the gradual realisation of individual security and the progress of society. Liberty in this sense was a means rather than an end. The end was justice and happiness. Guizot was to give his great historical works the titles history of Civilisation in France and History of Civilisation in Europe99 rather than History of French or European civilisation. The achievement of representative government and the rise of civilised middle classes, culminating in the rule of law, was the subject- matter of the history of the slow self-perfection of mankind. In this sense Sismondi's histories of Italy and France were to be histories of civilisation in Italy and in France rather than of the self-assertion of the national individualities of the peoples. Basically, Sismondi belonged to the Scottish tradition of historiography although, as it will have to he shown, he was also seminal in understanding and portraying the class

98The relationship between Sismondi and the French 'new history', esp. Michelet, will be treated in a later chapter 99Histoire generale de la civilisation en Europe; Histoire generale de la civilisation en France; Cours d'Histoire moderne 1828-30 (6 vols.)

70 struggle, the emergence of the working class no less than the earlier rise of the middle rank.

The Simonde family left London on Saturday, April 26, 1794 at five in the morning. There was trouble with the coachman who asked a higher price per mile and a greater mileage than had been bargained for; both Mr S. and Charles stood firm. The night was spent at Canterbury, and the next day at 5 p.m. they arrived in Dover. The place dismayed Madame S. because it was not really England; many of its inhabitants understood French, and the town teemed with foreigners. The previous day Madame S. had heard for the last time a watchman crying 'God save the King', but "the sight of Dover damp'd my spirit... I am so sorry to part with this dear country".

The crossing, which lasted 11½ hours, was terrible. Madame S's workbox had inadvertently been stowed away with the trunks, and she found herself "quite idle and uncomfortable... more than two hours" - a remark which emphasises her devotion to work, a quality which Charles inherited and was to display throughout his life. He, his mother and Suzette, the maid, were desperately seasick. During their sea passage they met English troop transports, and on arrival in Ostend they found all accommodation taken up by the military. They had to travel on to Bruges crossing "flat country that does not look rich as our own England". Serina wrote in her diary: "The difference from England shocked us oh our hearts are yet more English than we had thought".100 From Bruges the family went via Ghent to Brussels, where they were held up for three days as their coach had to be repaired and horses were hard to get because of military operations. Talking with a local woman, Madam S. "was so hurt to hear speak French and not English that I could have cry'd for vexation".

It was not a propitious time for travelling. The French Revolution had arrived at its self-destructive phase. April 1794 was the month when the indulgents were condemned to death and executed, that is, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Fabre

100Diary X

71 d'Églantine, preceded by Hébert and Anarcharsis Cloots. It must have dawned increasingly on the family that they were not to return to a pacified Geneva. From Brussels they proceeded via Liège, Aix-la-Chappelle, Bonn, Coblenz and Mainz to Frankfurt, meeting troops on the march all the way. Frankfurt was a haven; they stayed in an inn "more like a Palace... the nobleness and grandeur of a great Lord's house". Wherever they stopped, they went to see the sites, churches and museums, and enquired into the history of the place. In Frankfurt, soon after their arrival on the 10th of May 1794, they went to a "play at 6, a German one, the Magic Flute... we have not understood a word but the music was beautiful and the spectacle and the scenery the most magnificent I ever saw...". The Magic Flute was quite new then, having been written in 1791, and evidently its magic captivated the family.

Thence via Darmstadt, Heidelberg and Durlach to Freiburg. Here Madame S. the pupil of Rousseau, entered in her diary that "the evening was so fine, the prospect so delightful I was quite absorb'd in lively and sweet sensation, I am sure there is no panorama nor any show in the world that could give me half the pleasure I receive by beholding a fine rural scene..." Not to give expression to such feelings would be ungrateful; but "to extol it is declamation, to describe it is cold..." However, the elation didn't last. There was no room at the inn; a young scholar, talking Latin with Mr. S., helped them to find a room "where fleas instantaneously covered us".

Friday the 18th saw the family in Basle. "Oh to be in Switzerland! to see these lofty mountains behind the hills, to think of approaching that place I can no more love as my country, to think of England and the safety one can be sure of there. Ah! I am not in very good spirits and wish I could go back again never to .. I don't know I felt something like remorse as I was writing these words..." These were prophetic words; Geneva was never to be her home again nor was it given to her to return to England and its ordered liberty. They stayed at the famous hotel, the Trois Rois, "a splendid dinner, but then England! ah! I know the dinners are not so good but I wish I could now be preparing to go and drink tea at Mrs Jerry Curteis.."

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After passing Berne the family were soon reminded of the bitter reality of revolutionary Geneva. In Rolle they met with some of their neighbours who had sought refuge in the countryside of the Swiss province of Vaud, then under Bernese domination. There were Madam Pictet and her two daughters, the Eynard family, (Charles's former employers in Lyons) the Gourgas, and especially their closest friends, the Gallatins; tears were flowing freely. On the 22nd May the Simondes were subjected to a severe customs search at Nyon, and shortly before 10 at night they reached their home at Châtelaine. François and Jeaneete, their servants met them "sobbing with joy"; everyone was deeply touched. The Sartoris came to welcome them, and so did Madame S's mother, Madame Girodz, Madame Juventin, Mr S's sister, wife of the pasteur Juventin, Madame Vernes, another sister and widow of the pasteur Jacob Vernes, the friend of Voltaire and Rousseau.101 In the next two days many members of Geneva's old families called, the families Fatio, Cayla, Bontems, Le Fort, Mestrézat, Saladin, Prevost, Pesdriau, Mussard, Fazy Dumont. The Simondes tried to take up the old rhythm of life at home, but in vain. Madame S. noted in her diary: "I feel the influence of the country, I am sick at the sight of the rascals I have often under my eyes, at the style which has prevailed in town, ah old England!"

The situation was grave, graver indeed than it had been in 1793, when the Simondes had found life unbearable at Geneva. The French Revolution cast its shadow on the city state. Just as it had got out of control in Paris, so it did in Geneva. In 1790 and 1791 a number of the men, who had been exiled after the revolution of 1782, returned to Geneva, amongst them Du Roveray and Etienne Dumond who, as speechwriters and collaborators of Mirabeau, had played a leading part in bringing about the French Revolution; in fact, it was their experience gained in the constitutional struggles of Geneva that enabled them to play their role so efficiently. Now they would be able to put into practice in their home-town the democratic reforms which they had attempted in 1782; then they had been defeated by the intervention of the military power of

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Berne, France and Sardinia. They proclaimed the liberty of the press and the equality of all citizens; the lower classes, the natifs and country people, were admitted to full citizenship. A Code Genevois assured the reform of political administrative life; so did a re-organisation of the militia. In April 1792 the French revolutionary army conquered the neighbouring Savoie; the pace of revolution accelerated dangerously. December 1792 witnessed the victory of the radical forces in Geneva. A complete revision of the Constitution was set in motion; committees were appointed with this task in view. The moderate leaders were soon replaced. Du Roveray and Dumont returned to their English exile, deeply discouraged by the decline of liberalism into libertinism, and of reform into riotous revolution. Such had been the situation which had induced the Simondes to go to England.

During their stay there, the Terreur reached its climax in Paris. Similarly in Geneva, the extremist montagnards took over the reins, supported by the local French delegate. Riots took place. The economic crisis, caused by revolution and war, reached new depths. France being practically cut off from England, goods were increasingly in short supply, and old trade outlets were lost. Unemployment was wide-spread in Geneva. The watchmaking industry was almost at a standstill. Business firms and banks were going bankrupt. Inflation was rife, investments were losing their value, and many citizens were faced with ruin. The new constitution, inspired by Dumond and based upon the model of English usage, could not stave off the outbreak of bloody upheaval.

The Simondes had returned to Geneva at the end of May 1794. The mob dominated the streets. On the 19th of July the final phase of the Revolution arrived. The club des Montagnards suspended the constitution, replaced the citizens' militia by forces drawn from the crowd and excluded the aristocrates from all public functions. A revolutionary tribunal was set up, handing out heavy sentences, often under the mob's physical pressure. The tribunal sat from the 24th July until the 10th August, and again from August 24 to 31. Some 40 death warrants, the majority in absentia, including the

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Simondes' cousin Sartoris, some 700 prescriptions and detentions were the result. Among those sentenced to death by the first session of the tribunal were some of the most eminent men of Geneva, including the former syndics Guillaume Cayla and Jean-François Fatio as well as the attorney-generals J.-F. Prevost and F.-A. Naville; these death sentences were a belated vengeance for the defeat of the revolution of 1782 and the part the condemned men had played in it.

Cayla was an immediate neighbour of the Simondes at Châtelaine. He took refuge in their garden house whose backdoor opened into French territory. One night the militia came to fetch him, but he was able to evade them on that occasion. Also Mr Fatio and Madame Prevost took refuge at the Simondes. They played backgammon with the ladies in the house while Mr. S and Charles stood guard outside. Yet the following night the soldiers caught up with Monsieur Cayla. Charles was guarding the approach to the garden house and tried to rouse the rather deaf syndic by means of signals which had been agreed upon. In vain, Monsieur Cayla, who had remained asleep, was led away to his execution. Mr S. and Charles were sent to prison and later sentenced to one year of house arrest.

The family and their friends suffered all the tribulations which are known so well to those in our time who have lived through the Russian and Nazi revolutions. Rationing and confiscations, threatening crowds, invasion of their privacy by soldiers roaming their garden and stealing the fruit, uncertainty as to what the next hour would bring, such were the conditions they had to endure. The new government set out to solve the country's economic difficulties by the taxation of wealth on a sliding scale from 2- 25% for 'patriots' to 5-40% for aristocrats. The political passions brought out both heroism and treachery. Serina noted with what firm resolution two of the condemned, the watchmaker Delorme and Monsieur Audeoud, met their death: "it is said that boy Delorme fell into most dreadful fits when he heard his father's condemnation at the tribunal and he has so much knocked his head against the wall that he is dead - I don't know the truth of it he is 10 years old." On the other hand, "a married daughter was

75 very glad to hear of her father's execution. Madame Audeoud went to the tribunal to cry and implore mercy but they rejected her suit and if she had not been carried away she had perhaps been put in jail...". When the Misses Cayla and Fatio came to visit them, Madame S and Serina were shocked to see them "look so composed so well dressed so fine so smart". True, they were forbidden by the new authorities to war mourning, but they should have restricted themselves to plain dresses! Madame S. asked Mademoiselle Cayla for a copy of her father's moving farewell letter102 which she treasured, and which is still preserved among the Sismondi papers at Pescia.

Mr S's and Charles's detention in prison lasted three weeks. On their release they started preparing their emigration. They had to sell Châtelaine at a low price to enable Mr S. to pay the confiscatory taxes and retain some funds for the future. On the 8th October 1794, Serina reports, her father was able to come to a relatively satisfactory arrangement concerning the rating of his fortune on which the tax was to be based. Moreover, he was permitted to transfer his wife's town house in the Bourg-de-Four into the name of her mother, Madame Girodz, who lived in it and stayed on n Geneva; as for herself she "shall pay but as a 'patriot'." Mr S. had to pay 2,100 livres in silver, but was unable to settle this debt until the following year, in October 1795, when Châtelaine had found a buyer.103 This outcome was comparatively favourable as, apart from the house in the Bourg-de-Four, Madame Girodz's country house 'Le Tournant' at Chêne, was preserved for the family. In later years, after his return to Geneva, Charles was to live in an apartment in the Bourg-de-Four house until his marriage in 1819; after his marriage he made 'Le Tournant' his home.

The family spent most of the winter 1794-95 at Chatagnereaz, the centre of Vaud with their friends and former neighbours, the Gallatins. From March until the 8th October 1795 they resided for the last time at Châtelaine. On September 25, 1795 Charles was emancipated from Mr S.'s paternal power. By an 'act of emancipation' he was declared

102De Salis p.28 n.2 103see 'Obligation contre Gédéeon-F. Simonde' of Oct. 21, 1794, and 'Obligation acquittee' of Oct.30 1795 - Document, Pescia.

76 as having come of age (he was then 22) in consideration of his "wise conduct, his prudence and ability".104 This deed enabled him to enter into legal commitments in his own right; it had become particularly necessary as Mr S. was not immediately to accompany his family into exile. He stayed another two months at Chêne where he sojourned for a good part of the year 1795.

It was a very unhappy time for the Simondes. Already a year before they actually left, their books were consigned to Lausanne in four cases, where they were to stay until the ultimate destination of the exiled family was known. Serina wrote on August 19: "Oh how sad it is to see every part of one's happiness depart one after the other till all is lost - for I always thought that Châtelaine with a good library was happiness to our family but now where can it be found!"" In September Suzette left the family, deeply distressed; in 1792 she had been rebellious for a time, but in England she had become a friend and member of the family. The other two servants, François and Fanchon, though delighted at the family's return, became now corrupted by the revolutionary propaganda, "even Francis... has now taken a very saucy tone... as for Fanchon we find her temper has much changed during our absence". It was all "too sad an idea for me to bear and yet tis but too true!.."

There was no staying at Geneva, but where could they go? Naturally, their thoughts turned to England. Madam S wrote to Mrs Cornwallis and Charles to Mr Curteis; would their means permit them to acquire a landed property? Mr Curteis's reply was not informative, as Serina recorded on the 4th October. Mrs Cornwallis replied carefully with the revolutionary censorship in view. She made it appear as if she had received an enquiry from an 'unhappy friend, Mr B. in Switzerland:

...You know I was very reluctant that they should return to their native land during the present convulsions of Europe... They have thought of seeking an asylum with us... Mr B thinks it possible that they might engage in a small farm in which his son might assist him - but we are all of opinion that this would not succeed, as much experience and much labour is necessary to gain a livelihood out of a

104Pescia, Documenti

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farm. We rather think it would be best to hire a neat cottage or four or five pounds a year with a good garden near a town, which he and his son might cultivate..., the latter being as you know a young man of great activity and natural parts might soon obtain a situation in which he would maintain himself."105

So far, so good. But then, Mrs Cornwallis embarked on pages of religious admonition; there was no reason to doubt God's providence, and, surely, governmental upsets never lasted long. Serina commented on October the 8th:

Mrs C'llis is so very pious and resigned that it is too much for us I don't mean that she is too much of it but she makes such a show of it with such stiffness.

Clearly, the English friends in their peaceful world had no conception of the vicissitudes of revolution. Some months later, when the Cornwallises were about to leave Withersham, Mary Cornwallis complained bitterly in a letter how desperate she was to have to leave the peace of her home; Serina commented: "Oh! if she knew the situation I am in, how happy would she be if she were able to make a comparison."106

Serina's position was indeed desperate. The family could not remain in Geneva. They owned no land in the neighbouring Canton of Vaud where some of their friends had found refuge, nor would they have felt it safe enough there owing to the vicinity to France. England was not practicable. On September 29, 1794 Serina noted: "Since Mrs Vieusseux spoke so much of Italy, we begin to think of it too", The Vieusseau, as mentioned, were amongst the Simonde neighbours at Châtelaine. Jacques Vieusseaux, though one of the city's functionaries, had been a leader of the popular rising of 1782; he was known as the 'Aristides of Geneva'. Like Sismondi's uncle, the pasteur Jacob Vernes,107 and (Sir) François D'Ivernois, he was proscribed and, together with about 600 Genevese, left his country. D'Ivernois, Clavière, Jacques's brother Etienne Vieusseux and others went to Britain with a view to establishing a New Geneva at Waterford in Ireland, but finally settled in London. Jacques Vieusseux emigrated to

105Letter of 15/9/94 - Pescia, A6, 83 10611 July 1795 107Vernes was soon pardoned though he remained suspended as pasteur; Vieusseaux's proscription was lifted after some years. Chapuisat, III, 135, 147

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Italy. He had business connections and friends in Oneglia (near Imperia on the riviera ponente of Genoa), from where he imported oil to Geneva. He established a commercial bank at Oneglia, and later his family came to be substantial oil, wine and grain merchants both in Oneglia and at Leghorn. Jacques's son Pierre, a young lawyer and member of the Conseil General of Geneva since 1775, refused to take the oath on the new, reactionary constitution of 1783 and followed his father into exile, though he was later to divide his life between Oneglia, Geneva, and Leghorn. He married his cousin Jeanne Elisabeth, sister of Dr Gaspard Vieusseux, a distinguished physician in Geneva. Gaspard himself had married a French girl, Anna Gravier, who was born and brought up in a merchant's family at Leghorn. Thus the Genevan Vieusseux had close contacts with Italy and especially with Tuscany; it is not surprising that Madame Vieusseux directed the Sismonds's interest to Tuscany. Pierre's son Gian Pietro, born in Oneglia in 1779, was brought up an Italian though he was bilingual. Later a close friend and pupil of Sismondi, he was to become the central figure of the Tuscan intellectual Risorgimento from 1820 until 1860, that is, an outstanding leader of moderate, liberal thought, an advocate of agricultural reform, and a dominant figure in the unfolding of modern Italian historiography.

Italy it was to be. Charles and his mother were in favour, Serina and her father against. Mr S did not cherish the idea of living in a catholic counter., Serina was "lost... very unhappy indeed.. (about) the fatal decision... about that hated Italy."108 But both daughter and father were the weaker part of the family, nor had they a feasible alternative to offer. Mr S pressed his opposition so far as to remain behind in Chêne for some months when the family set out for Italy. Ten years later he was to write from Geneva to his wife in Italy:

...it is most unfortunate that circumstances have separated a family who love one another and who have always wanted to live together; no doubt this is due to Charles's inconstancy who, after having set his mind on devoting himself to farming and transporting all our things to

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Tuscany, abandoned this project and has settled again in Geneva where he thinks of getting married.109

Mr S's reproach was not quite unjustified, for, as will be seen, Charles left Tuscany for Geneva in 1800 after he had been condemned to perpetual exile in October 1799. There was no alternative open to him at the time; but he could have returned a year later after the French came to control Tuscany. He had been perfectly serious about ...? on the land, preferably in England or, as a second best, in Italy, However, when left Pescia, it had already become clear that he was to be a writer and reformer rather than a framer. His youthful enthusiasm had led him to misjudge his ability and inclinations. While he was able to return to his own country, his mother and sister remained dépaysées in Italy. His honest intentions led to unforeseen results. In this sense he had to bear an indelible guilt towards his dearest throughout his life. But how could he have understood at the time to what extent human lives are affected by the terrible dislocations caused by war and revolution. His stay in the peaceful haven of England had not prepared him for the difficulty and heartbreak of emigration into a largely alien culture.

Moreover, Mr S conveniently forgot his own responsibility about the misfortunes his family were having to face in later years. However, for the time being, Charles and Serina made the most of the situation. They contributed seriously on the study of the Italian language and were soon able to write to .....? in Italian.110 Previous biographers have assumed that it was the romantic attraction in Tuscany from where he believed his family to have descended, that caused Charles to turn to Italy. However it was merely a measure of harsh necessity.

On the 8th October 1795 Charles, his mother and serina, left Châtelaine for good - "The thought is death to me" Madame S. was to write in her diary on the first anniversary of this fatal day. Mr S remained behind, staying at Chêne, earning a little

109Letter to his wife: 3/6/1805 110Already Peasmarsh ...... ?

80 money as a temporary milkman111, and trying in vain to sell the property for which, however, no buyer could be found. On October 10 the family obtained a passport from Baron Aimé-Louis Vignet des Etoles, the resident minister of the King of Sardinia in Berne, who stated on the document that the family were leaving their native Geneva "because of the political unrest which afflicts it", and in order "to settle in Tuscany". Savoy, from the Haute Savoi to the Mediterranean Riviera, then formed part of the kingdom of Sardinia. On October 14 they crossed into Sardinian territory, and on the 22nd their passport showed them as having passed through Bologna. The following day they arrived in Florence where they stayed until 14th December.

They were soon able to make friends with two distinguished people there. One of Geneva's notables, Monsieur Trembley Massé, had given Mr s. a letter of introduction to the Marchese Giovanni Battista Guadagni,112 describing Mr S as a member of parliament and a distinguished man of letters, and Madame S as a woman of the finest and most beautiful turn of mind; at the same time he informed Guadagni of the lamentable execution by shooting of their mutual friend Naville. In the following year Serina's future husband introduced them to the eminent statesman and scholar Giovanni Fabbroni who had taken an active part in the epoch-making agricultural reforms of the Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo, the later emperor Leopold II. Fabbroni had wide cultural interests; he had assembled a natural history museum in Florence; his father-in-law was Guiseppe Bencivenni già Pelli, a former director of the Uffizi gallery and a celebrated Tuscan writer. Both Guadagni and Fabbroni were to become friends of Sismondi.

As usual Mrs S and Serina started on their diaries without delay. They visited all the sites, the churches, the convents, the picture galleries. Charles himself set out for the Tuscan countryside, passing through Prato and Pistoia, and getting as far as Pescia.113 It was not the happiest of excursions, for he was plagued by toothache, which caused

111De Salis, p. 112M.S.Pescia - letter of 6 October 1795 113Mademoiselle Montgolfier,

81 him much pain and sleepless nights. Still, he persevered until he found a small villa in Pescia which he rented for half a year at the rather high rental of one louis per month. There, in the Villa Marchi114 outside the Porta Lucchese. They were to stay there for a year and a half, until they moved to another temporary abode, the Villa Rossi-La Capella in the district Le Cave, for the following six months. Mr S joined his family in Pescia on January 19, 1796.

The family had to endure two years of uncertainty; as will be seen, they did not escape the vicissitudes of the French Revolution which they had been hoping to have left behind in Geneva. However, Pescia and the Val di Nievole, in which it is situated, seemed to be the right place in which to look for a permanent home. The landscape was more attractive than in any other part of Tuscany; the town had a serene beauty. Unfortunately, prices of land and houses were high. They looked at houses elsewhere, at Pistoia, as far away as Siena, and at Leghorn; none seemed to be suitable. It was not until Serina became engaged to a local nobleman that, with his help, the were able, after a two-year's wait, to find the home they had been hoping for.

Pescia in 1796 was a prosperous agricultural and industrial centre of some 4,000 inhabitants. About two thirds of the population lived from work in silk factories, tanneries, and felt and paper mills, whose products were exported to various parts of Europe and America. Others worked in the fertile mulberry and olive plantations and orchards surrounding the town. The history of Pescia goes back to Ligurian and Etruscan times. Hannibal is said to have passed through it. A topographical sketch of the Val di Nievole from the hand of Leonardo da Vinci belongs to the Royal Library at Windsor. From the 13th to the 15th centuries Pescia was at times under the dominion of Lucca (in the times of Castruccio Castracani, immortalised by Machiavelli) and of Pisa, but most of the time it was subject to Florence. For a year during the early fourteenth century Pescia knew independence as the head of the

114Serina spells the name 'Mazzei' but according to M. Cecconi and E. Coturri, Pescia ed itl suo territorio (Pistoria 1961), p.189, the correct name is Marchi.

82 league of the communes of the Val di Nievole, namely Buggiano, Montecatini (the famous spa), Monsummano, Uzzano, Velano, Sorico, Pietrobuona, S.Piero in Campo and Collodi ( the place where Pinocchio was to be written in the 19th century). Under Florentine rule the city was administered by a podestà and a vicario, later solely by the vicario, and finally, after 1732, by a gonfalionere. Whereas the former functionaries had been Florentines, the gonfalioneri were drawn from the local families of the Maggiore, i.e. the Pesciatine nobility. In the years 1796 and 1797 this office was held by members of the Forti family into which Serina was to marry at the beginning of 1798.

Pescia was a well laid out town, accessible through the beautiful 18th century Porta Fiorentina and the old Porta Lucchese, embedded in the wooded hillside of the Val di Nievole, and divided by the river Pescia with its clear and cool mountain water. Pathways lead past villas and orchards on to the mountainside. The narrow streets are flanked by palazzi of the ancient nobility and lesser stone-built houses. There are a number of squares and a considerable number of churches from the romanesque of the 11th century to the renaissance architecture of the fifteenth century. The dome, first mentioned in 857 and repeatedly restored, the episcopal seminar, the Palazzo dei Vicari, the Oratorio SS.Pietro and Paolo with its resplendent soffit, are some of the outstanding landmarks of the place. The finest examples of its architecture are the severe classical lines of the church of S. Francesco, which dates from the mid- fourteenth century and commemorates a stay of St. Francis in Pescia in 1211; and the gracious elegance of the romanesque church of S. Stefano and Niccolaio, opposite which are today the municipal museum and library which house the Sismondi archives. For a small town Pescia was remarkable for its fine buildings and its generous, picturesque setting.

Nor was it devoid of cultural aspirations. Its flourishing paper industry went back to 1224 and was the reason why Pescia became the seat of the first Italian printing press

83 in 1485.115 In 1795 a new theatre building had been inaugurated;116 the Simondes frequented it regularly, met there the local society and added to their knowledge of Italian literature. They saw and read plays by Goldoni and Alfieri, but also Shakespeare and Voltaire, apart from lighter fare, including performances by improvisatori.117

The French Revolution cast its shadow over Percia as it did over all of Italy. The Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinando III, neutral until 1793 and again after March 1795, had incurred the enmity of the French Directoire because of his close association with the British envoy in Florence, Lord Hervey. This policy was to lead to a short occupation of Percia by the French in June 1796 and to a period of French domination in 1799. These interventions were to bring great misery in their train for Charles and his family. However, in the meantime, a new horizon seemed to be dawning over Italy. From 1796 to 1799, the years of revolution were also the years in which the risorgimen was born, i.e. the process of the unification and moral renovation of Italy. Charles soon took an active part in this movement. Despite his mother's passionate opposition to all things French he became a giacobino like most of the intellectuals of Pescia at the time, the doctors and lawyers as well as some priests. Outstanding amongst the giacobini were the lawyer Celestino Chiti, the maternal grandfather of his future biographer, the great Tuscan poet Guiseppe Giusti, and a young nobleman, Anton Cosimo Forti. With the former Charles was to share imprisonment in 1799; the latter was to become Serina's husband.

However, Charles did not become a convert to the French Revolution. Giacobinismo equalled as little French Jacobinism as Italian romanticismo resembled French and German romanticism. Both these Italian movements were off-shoots and the continuation of illuminismo, that is, the Italian enlightenment of the eighteenth century. This movement was largely the creation of the great economists and lawyers

115Caxton's Westminster Press 1477-91; Gutenberg Bible 1452-5 116The teatro, run by the Accademia degli Affilati, dated originally from 1700 117see the description in Madam de Staël's Corinne

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Pietro and Alessandro Verri and Cesare Beccaria and their friends, whose collective monument was the periodical Il Caffè, published between 1764 and 1766. Their ideas were influenced by Locke, Hume and the writers of the Encyclopédie; they may be described as individualism, universalism, humanitarianism and rationalism. In particular, Beccaria's criminological work Dei delitti e delle pene became the most influential tract in its field for the whole of Europe. Illuminismo led naturally to the riformismo of 1796-1799 which added to its ideas the concepts of popular democracy, participation and national unity. This movement was given its impetus by the French Revolution. However, it was not revolutionary itself. Its aim was reform: the attainment of civic equality, religious tolerance, liberty and the press, and the modernisation of administrative, political and social institutions118 in the light of a new national consciousness.119

Charles took an active part in these aspirations. He was soon able to lecture on relevant subjects, and he planned a periodical on the lines of Addison's and Steele’s Spectator (1711-1714), which had indeed been the model for Il Caffè and many important periodical publications in Europe.120 Within half a year of their arrival Charles had thus taken up the role which was to turn him into the apostle of the Italy of Mazzini and Cavour.121 The publication which he had then in mind was to become a reality in the great periodicals, in which he was later to take a leading part as a contributor and spiritual father, the Conciliatore in 1818, the Antologia in 1821, the Giornale Agrario in 1827, and the Archivio Storico Italiano in 1841.

The Tuscany illuminismo and riformismo were not purely intellectual movements. Its Grand Dukes Pietro Leopoldo, the later Austrian Emperor Leopold II (1765-1790), and Ferdinand III (1790-1799 and 1814-1821) were "enlightened despots" who had carried out considerable agricultural, educational, legal and administrative reforms,

118Salvatorelli, 62-66; Conradini; Fubini 119Franco Venturi 120Mother's Diary 9 July 1796; 16 August 1796 121Guiseppe Calamari, 35

85 putting Tuscany in the forefront of modern European countries. Their advisers included Beccaria and Sismondi's acquaintance and later friend, Giovanni Fabbroni, as well as Rousseau's pupil Pestalozzi; through him the spirit of Genèvisne and of Helretism had found a home in Tuscany. Some of the old rights of the medieval communes had been revived, and in particular, the protection of the peasantry had been a foremost concern of Pietro Leopoldo. In contrast to the English tendency towards larger agricultural units, the old institution of the crop-sharing mezzadria was favoured and improved.

This is a system in which the produce of the land and labour is divided between the landowner and the labourer or peasant (the mezzadro or métayer), usually, as the name imports, on a fifty-fifty basis; but in certain parts of Tuscany the peasant would retain two thirds of the produce with the landowner supplying the implements. It was a system in which the peasant could find himself in a state bordering on slavery; this was the case in France and in the south of Italy. On the other hand, where laws and local custom guaranteed the continuity of generations on the same farm, a mezzadro had the same interest in keeping his place prosperous as a peasant-proprietor, while running a lesser risk. It was on such a landed holding, a podere, on the outskirts of Pescia where the Simondes found a home in November 1797. It was love at first sight. They inspected the place on the 3rd November, and a few days later they moved into Paradiso or Valchiusa. It was a small property with one mezzadro, Gian Antonio Spicciani and his family. Charles had now to cope with the ins and outs of agriculture, devote himself to the administration and amelioration of their holding and often to act himself as a practical farmer. If it had not been for political, financial and personal misfortunes, Valchiusa could have provided the ideal background for the good life.

The farm, as the name Valchiusa implies, is situated in a valley without an exit, immediately outside the town. A clear small stream meanders through the gorge, bubbles round pebbles and boulders, breaking itself in small waterfalls; a path runs along its shore in the shade of hazel and elder trees. A steep slope rises to the south of

86 the brook; although it is exposed to northerly winds and frosts in the winter, it is nevertheless covered with olive trees, vineyards, cherry and fig trees though, it is true, trees and flowers blossom rather late in the season. On the top of the hill a bridle path leads towards the mountains behind Lucca. The northern side of the stream has the full benefit of the sun. Violets and anemones bloom here in January; there is a glorious show of daffodils, irises, tulips, hyacinths, all sorts of narcissi, and later, lilies, gladiolas, orchids and many other flowers.

The commodious122, though not distinguished, main house is built into the hillside, below the olive plantations which rise in terraces to the ridge of the mountain which are crowned by several villages and bell towers. Lower down there are green meadows fenced in by graceful trellises of vine and full of fruit trees; long pergolas cover the paths which cross the dale. Immediately in front of the house three terraces slope down one below the other. Numerous lemon trees mingle here with shrubs and flower beds, and mimosas perfume the air. The view from these terraces along the valley opens into the plain of Pescia with its orchards and colourful gardens, its triumphal town gate, its steeples, its dome and convents, which stand out against the greenery of the chestnut woods on the hillside opposite. There the fortress-like village of Uzzano, perched on a precipitous slope, soars high above the town. It is a picture uniting romantic beauty with the opulence of a fertile and well tilled soil.

Charles and his mother never tired of the beauty of the Tuscan landscape. They were fortunate in living in the finest part of the country which stretches from Lucca to Pistoia, with Pescia in the most sheltered position. By comparison the hill country round Florence is rather dry and sterile, that of Pisa too precipitous, while the hills of Prato are denuded and those of Siena and Volterra deserted. Nor was the beauty of the scenery merely seasonal. There was something to warm the heart of the observer

122 today it houses several families

87 throughout the year. As Charles was to describe they cycle of the seasons a few years later:123

On an autumn evening the sight of the hills evokes the most romantic scenery. Then the lights shine on all sides and reveal the modest farmsteads which are hidden behind trellises or clusters of fruit and olive trees; the straw torches gliding along the paths show up the peasants on their way to their neighbours to spend an evening together; and the rounded brows of the hills, which the olive trees seem to soften into a velvety hue, stand out against a pure sky. A night in June offers a quite different picture, more brilliant perhaps, though less animated; then the glow-flies are abundant; the lightning path of their iridescent flight dazzles the eye. The mountainside is scintillating; rest your eye on some valley, it forms a lake of light; the whole earth seems electrified and sparkling all over.

The winter, too, which is free from snow, has its beauty; the meadows remain green and are even adorned with flowers which would be worth cultivating in a garden, including all sorts of anemones, narcissi, hyacinths, hellebores, etc. The green of the olive trees, although not the only green to survive, has not to compete with brighter hues as in spring; when the countryside is animated by a brilliant sun, it is pleasant to keep away from the shade of the trees. As the harvesting of olives goes on all through the winter, it adds additional life to the landscape. Ripe fruit, covered by a flowery skin, hangs from the trees and covers the ground... The womenfolk and the children are ceaselessly busy gathering the olives, a sight which one would not associate with winter elsewhere.

Evidently, Valchiusa offered an ideal setting for the good life, as Sismondi’s masters from Virgil and Horace through Abraham Cowley124 to Rousseau had envisaged it, a life far from the madding crowd, serene, disciplined, frugal and industrious, peaceful and non-competitive. Adam Smith himself, Charles’s idol., had called the small agricultural proprietor “generally of all improvisers the most industrious, the most intelligent, and the most successful... [who] might indeed expect to live very happily and very independently”, though he must bid adieu to “either great fortune or great illustration”.125 A letter written in 1798 by Madame Micheli, Charles’s first love, described him as “farmer, gardener, decorator... he does the digging, the sowing, the

123 In his Tableau de l’agriculture de Toscane, 1801 on which most of the description in the text is based. See pp.102-105, 219-225 124 Abraham Cowley, Of Agriculture, 1650. Rousseau, Lettre à D’Alembert, 170/171 125 Bk.III, Chap.IV, 392

88 labouring; he plants the trees and fruit-trees and improves the soil.”126 While working manually in house and garden, Charles supervised and advised his métayer. He kept records of his experiments and results with various crops. Even in 1800, after imprisonment and during the trial which led to his banishment from Tuscany, he set down in writing his “expériences sur la plantation des pommes de terre à Vaucluse au printemps de l’an 1800.”

He worked assiduously to improve his theoretical education as an agriculturist. He interviewed farmers in the region with a view to obtaining information on farming methods. He studied botany, soil chemistry, geology, drainage and river regulation, and the technology of farm implements and soil cultivation. He made detailed extracts from Linnaeus, filling hundreds of pages. Among other tracts on agriculture, Charles wrote a book of some three hundred pages on Rules of Agriculture and Gardening drawn from several French books, the first half in English dealing with graeninging, and the other half in Italian with farming. He added to this work a comprehensive index of plants, enumerating “all their different names in English, French, Italian and Linnean”127 Some of these tracts on agriculture Charles submitted to the Accademia dei Georgofili at Florence, the oldest of the European agricultural institutes which had sprung up in the eighteenth century and contributed greatly to the agricultural revolution of the period. It was quite an honour for Charles to be admitted as a member of this distinguished society, probably with the help of Giovanni Fabbrioni. These writings were visible witness to his progress as an agronomist. In the event, they were to prove to be prolegomena to his first published work, the Tableau de l’agriculture Toscane of 1801.

Valchiusa thus provided Charles with a new purpose in life. Its radiant landscape and genial climate set the material preconditions for physical happiness. The family’s limited means permitted them to lead a comfortable though frugal life. Their visits to

126 Unpublished letter, Biblioteca Comunal, Pescia 127 Real Secreté ecolourice di Firenze osia de’ Geogofili (unpublished MS, Pescia

89 the theatre and social intercourse with local families opened a door to new and often heart-warming experiences. All the same, they were strangers for reasons of language and religion; they felt transplanted to an alien soil. Madam S. in particular always yearned for England no less than for Geneva. In London, Peasmarsh and Tenterden they had met people of their own kind. Although they were never to find the same affinity with their Italian friends, yet, thorough Italian literature, art and history, they were introduced to a rich, new world.

Prior to coming to Italy Charles had been familiar with the writings of Dante, Petrarc, Arissto and Metegerio. Now he immersed himself in contemporary literature, a literature which he found to be directed towards recreating a reformed and united Italy from the vestiges and memories of its great past. Both drama and historiography furthered this aim. Later on Charles was to become the friend and mentor of the leaders of the intellectual risorgimento, the Italian reform movement, among them Ugo Foscolo, Silvio Pellico, Giovanni Berchet, Ludovico di Breme, Carlo Borsieri, Guiseppe Pecchio, Vincenszo Monti, Camillo Ugoni, Santorre Santa Rosa, Gian Domenico Romagnosi, and finally the circule of Gian Pietro Vieusseux, Gino Cappoini, Raffaello Lambruschini, Cosimo Ridolfi, Enrico Mayer and others. However, the Italian authors who made a decisive impact on Charles during his early stay in Pescia were the dramatist Vittorio Alfieri, the historians Ludovico Antonio Muratori and Carlo Denia, and the economist Pietro Verri.

These writers expressed the common aspirations and interests of the Italian intellectual elite of the time. They combined a deep regard for their national history with the desire to reform their country which had gone into a steady decline since the Renaissance. They aimed at describing and explaining the areas and causes of failure, at re-creating the image of past greatness, and at initiating a process of national regeneration.

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The Italy of the eighteenth century was politically fragmented and subject to foreign domination and intervention. Its social structure was rigid and largely determined by the Church. Its women were peculiarly kept in subjection under the prevailing code of chivalry. The country, which in the past had produced many of the most original scientists, had turned its back on the natural sciences because they threatened religion, and on the emerging social sciences inasmuch as they put the existing social order in question. There was a great historical past to rediscover and to arouse to a new life, a past derived less from the distant Roman origins of the country than from its medieval institutions and traditions which, though weakened and suppressed, were lingering on under the surface. A rejuvenated cultural, social, political and economic framework was required to rekindle the nation’s submerged powers. In the circumstances, it was natural for Italians to delve into their origins as a means for bringing about a re-birth of lost greatness.

Muratori was thus to re-discover and virtually to re-created, Italian history which had been all but extinguished in the downfall of the medieval republics; so much so in fact that even today there are historians who doubt the unity and continuity of Italian history. Denina as well as other historians of the period continued Muratori’s search for the causes of the national decline and for appropriate remedies.128 Verri gave systematic form to these endeavours and extended the political and cultural programme to the economic field. Alfieri lifted the movement to the level of creative writing. All these writers, though preserving their individual and national genius, ranged themselves with the wider aspirations of the European Enlightenment. But whereas French, English, Dutch and German reformers, prior to the romantic era, were primarily forward-looking in their philosophical, politico-social and economic analysis, the Italians, like the Scots, based their reform proposals firmly on a historical, evolutionary basis. Perhaps they needed a past Arcadia from which to set out because for them the present offered no sufficient platform on which to build.

128 Franco Venturi,

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Alfieri was the most recent of these writers, and probably the first to arouse Charles’s interest. Charles and his family were ardent theatre-goers. As we have seen, they had attended many performances in London, and they had heard the Magic Flute during their short stay in Frankfurt. Pescia’s large theatre, capable of accommodating some 700 persons, was the social centre of the place; the Simondes went there nearly every night to meet company, to practise their Italian and to watch Italian life. The end of the eighteenth century witnessed the transition of the theatre as a place of mere entertainment to a forum for political ideas, social analysis and the exploration of the individual, in addition to its more light-hearted functions. Many new theatres were springing up in the decade following the French Revolution, including that of Pescia and La Fenice in Venice. Stendhal’s writings, especially the opening chapter of La Chartreuse de Parme give a vivid picture of the Italian cultural climate of the time. This development had its parallels elsewhere; the electric effect of Figaro in France and of the dramatic productions of the Sturm und Drang in Germany are telling examples. Progressively minded citizens of Geneva were particularly prone to display an interest in the theatre. It had been proscribed as frivolous in the city of Calvin and Rousseau. Voltaire had first introduced it with private performances; D’Alembert had attacked the city in the Encyclopédie for its lack of a stage. It was only after the political upheaval of 1782 that a theatre was permitted to perform in Geneva. It soon came to serve as a vehicle of political dissent, and, indeed was closed down by the revolutionary regime in January 1799 because it had become a rallying point for patriotic and political ideas. Thus Sismondi was ready and able to learn a good deal from his visits to the theatre, especially from Carlo Goldoni’s comedies which revealed a realistic, and not always attractive, picture of contemporary Italian social life. Alfieri’s art presented his audience with an impassioned version of the aims of political and moral reform.

Count Vittorio Alfieri (1749-1803), in the words of Francesco De Sanctis, was a modern man in classical garb. His drama broke with the prevailing affectation of

92 chivalry and bravura and replaced it by a representation of true greatness and of realistic human relationships. He thus brought about a real revolution in Italian drama. While weak in poetic imagination, he convinced by the strength of his feelings, his impassioned championship of patriotic dignity, the rule of law, individual morality, a stoic sense of duty, and a rebellious pride in independence. Unlike the other reformers, he delved more deeply into classical history than into that of medieval and contemporary, Italy. However, the lessons which he deduced from his reading of the classics, were addressed to his own time regardless of their historical setting. His writing amounted to a clarion call against tyranny and for individual liberty.

There was however something opinionated and doctrinaire in his work, possibly due to aristocratic pride. He painted the world in black and white, and he took ideas to extreme consequences. While extolling heroes of the past and holding out a conception of a better future, he was out of touch with his own time. He glorified Brutus and the regicides of the English Rebellion, yet sided with Louis XVI. Though Charles was critical of him Alfieri offered him food for thought. Alfieri rejected a purely aesthetic approach to art; he emphasised the intellectual and moral qualities of the artist and his work. He despised artists who had accepted the yoke of patronage, including, indeed, Virgil, Horace, Ariosto, Tasso and Racine; their servile dependence on patriots, had, he felt, made them mediocre. On the other hand, he celebrated Dante as the truly free and autonomous master whose example justified the ideal and the expectation of a future risorgimento of the “corrupt and slothful” Italian people. Here were two ideas which were close to Charles’s heart. The interdependence between social structure and cultural institutions was already familiar to him from his study of Montesquuieu, Blair and Delolme. Alfieri’s emphasis on a correspondence between civic liberty and manly truthfulness in literature provided Charles with an insight he was to apply later in his own Literature of Europe.129 As regards the concern for the

129 Immediately after leaving Italy in 1800, he was to meet once more with these ideas in a more systematic form in Madame de Staël’s De la Littérature considerée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales, her first masterpiece.

93 re-birth of an Italy actually in decline, this notion was to become a pre-eminent theme all through Sismondi’s life.

Alfieri’s work helped Charles to clear his mind. Greatly as he admired Alfieri as a dramatist, he came to criticise him on three counts. His experiences in Geneva as well as his study of authors like Blackstone and Delolme caused him to reject Alfieri’s belief in the unbridled autonomy of the individual, a belief which, similar to Wilelm von Humboldt’s youthful ideas, “led [Alfieri] to confound the dissolution of all the bonds of Society with that freedom after which he sighed”.130 But Alfieri’s strict adherence to unity of time, place, action and interest in his dramatic work struck a chord in Sismondi which, in a modified form, was to pervade his own work. He was to become the classifier and unifier of historical and economic processes, always in search of proportion and harmony., In Alfieri, however, the quest for poetic unity detracted from the variety of life. “Harmony”, Sismondi said later in this context, “consists in bringing to one centre diverging sounds... A union of instruments of different pitch and tone produces a concert; but in the sound of a single bell there can be no harmony, however fine the sound may in itself be”.131 Sismondi was for ever to search for ‘unity in variety’ in the tradition of the Scottish thinkers following Francis Hutcheson.132 Finally, Charles found fault with Alfieri’s neglect of historical colour in his tragedies; while extolling love of country, he “deprived the patriot of his native soil”. His Arcadia was an artificial projection of the future, but it had no roots in the reality of an on-going historical tradition. Evidently, there were lessons to be learnt from the defects in the work of a genius.

Charles, then an unknown youth, never met Alfieri who died in his early fifties in 1903. However, two years later he was introduced to Alfieri’s former mistress by their mutual friend Charles-Victor de Bonstetten. She was princess Louise von Stolbert,

130Lit.Europ. I. 569 131 572 132

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Countess of Albany,133 the widow of “Bonnie Prince Charlie”, Charles Edward, the “Chevalier” or “Young Pretender”.134 She had been married in Rome in 1772 in the expectation of becoming Queen of England and Scotland. The marriage was unhappy as the prince declined into a bullying and jealous despot. In 1777 the couple moved to Florence where they lived in the beautiful palazzo Guadagni. Louise was pretty, amorous, elegant and intelligent; an education in a Belgian convent had given her a taste for books. It was instant friendship between her and Alfieri, one of the few people her suspicious husband suffered her to see. In the following year Alfieri devoted to her his Maria Stuarda. Their friendship grew closer as her marriage broke up. Finally in 1793 they moved together into an elegant palazzo on the Lung’Arno near the Ponte Santa Trinità. Their salon attracted artists like Canova and Thorwaldsen and members of society, among them Giovanni Fabbroni and Lord and Lady Holland, who became an intimate friend, as she was later to be on the closest terms with Madame de Staël and Sismondi. Lady Holland described Madame d’Albany as living “in a state of dubious intimacy with Alfieri, the great Sophocles of Italy”.135 Among the artists of the cercle was Baron François-Xavier-Pascal Fabre, a pupil of Louis David, who had arrived in Florence in 1793.136 He was fourteen years younger than Louise who took him up and finally became his mistress, probably well before Alfieri’s death; indeed, according to Stendhal’s malicious account,137 his death was due to his jealousy of Fabre. Henceforth she lived with Fabre138. While Charles- Edward had tried to shut her away and Alfieri had been forbiddingly exclusive in his friendships, now her salon became a rallying place for toute l’Europe in Florence. Madame de Staël, Frederike Brun, Prosper Barante, Ludovico di Breme, Ugo Foscolo, Benjamin Constant were among her visitors and correspondents. She commissioned

133 1752-1824 134 1720-1788 135 Pellegrini 96 136 137 Mémoires d’un Touriste, Pelleg. 118 138 She is said to have been married to him secretly. She left all her and Alfieri’s possessions to Fabre and together with his neo-classicist paintings, form part of the Musie Fabre at Montpellier; the ...... ?

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Alfieri’s tomb by Canova in Santa Croce, the Westminster Abbey of Florence; her own magnificent tomb is close to his.

Sismondi was to become her most faithful friend and correspondent. There were eighty of his letters to her extant as well as 67 of her letters to him, covering mainly the years 1808 to 1816. Thereafter their correspondence became intermittent as Madame di’ Albany was disenchanted by the role which Sismondi, in common with Benjamin Constant and with the approval of the English Radicals and Holland House Whigs, had played in supporting Napoleon Bonaparte during the crisis of the Cent Jours, that is, after the emperor’s return from Elba. Sismondi and Constant had aimed at limiting the emperor’s power by means of a liberal constitution in order to protect the integrity of France against her external enemies as well as against the retrograde rule of the Bourbons, while Madame di’Albany was on the side of the legitimate dynasty.

However, she was not rigid in her views. She kept up her reading into old age; she knew the classics, and she had even made a valiant attempt at studying and understanding the philosophy of Kant in the French version published by Charles de Villers in 1801.139 In her letters to Charles she mentioned reading works by Chateaubriand, Chateauvieux, August Wilhelm Schlegel (“un pédant allemand), Goethe, Schiller (including Maria Stuart), Johannes von Müller, Wieland, Adam Smith, Dupont de Nemours, Madame de Staël, Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley, Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, Fouche, Ginguene’s Cours de lat littérature italienne, and source works on Italian history., She was able to discuss Alfieri’s views with Charles. She disagreed with his understanding of Alfieri’s alleged idolisation of unrestricted individual liberty. On the contrary, Alfieri had told her often that, given the corrupt state of mankind, English liberty under the law was the best possible solution, and one which made England “that fortunate isle”, where he himself would

139 Philosophie de Kant, ou Principes fondamentaux de la Philosophie transcendentale (Metz an IX (1801)

96 have liked to have lived, had it not been for its inclement physical climate.140 However, she could not dissuade Charles from his view that there were incongruities in the great dramatist’s aristocratic way of thinking. As regards the poor, according to the Countess, he held that though they had to be fed, they must be guided with firmness; they needed pane e bastone.141 Stendhal, it seems, understood the poet well when he said of him that he was aristocrat par excellence who regarded himself as a liberal because he abhorred the few placed above himself.142 Like German and French Romantics and idealist philosophers, Alfieri claimed the anarchic freedom of the old aristocracy for the artist,143 in contrast to the humanitarian and socially responsible Liberté anglaise; he claimed liberty above the law rather than liberty under the rule of law. His immersion in the world of Alfieri helped to enlarge Charles’s mind. It deepened his understanding of poetic imagination as well as of Italian aspirations; but on the intellectual plane it could only reinforce the political and moral views that he owed to his Genevan heritage and his English experience.

140 15 June 1813, p.309. See also “Journal of the Countess of Albany” 1791 Ed.Rev. 114 (July 1861) 171 141 14 December 1813, p.319 142 Pellegr.117 (Mémoirs d’un Touriste, III, 259 143 Starobinski, The Discovery of Liberty

97

III.-IV.

In Alfieri Charles had met harbinger of Italy’s future revival; yet the plays, with the exception of Don Garzia and Congiura da’ Fazzi, offered them only scant guidance to the historical past of the Italian people in the Middle Ages. Charles had gained some insight into this period through his study of Letiancty and Dante, even before he came to Pescia. Now that he lived in Italy, he found himself in the presence of the ubiquitous monuments of that time, including the inscriptions on each bridge, each road, and each embankment, referring to the senatus populusque, not of classical Rome, but of Florence, Pistoia, Lucca, Siena and Pisa144, that is, all those Tuscan places which Charles was went to visit. A chapter of this great past had actually become integrated into the history of Geneva, where many of the leading families of Lucca and Pisa and other places had found refuge at that time of the Counter- Reformation. Among them was the family of the great lawyer Burlamaqui (She had influenced Blackstone), whose ancestor Francesca Burlamacchi had been tortured and executed in 1546; as gonfalionere of Lucca he had tried to recreate the medieval republics of Italy, then under foreign and monarchic rule, as parts of a free and united Italy.145 Other eminent families in this group, and personally well known to Charles, were the Turrettini, Micheli, Diodati, Callandrini, Fatio, and others, who had long played a prominent part in the life of Geneva. Charles’s ancestors, the family Sartoria, had been highly placed refugees from Savoy.

The Simondes themselves, though they had come to Geneva from the Dauphine, had, so Charles came to be convinced, their origin in Pisa. They were descended, it was alleged, from Sismondi d’Oleastro, a Pisan Noleman who had entered French service in 1509 and finally settled in France. The family had been established at Pisa since 982, when seven of Otto II’s barons, who had followed the emperor on his Italian expedition, had elected to become citizens of Pisa, then a flourishing trade centre

144 Agric. Tosc, 288 145 see his monument in Lucca; also Hist. Rep. Ital. VIII, chap. IX, 527ss.

98 more important even than its rival, Genoa. The families became the leaders of the Pisan nobility; the Sismondis in particular won great distinction as admirals. Chinzica Sismondi, the first baron’s daughter, saved the city from the Saracens in 1005 when, braving great danger, she succeeded in alerting the authorities to the surprise attach; she became the great heroine of Pisan history, celebrated by monument and inscriptions and mentioned by Dante.146 These events in Pisa’s early history were however not firmly established. Chroniclers and analysts differed in their accounts: the German origin of the family was indeed mythical, and so was the saga of Chinzica. Charles maintained that hers was a Germanic name, although the great Italian historian Muratori discounted the whole episode and took the name to refer to an old Arab quarter of Pisa. It was, however, the work of this historian that Charles owed much of his initiation into Italian history.

As had been their habit in Geneva and in England, the family kept up their common reading at Pescia. An entry in Madame S’s diary of July 6, 1796 reads: “Mr S. Has read his 30 pages as normal of Muratori. After dinner Charles read us one act of Count Alfieri’s Brutus.”147 Charles was soon widely read in Italian history as we know from the copious quotations in his first major historical work, the Recherches sur les Constitutions des Peuples Libres, written in 1798/99. In the course of his extensive reading, apart from. 148The painstaking study of Muratori’s work alone would indeed have taxed any man’s power to the full.

Ludovico Antonio Muratori (1672-1750) devoted fifty undisturbed years as court librarian at Modena to the collections of the records of Italian history, culled from archives, chronicles, annals, historical works and all kinds of monuments. Charles

146 Cordié; also Hist. Ital. Rep I, 201 at II, 377 147 The play they read was the first Brutos, concerned with Lucius Junius Brutus, of the 6th century BC, the principal founder of the Roman Republic. On August 15 the family were reading Alfieri’s second Brutos, which celebrated Marcus Junius Brutus, the leader of the republican conspiracy against Julius Caesar. 148 Charles made précis of Carlo Denina’s Revoluzioni d’Italia (1768-72), of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, of Alexandre Louis de Watte’s Historie de la Confideration helvetinne (1757) and of Louis Cousin-Despréaux’s Histoire.... de la Grèce (1780-1789).

99 worked through practically all of Muratori’s voluminous oeuvre and was soon able to put what he had learnt to good use. There were twenty-eight huge folio volumes of Muratori’s Rerum italicarum acriptores (1723-1750), a compilation of the texts of Italian historical writing149. Then there were 6 volumes of Antiquitates italicae meii aevi (1738-1742), containing 75 dissertations on the culture and thought of medieval Italy. The Novus Thesaurus Inscriptionum in 4 volumes (1739-1743) was a pioneering piece of Italian epigraphy. These three works laid the foundation from which modern Italian historiography was to take its rise. Muratori himself tried to crown his achievement by giving shape to a general Italian history in the 12 volumes of his Annali d’Italia which he published between 1744 and 1749. Not surprisingly, this enterprise did not produce an interesting, well co-ordinated and readable piece of writing; it was a chronological account rather than an organically integrated history. Chalres acknowledged the inestimable value of Muratori’s spade work, though he found him ennuyeuz as a historian while appreciating that the dissertations in the Antiquitates revealed sound judgement and shed much light on the population, the wealth, the trade and the activities of the Italian republics.150 It was left to Charles himself to achieve that first authentic and masterly history151 of these medieval republics by combining the methods and lessons of Scottish historical writing with his exploration of Italian sources and predecessors.

Muratori was far from being a dry-as-dust Casaubon. Though primarily an érudit, he was a philosopher as well. He was very much like Charles himself, a loveable, truthful, modest and compassionate man and writer. Apart from his historical research, he published works on aesthetics, the poetry of Petrarch, moral philosophy, human understanding and happiness, thus ranging himself with the great writers of the British and French Enlightenment. His Della pubblica felicità, first published in Lucca in 1749, was translated into French as Traité du Bonheur public

149 (Charles was not able to afford a set of his own until 1805 when he acquired at Milan at that cost of , ou Lettro of to Paschoud) 150 Tableau de l’Agriculture toscane, 287, N.1 151 Storia d’Italia, (Einaudi) t.II, 2,1173 (Franco Venturi)

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While Sismondi was become more and more absorbed in the study of Italian literature; yet, at the same time, despite his buys life, he kept up and deepened his interest in Geneva and Britain. He had, as we have seen, taken many English books with him, first to Geneva and then to Italy. But there was no need for him to rely exclusively on these sources. With the help of his former teachers at the académie in Geneva he was able to keep in touch with the best of English writing including the most recent publications. Marc-Auguste Pictet, his brother Charles Pictet de Rochemont152 and Geneva’s mayor, Frédéric-Guillaume Maurice, started a new periodical in January 1796, the Bibliothèque Britannique; Pierre Prevost was one of their leading contributors. Geneva was then under threat of annexation by France (which in fact took place in 1798). Its intellectual elite turned towards England as the country which had developed and preserved the civil liberties and institutions that they saw threatened in Geneva. Their professed aim was to keep their “unfortunate country” before the eyes of the world and, primarily, to keep before the eyes of Geneva the example of a country which had held on to its social order and integrity without falling prey to the “principles nouveaux”, the egalitarian passions engendered by the Revolution.153 The enterprise was daring and dangerous, as it was clearly directed against the France of the day while favouring Britain, her leading adversary. The message was widely understood in France; many, probably most of the articles of the Bibliothèque Britannique, were reprinted in French publications. The notoriety which the periodical thus gained naturally endangered it, but at the same time made it a power in the land as the mouthpiece of opposition. There were influential Frenchmen who welcomed the new magazine, including Du Pont de Nemours and Carnot. Even Napoleon Bonaparte, the first Consul and later Emperor, came to be

152 his monument on the Bastions in front of the hôtel de ville in Geneva; his biography by Edmond Pictet 153 Letter of M.A. Pictet to Etienne Dumont of 1/6/97, Bibl.publ.Geneva, MS.Et. Dumont 75, 26; also Charles Pictet de Rochemont, 54 et seq.

101 favourably disposed towards it,154 probably because he regarded the editors as potential go-betweens in his relations with England; one of them, M.A. Pictet was in fact appointed a member of the French Tribunal in 1802 in place of the more radical Benjamin Constant. In 1814, during the Hundred Days, between Elba and Waterloo, Napoleon was to view Sismondi, by then a famous author, in the same light, that is as a possible mediator between himself and British opinion.

Certain compromises proved to be necessary. The Bibliothèque had been meant to champion a conservative liberalism in direct opposition to the principles of modern radicalism.155 But, under the pressure of events, politics had to be excluded from the topics to be treated. The editors found their way round this enforced omission: what could not be said expressis verbis, could be said between the lines. Ostensibly, the Bibliothèque took up an old tradition. There had been many predecessors serving the same aim of keeping interested French people in touch with English literature. Ever since 1710 there had been French magazines with titles such as Bibliothèque Angloise or Bibliothèque Britannique. Two bore the name of Journal Britannique; the first of these was published from 1750 to 1755 by Dr Matthew Maty, librarian of the British Museum and secretary of the Royal Society, who had warmly encouraged and promoted the young Gibbon’s first masterpiece, the Essai sur l’étude de la littérature, published in 1761, but neglected in England because it was written in French; the other Journal Britannique had started in 1756, when England and France were at war, and had lasted until 1758.156 Edward Gibbon himself, together with his friend Deyverdun, had emulated Dr Maty’s example by publishing a journal for the year 1767 under the title Mémoires littéraires de la Grande Bretagne.157 However, the new Bibliothéque Britannique was much more comprehensive than its predecessors. It

154 Borgeaud II, 49 et seq.; Talleyrand told Pictet de Rochemont at the Congress of Vienna that Napoleon would have liked, but had not dared, to suppress the Bibliothèque, Ch. Pictet de R., 59. But Talleyrand was hardly a credible witness 155 No.1 (Janvier 1796) 7 156156 Bibl.Brit. (Litt.) t.II (1796) article IV) 157 Autobiography, 130

102 went on for 20 years; after the fall of Napoleon the review changed its name to Bibliothèque Universelle, indicating that it had extended its range of interest to cover the whole of European literature; it continued, finally with its seat in Lausanne, as a widely respected periodical until ....?

Of the three editors, Maurice was the administrator; in 1797 he travelled to Paris and London to strengthen their bonds with friends and contributors, these including Etienne Dumont, Arthur Young, Sir Joseph Banks, Maria Edgeworth, William Godwin,Sir Francis D’Ivernois and Dr and Mrs Maracet, Prevost’s in-laws. He was surprised to find London, despite the high burden of taxation, so full of animation with its elegant coaches, riders and pedestrians, a picture of luxury, abundance, wealth and cleanliness.158 Marc Auguest Pictet was in charge of literature and science other than agriculture; the latter was in his brother Charles’s hands. M.A. Pictet travelled in England, Scotland and Ireland in 1798 and 1801; in Ireland he visited Maria Edgeworth and her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth; in London he stayed in the ultra-modern house of the great American-born town planner and inventor and founder of the Royal Institution, Count von Rumford (formerly Sir Benjamin Thompson), and spent a good deal of time with Etienne Dumont. The works and achievements of these friends were looming large in the Bibliothèque Britannique159

The Bibliothèque appeared most of the time in three divisions, Littérature, Arts et Sciences, and Agriculture Anglaise, altogether offering the reader annual about 4000 pages of articles and copius extracts, often in instalments, as well as summaries of English books and periodicals. The translators were the editors and contributors like Pierre Prevost, their wives and daughters; Genevan women of the upper classes were well educated, and were guilty, as Napoleon blamed the, of trop bien savoir l’anglais.160 Prevost’s translations of works by Blair, Stewart, Bell and Malthus have

158 Letter of F.G. Maurice of May 15, 1797 to M.A. Pictet, Papiers Edmond Pictet, Cahier 6, p.10, Bibliothèdque Publique de Genève; also Bibliothèque Britannique 7 (1798) XVI 159 ibid. Cahier 7 160 Ch. Pictet du R., 63

103 been mentioned. Charles Pictet de Rochemont published translations of such important works as Henry Thornton’s Enquiry into the Nature and Effects of the Paper Credit of Great Britain (1802; transl.1804) as well as Poésies de Byron, Thomas Moore and Walter Scott, traduites en français (no year). His own publications, apart from writings on politics and strategy, consisted mainly of his articles in the Bibliothèque, later reprinted in the ten volumes of his Cours d’agriculture anglaise (1808-1810). After Charles’s return to Geneva in 1800 the two men became friends, and in 1810 Charles was to court Pictet’s daughter Amélie; his suit was viewed favourably by her parents but remained unsuccessful with the young girl.161 Unlike the Simondes, Pictet had not emigrated to foreign parts during the height of the Revolution; but he had retired to the countryside at Lancy, where he pursued his interests and experiments in farming, of which more will be said later. He had seriously contemplated emigrating to the United States, whose constitution he regarded as providing the best safeguard of true liberty against the dangers of fanaticism.162 His admiration of the American constitution as that of a model republic had led him to the study of John Adam’s History of the principal Republics in the world. A defense of the Constitutions of the United States (London 1787-88, 3 vols.), the work which Charles had acquired and experted during his stay in England, and which was to serve him as one of the models for his Recherches of 1798.163 Adams’s book was one of those dealt with in the first issue of the Bibliothèque Britannique.

The section on Littérature had subdivisions devoted to Political Economy, Moral Philosophy, History and Biography, Theology, Theory of Art, Voyages, Novels, and Miscellaneous. During the years of Charles’s stay in Italy the historical works experted and commented upon in the Bibliothèque included Gibbon’s Autobiography and William Roscoe’s Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici (1795, both of which books made a great impact on Sismondi’s later work. In the next few years Dugald Stewart’s

161 Amelie married J B Galiffe, a minor local historian and genealogist, who entertained a life-long jealousy of Sismondi’s greater ability...... ? 162 op.cit. 54-5; he published Tableau de la situation actuelle des Estats Unis... in 1795 163 supra p.75-6

104 masterly biographies of William Robertson and Adam Smith were to follow. The latter work was translated in full as a separate book by Pierre Prevost together with Smith’s philosophical essays, which commentators from Sismondi’s friend Degerando to Schumpeter have rightly been acclaimed as a masterpiece.164

The novels treated included those of Maria Edgeworth, William Godwin, and Mrs Radclifffe and her followers. The latter were described as a kind of morose outpouring, but on the whole, the merit of novels as serious literature was appreciated as providing an aid to the study of society and an example of good conduct. It is true that in later years the editors were to mistake the irony of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park as forming part of the Radcliffe tradition;165, but on the whole, both selection and critical comments evoke a vivid picture of the English prose and poetical literature of the time. Naturally, Walter Scott’s , but on the whole, both selection and critical comments evoke a vivid picture of the English prose and poetical literature of the time. Naturally, Walter Scott’s Waverley and other historical novels were received with admiration when they appeared from 1814 onwards. Their success was to give Charles the idea of complementing his Histoire des Français with a series of historical novels destined to emphasise the local colour, the individual feelings, suffering and personal relationships of an epoch more powerfully than it was possible in the generalising historical narrative. Eventually he completed only one of these novels, Julia Severa166, a companion volume to his history of the Merovingian period of Gaul.

However, the work revealed little talent for imaginative writing, and its reception by critics did not encourage its author to persevere. Macaulay, who admired Sismondi as one of his “favourite writers”, said of his (imaginative) novel in contradistinction to his (analytical) history that it had “all the disadvantages of a division of labour and

164 Schumpeter 182; Degérando, Hist. Comparée des Systemes de Philosophie, vol.I (1804-An XIII) 55 165 However they singled out Pride and Prejudice as the best of the ‘mediocre’ novels published in 1813; Bibl.Brit. (Litt.) 55 (1814) VIII. Imaginative literature was not the ....> of Genevan culture. 166 Julie Severa, ou l’an Quatre Cent Quatre-Vinght Douze (Paris 1822) 3 vols.; the preface sets out Sismondi’s justification for supplementing his history by fictional writing.

105 one of its advantages.”167 Though it was no success, the attempt revealed the width of Charles’s interests and ambitions as a writer.

While deploring the mystical trivialities of Mrs Radclifffe, the editors appreciated that novels on contemporary subjects, like those by Maria Edgeworth, held up a valid mirror to the state of society, of characters, manners and opinions. One of these novels, long forgotten, is worth singling out here because, in a highly informative and entertaining way, it fitted in with the editors’ concern with moral and social philosophy and education. The title of this anonymous forerunner of Dickens’s Hard Times and Dorothea, or a Ray of the New Light, a novel in 3 volumes published in London in 1801. It provides a lively, satirical picture of the post-Enlightenment and post-revolutionary self-image of women and children under the influence, in particular, of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, both of whom figured widely in the first few years of the Bibliothèque Britannique. Dorothea, the heroine, is an intelligent, spontaneous, yet spoilt girl of nearly 16, who dominates her family and combines the ambitions of a social reformer with those of a buddy society lady.

Her heart was full of philanthropic schemes; she dreamt only of improvement, reform and emancipation. While she was busy dressing for the ball, she pondered the equitable redistribution of property and the poverty of the common people; and she never paid her modest without deploring the discontents of the poor. - Not that Dorothea had gone to the sources of the doctrines to which she was attached. Rousseau, Voltaire and Hume were still unknown to her, but she studied the works of the day, the books of those authors who, counting on their readers’ ignorance, repeat at second hand, as if they were their own, the opinions of their masters. - The Rights of Women made a great impression on her. Caleb Williams, Godwin’s favourite son, had moved her compassion, and the precepts of the citizen Holcroft engendered a new source of energy in her...

Dorothea combines a mechanistic utilitarianism with an extreme, pre-romantic individualism:

167 “Dante”, Knight’s Quarterly Magazine (January 1824), Misc. Writings, 23; “Hallam”, Ed.Rev. (Sept. 1828), Historical Essays 62

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Isn’t it true, father” she said to him, “that one must permit one’s reason to develop spontaneously, and that a human being must only learn what he wants to know and finds useful?” “My dear Dorothea”, answered her father, “ I suppose you want to be like the other girls of your age and get the same kind of education and instruction as they do; yet if we had waited with your lessons until you had asked for them, I asure you, you would surely have remained a little imbecile. However, as you are now reasonably advanced, we’ll be able to do without your governess... As regards your other teachers, you can see to that yourself.” - “I’ll tell you the distinction I make, father, all that I learn happily and without the drudgery of constant application, is fine with me. It is a matter of exchange, it is a bargain; I pay money which someone needs, I obtain instruction which I want; this is a free act all round, everyone likes it, and there is no degradation; by contrast, in the traditional manner, there is real slavery, in short, “slavery of children is not more legitimate than that of men and women.”

Dorothea provides a vivid sketch of the ambitions and passions which were in the air, though they did not find pleasure in the editors’ eyes. They wished to counteract extreme passion, egalitarian radicalism, and arid rationalism. They aimed at tampering the rugged individualism of the market place by compassion, as Adam Smith had done in the Wealth of Nations and the Theory of Moral Sentiments. They were utilitarians in the same sense as Smith had been. They stated in the preface to their first issue:

The principle of utility... will be our constant lodestar... a science, whose principles we wish particularly to uphold, is that of the English and Scottish moralists: no one has been able better than these philosophers to develop and cultivate that in strict of justice, and properly to direct that ardent and blind desire for happiness, towards which tend all the secret qualities of the human heart.168

With admirable insight into the true achievements of eighteenth century thought, the next issue of the Bibliothèque asserted that “the immortal works” of men like “Hume, Smith, Ferguson... those men, after whom posterity will judge the British of this century, set to the world an example of genius over and above all prejudice”.169 No less than British thought, it was also English political and social practice that caught

168 Bibl.Brit. (Litt.) I (1796) 6-7 169 ibid II (1976) 409-10

107 the editors’ attention, particularly the treatment of the poor, at once harsh in the Poor Law legislation and charitably generous by means of private munificence.

No nation looks better after its poor, yet none has more of them. No one is more ingenious in supporting suffering individuals, in preventing beggary, in succouring the old and the weak; but all the same, the mass of the poor is a plague which devours England. We must give much thought to these facts so important for the welfare and prosperity of nations.170

These programmatic statements of the editors were tantamount to intimations of Sismondi’s own future work. This is true also of their conception of political science and expounded in a review article on the Outlines of Moral Philosophy by Dugald Stewart, one of the founding fathers of the modern methodology of the social sciences:

Is this political science one of the branches of knowledge which we can know only by intuition? ...The British don’t think so. They believe that the science concerned with the rules of human societies can be understood only if one sets out from the study of the elements which form these societies, that is the study of man. Psychology and moral philosophy are the basis of political science.. that art of increasing and preserving the welfare of human beings united in great societies.171

In contrast with Hume and the Encyclopédie, Stewart distinguished between the sciences of matter (the natural sciences), whose study was a matter of observation, and the sciences of the mind (social sciences), “the inductive Philosophy of the Human Mind”, which were a matter of reflection.172 From Stewart the methodology of the social sciences was to lead to the sixth book of J.S. Mill’s Logic (1843), and, in a modified form, to the German notion of Geisteswissenschaften.173.

The early issues of the Bibliothèque Britannique published long extracts and résumés of the sociological, economic and historical works of Adam Ferguson, John Millar,

170 ibid. 22 (1803) 8 171 ibid. II (1796) 413 172 See in particular Stewart’s Preliminary Dissertation to Supplemental Volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica, The Collected Works, ed. Sir Wm. Hamilton (Edinburgh 1855) Vol.I.22 173

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Dugald Stewart, Bentham, William Godwin, Arthur Young, Sir John Sinclair, Lord Lauderdale, Patrick Colqhoun, Sir Frederick Eden, and many others. In later years the work of Richard Owen was to be given prominence in the pages of the periodical. But in the first few years, which were of significance to Sismondi’s early writings, the articles on and by Godwin, Bentham and Arthur Young must take pride of place.

The overwhelming role assigned to writers like Bentham and Godwin may come as a surprise in a context which was expressly designed to fight the egalitarian principles of Rousseau and the political fanaticism of the Revolution. However, in Godwin’s case it was his social critique and his compassionate concern for the weak, which recommended him to the editors, rather than his political radicalism. He had powerful advocates in Geneva in the Constant family, the Simondes’ neighbours at Châtelaine. Samuel Constant had translated Godwin’s novel Caleb Williams in 1795, the year following its publication in England. This novel, a companion work to Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, aimed at picturing “things as they really are”, starting from the Platonic assumption that the source of all evil is the inability to understand reality. Godwin’s practical conclusion was that under certain social conditions “man becomes the destroyer of man”; this may happen in traditional societies as well as under artificially designed constitutions. What is needed to make life worth living, is an understanding of “the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism”, a despotism reflecting “the spirit and character of government which intrudes itself into every rank of society” and permits strong and privileged individuals to oppress others. When Godwin talked of the spirit and character of government, he had not a narrow constitutionalism in mind, that is, the assumption that the laws alone determine national character. Godwin was influenced by Helvétius’s De l’Esprit (1758)174 He regarded men as the product of social

174 De l’Espirit, dis.II and II who, in his preface made it clear that he in turn followed David Hume in wishing to “treat morals like any other science and to make an experimental morality like an experimental physics”. See Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature: being an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects (1739-1740). See Elie Halévy, The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism (1901), trans. Mary Morris, London 1928, 20, 205, et seq.

109 circumstances, or, in the modern sociological terminology, of his socialisation, the sum total of social and cultural influences acting upon his education. The legislator had therefore to be an educator in the widest sense of the word; both the legal system and the moral environment had to be fashioned so that he greatest number of people would be enabled to have a part in the good things of life. Accordingly Godwin’s idea of education was not quite as permissive as Rousseau’s, though the author of Dorothea wished his (or her) readers to believe this.175 Education was to give future citizens information and develop their reasoning powers; laws were meant to erect barriers to exploitation of the weak and the poor.

The editors were evidently fascinated by Godwin. The topics which occupied his mind, were questions fought over and suffered for in the revolutionary period. Godwin’s environmentalism clashed with their religious belief in an in-born divine spark in human beings. On the other hand, his trust in the power of education and good laws as well as his solicitude for the poor and the weak corresponded with similar tendencies close to the hearts of the Genevan philosophers. But where they saw a slow and tolerant evolutionary process at work, Godwin believed in the power of the philosopher to order life satisfactorily by means of the principle of utility and the association of beneficent ideas. Another of the writers connected with the circle of the Bibliothèque, Benjamin Constant, Samuel Constant’s nephew, and soon to be Sismondi’s friend, was so enamoured of Godwin’s thought that he translated his main work, the Enquiry concerning Political Justice and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (1793) into French in 1799.176 The editors were more cautious. Godwin was thought-provoking; but they found it necessary to affirm in their comments that they regarded him as utopian and intolerant. They admired his style which, they felt, evoked the Latin elegance of Montesquieu, Gibbon and Rousseau rather than the cumbersome, repetitive, imprecise obscurity, which they characterised as typical of

175 See Godwin’s Enquirer (1797), Part I, Essay XI. can’ read what’s in margin - Rosa 176 The work, De la Justice Politique was however not published until 1975, ed. Burton R Pollin (State University of New York Press). Constant was Geneva’s representative in Paris from 1798-1802, when he was replaced by Marc August Pictet.

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English style, not dissimilar in their eyes to the German tradition. Godwin preferred brilliance and satire to judicious and tolerant impartiality. Apart form his novels and his biography of Mary Woolstonecraft, most of the space devoted to his writing was reserved for The Enquirer, a collection of essay s published in 1797 and excerpted (and annotated) in the Bibliothèque in the following year.

The most important essay reproduced was that on “Wealth and Poverty”.177 It was part of the post-Smithian debate on the question whether poverty could be relieved by increased production alone or whether improvements in the distribution of wealth had to be implemented by state intervention. This debate was occasioned by the political upheavals of the late eighteenth century and the ensuing economic rises; Sir James Stewart, Lord Lauderdale, Thomas Paine, Bentham, Aruthur Young, Eden and Malthus took part in it. There was the baffling fact, which Roussseau had pointed out, and which the editors of the Bibliothèque found confirmed: England was wealthy, but the poor were abundant all the same. Godwin had corroborated this observation in his Political Justice when he said that “injustice, oppression, and misery can find an abode in those seeming happy seats”.178 He described the poor in the same terms which Sismondi was later to use concerning the proletarians, and which Marx and others took over from him. The poor lacked permanent property; their children were condemned to excessive toil, excessive because the privileged members of society were unproductive and did not work;179 their lives were short, brutish and ignorant; they knew no happiness except the avoidance of pain, no leisure, “that only true wealth”. A less iniquitous distribution of material wealth was therefore required to enable the poor to lead a more dignified life. The accumulation of wealth in few hands had led to dissatisfaction both in the wealthy and the poor; happiness could be achieved only by virtuous mediocrity in the possession of wealth and the wielding of power.

177 Bibl.Brit. (Litt.)7(1798) 178 2nd ed. (1796) Vol.II, 476 179 The most brilliant statement of this situation was later to be La Parabole of Saint Simon

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Godwin hoped that the introduction of machines would lighten the toil of human beings. Like Adam Smith, hew was optimistic in this respect; but even more than Smith, hew was perturbed by the dehumanising effects of the division of labour. When The Enquirer was published in a second edition in 1842, it carried the sub-title: A forcible exposure of the demoralising tendencies of competition. Sismondi was to take up Godwin’s anxieties concerning the introduction of machines, the division of labour, the accumulation of capital, and the unchecked growth of population. He soon came to feel that, in the words of his own follower, John Stuart Mill, it was “questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make large fortunes”.180 Smith, Godwin, and later Mill, believed however in the beneficial, economic, as contrasted with the social, effects of the division of labour and improved technology. Sismondi on the other hand came to condemn also the economic consequences of both the division of labour and machinofacture; his critical attitude in this respect led to his theory of crises in his Nouveaux Principes (1819), which was to become a cornerstone of Marxian economics.181 Sismondi’s economic analysis was more systematic, comprehensive and judicious than the more emotional path chosen by Godwin; but the questions posed and the solutions intimated by that “first of the great modern socialists”182 cannot have failed to give Sismondi ample food for thought.

180 JS.M. Pol.Economy (1848), Bk.IV chap. VI, last para. 181 Robert Owen’s influence on Sismondi will be treated in Vol.II of this biolgraphy; Owen was of course influenced himself by Godwin. From the biographical point of view it is worth noting that Godwin had at times been supported by the patronage of Josiah Wedgwood, with whose family Charles came to be closely related through his marriage to a sister of Mrs Josiah II and Mrs John Wedgwood. 182 so Jean Jaurès, quoted in L’oeuvre de Léon Blum, 1891-1905 (Paris 1954) 155

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The provocative and daring originality of Godwin’s thought assured him of a prominent place in the Bibliothèque Britannique; he was intrinsically interesting as well as representative of an important strand in contemporary English thought. But the editors were always careful to keep their distance from Godwin’s radical ideas and to express their own attitude clearly in copious and detailed “observations”. On the other hand, writers like Gibbon and Adam Smith were treated with unqualified admiration. Somewhat surprisingly the same treatment was accorded to Jeremy Bentham although he had joined the radical ranks after the French Revolution. In fact, the Bibliothèque played such an outstanding role in the dissemination of Bentham’s views and the rise of his reputation as an eminent thinker that it has become an integral part of his biography. His life spanned the years 1748 to 1832. As a young lawyer he had studied under Blackstone and had read Delolme with admiration, In 1776 he had published his first work, A Fragment on Government, a brilliant criticism of Blackstone and a first intimation of the original turn of his mind. His masterly, though uneven, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, written in the late seventies and printed in 1780, but not published until 1789, laid the foundation of his moral and legal philosophy and of his social psychology. Neither work met with success in England; they were practically ignored. However, the Fragment procured him the friendship of Lord Shelburne (the later Marquis of Lansdowne), who, as prime minister, conceded independence to the United States in 1782. It was through Shelburne that Bentham met two men who were to play a prominent role in his life. One was Sir Samuel Romilly, like himself a great legal reformer, and, coming of Huguenot stock, related by friendship to Genevan circles. The other was Etinne Dumont, who became Bentham’s most important collaborator, his alter ego. In later years Dumont became one of Charles’s closest and most cherished friends.

The editors of the Bibliothèque Britannique included Bentham’s Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation among the English works treated in the first year

113 of their magazine.183 They recognised that Bentham’s outstanding intelligence, penetration and judgement entitled him to be given ample space, even though they did not expect that his writings would attract the interest of many of their readers. They realised that here was an oeuvre taking shape which, though alien to the French intellectual tradition, was challenging the very basis of accustomed metaphysics. In this respect, they compared Bentham with “the famous professor of Koenigsberg, KANT”,184 a remarkably perspicuous observation, and one which must have been one of the first pointers for Sismondi to Kant, whose moral philosophy he was later to make his own. The editorial comment dwelled on the wide sweep and the originality of Bentham’s attempt at giving method and a clear terminology to the chaotic “science of legislation”, a term then comprising the while range of the social sciences such as law, politics, international relations, psychology, and political economy. While the ground had been prepared by Hume, Adam Smith and the philosophies, including Charles’s new Italian masers, Bentham’s systematic and philosophical penetration gave the concept added depth and penetration.

The editors translated and printed extracts from Bentham’s chapters I and II, giving an adequate idea of his somewhat crude treatment of the principle of utility, as well as chapters VII (Of human action in general), VIII (Of Intentionality) and X (Of Motives), too compressed though, to do full justice to Bentham’s masterly analysis of the concept of action. In their short introduction the editors drew attention to

Bentham’s desire to complement the traditional Aristoletian logic of the understanding by a demtic logic of the will, of which law, morality and policy were the most important applications. This division of the realms of knowledge and of action, or of is and ought, was the essential point in Bentham’s philosophy.185 It had been initiated by the sciences of human nature and society of Hobbes and Hume and their Scottish, French and Italian followers, and it was paralleled by Kant’s distinction

183 3 (1976) 137-150, 265-283 184 ibid.283 185 Can’t read note in margin - Rosa

114 between pure and practical reason.186 There were not only first principles of knowledge, but also first principles of conduct. It was the task of a scientific observer to inquire into cause and effect, while the practical adviser applied the insights of science to the ends and rules of human action.187 Bentham’s first principle of conduct was the principle of utility, the desire to preserve and to augment the happiness of the community, that is, its individual members.188 The dialogue with utilitarianism as well as the relationship between science and moral aspirations were to be among the main concerns of Charles’s work, in his historical writings not less than in his contributions to economics and politics.

The publication of the Bentham extracts proved to be a turning point for the Bibliothèque. From a mere mirror of the British intellectual scene it was transformed into a harbinger of avant-garde English thought. It became Bentham’s mouthpiece, publishing a number of his major works long before they appeared in England. In fact, it turned the hitherto neglected English writer into the universally admired legislator of the world. Bentham’s Theory of Legislation, which was not published in English until 1864, came out in a French edition in 1802, after parts had appeared previously in the Bibliothèque. Likewise, the English edition of Rationale of Punishment is dated 1830, after three French editions had appeared between 1811 and 1825. A Treatise on Judicial Evidence was put before the public in French in 1823, while the English version (by ....?) appeared two years later. Other works such as the Essay on Political

Tactics (London 1791) and Situation and Relief of the Poor (first published 1796- 1798 in Young’s Annals of Agriculture) owed their effectiveness to their re- arrangement and dissemination in French in 1816 and 1802 respectively. A French edition of Bentham’s collected works in 3 volumes (Brussels 1829-1830) preceded

186 Both Bentham and Kant acknowledgedtheir crucial indebtedness to Hume: “I felt as if scales had fallen from my eyes”; Bentham,Fragment, 50 N.; “Die Erinnerung des David Hume war even dasjenige, was mir... zuerst den dogmatischen Schlummer unterbrach und meinen Untersuchungen im Felde der spekulativen Philosophie eine ganz andere Richtung gab”; Kant, Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik..., Werke IV (1911), 260. Kant liked to regard himself as being of Scottish descent. 187 See the classical statement of the distinction in Bk.VI, chap. XII of J.S. Mill’s Logic 188 Principles, chap.I, para.5,6,9

115 the (more comprehensive) English edition by more than a decade.189 The three major works quoted were not only first published in France, but in the French language, from which most English versions were then translated. The Bibliothèque Britannique thus played a major role in introducing one of England’s intellectual giants to both the English public and the world at large.

The link between Bentham and the Bibliothèque Britannique was Etienne Dumont. When the Simondes had met him at a party in London in 1794, Madam S. had shrunk in horror from him as an evil demagogue, who had only recently been a prime mover in the revolution at Geneva. Dumont had played an important part in the French Revolution when, in 1789 and 1790, he acted as a speech writer for Mirabeau, together with his Genevan compatriots Clavière and Du Roveray. He had been a member of the Club des Jacobins in Paris in 1791. However, by October 1792 he had become disenchanted with the terreur; the persecutions left him desperate and broken- hearted. Yet, like Czech and other unsuccessful communists in our day, he still cherished the utopian belief that the humanistic ideal of the revolution could be translated into practice, given the right sort of liberal-minded leaders. He spent a few months in Geneva from the end of 1792 until early March 1793, putting himself at the disposal of the revolution there as a member of the new government. It was his aim in the field of foreign affairs to save Geneva’s independence from French domination, while in the domestic field he attempted to introduce English constitutional notions and conventions into the debates of the General Assembly. He was soon disillusioned. The logic of revolution took over; liberalism declined into licence, virtue into self- righteous despotism.

A chastened Dumont returned to London where he took up once more his previous position as tutor to Lord Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, the 12 year old some of Lord Lansdowne, his and Bentham’s friend. The pupil lived to be a witness to his tutor’s mature teaching; in 1807 as the second Lord Lansdown, he resigned as Chancellor of

189 Can’t read note in margin - rosa

116 the Exchequer over his government’s rejection of Catholic emancipation; later he became a champion of the Irish and the Jews, as well as of the abolition of the slave trade; he refused to have dukedom conferred on him. Dumont’s radicalism had been derived from religious (he had been a paste in Calvin’s church) and humanitarian sources.190 From a dogmatic democrat he became a champion of minorities and a pragmatic defender of liberties. Henceforth he served selflessly two aims: as a writer, to interpret Bentham’s philosophy to the world, and as a politician, to see Geneva grow into a just and tolerant republic. Charles’s own moral outlook had much in common with that of Dumont whom he learned to love as a friend. He went as far as helping Dumont give shape to Bentham’s manuscripts which, written with an eye to the subject-matter only rather than an audience, were generally regarded as “unmarketable”, and as entangling the thread of the argument in rhetoric and careless arrangement. Bentham’s was a comprehensive though somewhat elephantine, system of ethics, jurisprudence, logic and moral philosophy. It was against the background of Dumont’s Benthamism that Charles developed important aspects of his thought, though, eventually, he felt unable to share its utilitarian basis.

There has been a goo deal of argument among professional philosophers as to how far Dumont has actually misinterpreted and unduly simplified Bentham’s acute reasoning.191 This question, however, need not be examined here as Dumont’s version was at any rate more acceptable to Charles than Bentham’s own. There is no doubt that Dumont “Dumontized” Bentham’s work, as Bentham himself described the achievement “of the only true Dumont in the world, by whom they (B’s works) will be regenerated and beautified”.192 In the eyes of most contemporaries Bentham and Dumont were one.

Never was there a literary partnership so fortunate as that of Mr Bentham and M Dumont... If M Dumont had never been born, Mr

190 Can’t read note in margin - rosa 191 David Baumgardt, Bentham and the Ethics of Today (1966); C.K. Ogden, Bentham’s Theory of Fictions (1932) 192 Letter to Dumont of 26/5/1822; M.S. Et.Dumont, 33 V, Geneva

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Bentham would still have been a very great man. But he would have been great to himself alone... Indeed, what was said of Bacon’s philosophy may be said of Bentham’s. It was in little repute among us, till judgements in its favour came from beyond the sea, and convinced us, to our shame, that we had been abusing and laughing at one of the greatest men of the age... in the same rank with Galileo and with Locke... M.Dumont, ...was one of those persons who have, for the sake of mankind, neglected the case of their own fame.193

Already 3 years earlier, Macaulay, in a spirited, though Quixotic, attack on James Mill’s Essay on Government and Bentham for articles in the Westminster Review, which he mistakenly believed to have been written by these authors, had compared other Benthamites unfavourably with Dumont. Actually, Bentham had only supplied a memorandum on the greatest happiness principle to the WR. A letter from J.-B.Say to Dumont makes it clear that this memorandum was actually written by Dumont194 Without the publication of the two articles on Bentham’s Principles of Morals and Legislation in the Bibliothèque Britannique Dumont might never have been able to embark effectively on his role as Bentham’s interpreter. Evidently, he could not have done so in England as his English was not sufficiently idiomatic. As regards France, there would have been no openings for him under the prevailing political conditions. The Biblithèque Britannique must therefore have come as a godsend: Dumont was enabled to make his peace with Geneva and, at the same time, provide a platform for his favourite authors, Maria Edgeworth and Jeremy Bentham. The former required only translation; but Bentham, the “Newton of Legislation”, required to be Dumontized. To this end Dumont penned a series of “Letters to the Editors” on Bentham’s writings which, meeting with a ready welcome,195 were published in 1797 and 1798.

In his first letter, dated 1st May 1797, Dumont started by setting out his programme. Bentham’s creative genius, always intent on new ideas, had left his writings in an unrevised and unsystematic form, which required selecting, clarifying, abridging, re-

193 Macaulay, “Mirabeau”, Ed.Rev. (July 1832) passim 194 unpublished Letter of 10/5/1829; M.S. Et.Dumont, t. 7,p.1. Geneva (Quote Ed.R. and and W.R. articles) 195 M A Pictet’s letter of 1.6.97 to Dumont, M.S. Et.Dumont, 75, f.266, p.1; Geneva

118 arranging and reconciling discordant versions. Dumont stated that he had devoted himself to this task as a friend rather than a disciple who, in his French language, gave his own interpretation of Bentham’s works. Since 1790, that is for the previous seven years, he had been engaged in editing Bentham’s main writings on moral philosophy and jurisprudence, political economy, methodology and linguistic philosophy, in fact, those works which he was later to publish in full, including comparatively neglected pieces such as the Manual of Political Economy196 and The Influence of Time and Place on Legislation.197

In later years of his long life Bentham was to modify and add to his views, but for Sismondi it was Dumont’s Bentham who counted. Dumont insisted on the pragmatic character of Bentham’s projects; he was not in search of an ideal constitution.198 He thought that the best constitution for any people was the one it was used to, and which thus determined the expectations of its citizens.199 That constitution, however, was not to be blindly accepted; it had to be scrutinised in the light of experience. The sovereign had to be ready to correct and modify laws according to the requirements of the situation, to adjust prejudices, introduce innovations, avoid upsets in property and governmental relations, reform abuses without hurting existing interests, and plan ahead. Fictitious entities had to be reduced to their true meaning; for instance, political catchwords like the “mystery of the art of government” should be shown to have served as a cover to conquests, religious domination or commercial adventures.

Likewise there was no excuse for the contemporary (revolutionary) abuse of the name of liberty to conceal mere political power. Political power as such, the liberty of the ancients in Delolme’s terms or positive liberty, was no guarantee for the good life unless backed by good laws, that is, laws protecting the individual. Liberty was a means of achieving the final aim of society, the well-being of its citizens. Liberty, an

196 For details see W. Stark, Jeremy Bentham’s Economic Writings, Vol.I (1952) 49 et seq. 197 Dumont’s list is similar to Bentham’s own programmatic list of titles in the Principles, Preface, paras. 18-28 198 Howver, 30 years later B. was to design a Constitutional Code based on English, French and American political and administrataive experience. 199 Bibl.Brit. 5 (1797) 191

119 equivocal and much abused word, consisted in the security which the law procured to the citizen against injuries to his honour, life and possessions on the part of other persons. Political liberty in particular protected him from injustice inflicted by organs of the government.200

Individual liberty, as Dumont pointed out in his second letter of the 15th June 1797,201 had to yield precedence to the prime aim of the legislator, which was to provide security to the country, to its citizens and their legitimate expectations. Apart from security, there were three other ends of government in Bentham’s view: equality, subsistence and abundance, the two latter ends being the subject-matter of welfare policy and economics. It was the task of government to reconcile the conflicting requirements of these ends, a task which necessarily imposed sacrifices on individual citizens. Ideally, an equal distribution of property would appear to be the best means of assuring equal chances of happiness to all citizens. But security would be undermined by a re-distribution of property, which would dissolve the legal order and the expectations of continuity which is guaranteed. While a revolutionary upset of the status quo could be cured, as inequalities would assert themselves again,202 a re- distribution enforced by law and aiming at equality, would be irreparable; it would remove the incentive to work, cause people to spend rather than save, destroy mutual trust, and lead to price inflation, currency devaluation and, eventually bankruptcy - in short, the rule of law would give way to chaos. (The implications of this train of thought for our time are frighteningly clear). Equality, Bentham believed at that time, was attainable only in death. Dumont disagreed. He conceded that the law could not enforce quality, but, he claimed it should refrain form favouring inequality, and thus in the long run facilitate a more equitable distribution of wealth as well as impeding its accumulation. If enforced equality nullified the rule of law, so did rigid inescapable inequality. Under feudalism the population had been divided into two

200 ibid. 291 201 Ibid. 277-302 202 can’t read note in margin - rosa

120 classes, a few powerful proprietors on the one hand, and the mass of powerless serfs on the other. By contrast, the development of industry and trade had put an end to privileges and monopolies, and thus encouraged the rise of numerous enterprises, increasing social mobility and giving a new sense of purpose to a multitude of people.

These ideas of Bentham-Dumont were not revolutionary notions. Their conception of liberty, though more closely reasoned, was akin to that of Blackstone and Delolme. Their plea for security as the prime end of good laws was the same as Kant’s and no less adverse to revolution than Burke’s or Herder’s defence of the traditional order. They advocated individual reforms, but not sweeping change, piecemeal social engineering rather than wholesale social regeneration. “The only time for undertaking important legislation reforms is a period when public passions are not aroused, and when government enjoys real stability.203 The requirements of time and place had to be taken into account by the legislature. While it could not make citizens virtuous, it could attempt to “diminish and restrain the sad and mischievous passions” so as to protect people from more ruthless fellow-men or their superiors. Charles could go along with most of these ideas, so much so that in later years he agreed to edit Bentham’s Political Sophisms, first published in Dumont’s edition of the Tactique des Assemblées Législatives in 1816; the work, in two volumes, was published in Geneva by Paschoud, Sismondi’s erstwhile business partner.204 However, he undertook this task for the love of Dumont rather than Bentham of whom he became increasingly critical in favour of Adam Smith and Kant.205 What he rejected, was Bentham’s utilitarian moral philosophy rather than his political views as they were formulated in the seventeen nineties as a reaction to the revolutionary atrocities committed in the committed in the name of majority rule. (In fact, the Political Sophisms, preserved in

203 Dumont, in the slightly extended version of his first letter, in the preface to his Traité de Législation civile et pénale of 1802. Cp. with H. Kelsen in our time - successor to analytical scholl of Bentham - Austin 204 See Statistique, 11-12 205 See Dumont’s unpublished letter of 22/3/1816 to Sismondi, Percia, A, 8, 11: “Je suis curieux de savoir ce qu’il (Bentham) pensera de votre arrangement des sophismes: j’ai donné dans une note les raisons qui me l’avoient fait préférer au sien, et j’ai dit je le devois aux conseils d’un ami très éclairé”.

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Sismondi’s own hand in the Pescia collection, represent a concise guide to his own notions of constitutional theory and practice; they will therefore engage our attention in greater details at a later stage.)

In his fifth letter206 Dumont dealt with Bentham’s Manual of Political Economy. He contrasted his master’s views with Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. While Bentham expressed admiration for Smith, whose work served him as the starting point for his own investigations, he was critical of Smith’s method. Bentham wanted to develop economic analysis whereas he regarded Smith primarily as a mere historian of economic theories and economic development. Smith believed that most economic theories were ideologies, based on private interests and prejudices, and that these theories in turn had determined policies.207 Therefore, he said, it was necessary to understand how people and governments had come to behave as they did, or in general terms, to develop economic sociology prior to arriving at a scientific understanding of causes and consequences, that is, economic analysis. Smith’s own analysis, which diagnosed the division of labour as the main cause of economic progress, was embedded in a wide variety of illustrative facts of a predominantly historical nature. Its theoretical part consisted in a collection of recipes for the statesman rather than in a fully worked-out system of hypothetical imperatives, progressing from definitions to principles and consequences. He was concerned with the science of economic conduct, the practical measures required if the increase of wealth was assumed to be the end of human endeavour; wealth or abundance was once of the constituent elements of Bentham’s principle of utility. In contrast to Smith, Bentham based his economic system on the limitation of industry by the availability of capital rather than on the division of labour; but Dumont, a fine mind in political and moral questions, had not the analytical ability to interpret an economic system satisfactorily. There were too many contradictory statements in his treatment to recommend Bentham’s economics to a critical reader.

206 Bibl.Brit. 7 (1798) 105 et seq. 207 Wealth of Nations. Introd. para.8

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However, there were two propositions which must have left their impact on Sismondi. The first of these was the thesis that the mode of production, far from being purely a matter of economics, was an integral part of interpersonal relations, of the structure of the family, and of public and personal morality.208 The other observation of importance was the fact that, despite all progress made, there were many victims of the industrial process, and that it was essential to help them to improve their lot. For Sismondi the connection of economics and morals was to be one of the tenets which he was to investigate and emphasise in his own, epoch-making, economic analysis, one of the many basic notions which he was to hand on to J S Mill as well as to Marx. Basically these ideas (which were also those of Charles’s Italian mentors as well as Bousseau and Turgot) had first come to Charles’s notice in the work of Adam Smith. It was indeed Smith’s influence which was for ever to remain paramount in his economic books, as it was Gibbon’s in the historical field, and Arthur Young’s in agriculture.

These three authors figured prominently in the Bibliothèque Beritannique. The first number of January 1796 contained a notice from a correspondent in Edinburgh, no doubt Dugald Steward, announcing the forthcoming publication of Gibbon’s Autobiography and Letters by Lord Sheffield as well as of William Roscoe’s Life of Lorenzo de’ Medicis. Copious extracts and summaries of both works appeared later in the same year. Other works dealt with in the first few issues included Adam Smith’s

Essays on Philosophical Subjects, preceded by Dugald Stewart’s masterly Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, LL.D. Two other of Charles’s foremost mentors made their appearance in the first issue of the Bibliothèque, Arthur Young’s Six Months’ Tour of the North of England (as well as other of his writings) and John Adam’s History of the Principal Republicks, the work which Charles had thoroughly perused and excerpted in England. All these works were known to Charles when he

208 ibid.112. The point had previously been made both by Adam Smith and his pupil John Millar in the introduction to his Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1771). Cp. today R Meek who, however, gives exaggerated emphasis to the significance of historical materialism in eighteenth cetnury thought.

123 embarked in 1798 on his own career as a writer; they will engage our repeated attention.

Charles had by now immersed himself in the best of French, English, and Italian writing. He had become adept in the theory and practice of agricultural reform. He had read and thought about the problems of liberty, order and equality, constitutional and penal reform, the creation of wealth as well as the abolition of poverty, mechanisation and industrial society, revolution and the class struggle, the limits of state action and industrial initiative as well as the decline and rise of nations. His mentors had taught him to regard historiography as an imaginative account of social structure and social change rather than of princes and wars. He had been made aware of the significance of scientific method and the unity of the social sciences. Most of all, he was deeply imbued with the principles and precepts of morality and justice in their application to social and political life. The French Revolution had taught him the fragility of the social order. His own suffering as a refugee had made him open to an understanding of the vulnerability of individuals. He was at home, intellectually and by personal ties, in Geneva, in England and in Italy. In short, he was a cosmopolitan European; he was able to compare different national characteristics and to arrive at a Weltanschauung on the basis of observation, comparison and historical knowledge as well as philosophical reflection. At the same time, he had been able to enjoy the beauties of fine landscapes, of literature, theatre, art and music. By the age of twenty- five he had absorbed a greater variety of experiences than most people do in a life- time. His intellectual apprenticeship had come to an end. He had found a country to welcome him, and he was now settled in an idyllic place. The life of another Gibbon, writing intranquillity and peace, seemed to be awaiting him. His and his family’s Odyssey appeared to have run its course. We must turn once more to Charles’s life in Pescia.

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Charles’s explorations in the fields of politics, economics, and literature as well as his agricultural pursuits stretched his mind and extended his faculties; he had a full life. True, he had suffered exile and impoverishment, and he had known tragedy, when the family’s neighbour and friend Cayla was executed by the revolutionary militia. But he was young, and he lived now in a place which had so far escaped the experience of revolution. There was hope for a better world in the air, “when Reason seemed the most to assert her rights... to be young was very Heaven!” Charles would be able to take part, perhaps a leading part, in helping to shake off “the frailties of the world” and “the infirmities of nature, time and place”, and help “build social upon personal liberty”. (Prelude, 379-382).

He soon formed friendships with some congenial young people who were keen to listen to him. It was a time when tradition and rigid conventions were taken lightly by some of Pescia’s leading citizens; even the religious chasm between Catholics and Protestants did not appear to present impassable barriers. Though his native Geneva had been rent by political dissent and revolt, Charles had grown up in the spirit of enlightenment and toleration. His stay in England had taught him the delight of immersing himself in another culture; he and his family had indeed felt at home there. In his eager youthfulness he was able to forget that he was a foreigner and to feel secure as a cosmopolitan European.

For the other members of the family the transition from Geneva to Italy was less easy than for Charles. His parents did not share his over-optimistic hopes for a better political order. They as well as Serina were conscious of being aliens in the midst of a firmly structured world with its own traditions and habits. Tuscan domestics and tradesmen behaved differently from those at Geneva; they were more egalitarian and less reliable.209 The Italian language presented a natural barrier for a considerable time; at parties people would talk to them animatedly, but often they were at a loss to understand what had been said. They were unable to attend Church services in a

209 Benedetti Toscani

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Catholic world. The only fellow-Calvinists whom they saw, and even then only on rare occasions, were Pierre Vieusseux who called in at Pescia when ever his business truncations took him to Leghorn, and a Genevan coupe. François-Gratien-Emmanuel Micheli and his wife. The Michelis belonged to those distinguished Lucchese families who had found refuge in Geneva at the time of the Counter-reformation; some of these had retained a foothold in Italy where branches of the family had stayed behind. Moreover, the Simondes saw a good deal of the Italian branch of the Genevan Burlamacchis (the original spelling of Burlamaqui) at Pescia who had remained Catholics. The Michelis, like the Vieusseux, lived partly in Italy and partly in Geneva; they were bi-lingual. The Simondes themselves were conscious of a certain ancestral allegiance to Italy. Mr S’s mother’s family, the Sartoris, had been of Italian origin, and the Simondes themselves had come from Piedmont (see pp. ). But the meetings with Mr Vieusseux were infrequent, and the Michelis, as well be seen, were to prove a disturbing rather than a helpful influence. The pressures of life in an alien world weighed heavily on Charles’s family, and consequently on him as well.

“Here I am interred in my prison”, Serina wrote in the diary on the day after their arrival in Pescia (Diary, 15/12/95). Half a year later Madame S. who had been “low spirited these last days”, was brought down “to the lowest pitch” on hearing the news of the French invasion of Tuscany and their conquest of Leghorn; “I cannot say but the Toscans deserve a scourge but I cannot bear to be so near the scene” (Diary, June

24, July 1). The French army passed through Pescia and commandeered flour and horses. (Corrandini ); “all is altered in my sight here about I enjoy neither air verdure prospect and feel over again my blood clogged about my heart as I used in Geneva” (29/6/96). One evening Charles went into Pescia to deliver a letter. As his pistols were not in readiness, he armed himself with a sabre. He was mistaken for a French soldier, and his appearance caused terror amongst the people; “terror it seems is the only sentiment or at least the most universal sentiment they inspire”. A letter from Madame Juventin, Mr. S’s sister Marguerite, who looked after the family’s

126 affairs in Geneva, arrived with banker’s orders on Leghorn. But the amount received was only one third of what they had expected, as many of their debtors in Geneva had been bankrupted following the loss of their French investments. (July 21 and 14). There would not be enough for them to buy a home at Pescia where prices were high and so Mr S and Charles looked at homes near Pistoia and near Leghorn.

Still, Charles was determined to feel at home. Among his new friends, and soon to be his favourite, was the ???????????? Anton (Antonio) Cosimo Dante Forti, a handsome nobleman, well educated, musical and French-speaking. He became friendly also with Madam S. and Serina, and it was he who found Valchiusa, their home, for them. His family traced its ancestry from the twelfth century. Many of his forebears had been leading dignitaries in Pescia as he himself was to be. Among them had been notaries, canons, archpriests, ambassadors of Lucca, papal confidants210 condottieri and a number of distinguished doctors. (In the local history of Pescia the diary of Niccolo Forti of 1631 supplies an important source of the history of Pescia as place as it was (gives an account). The author of the outstanding chronicle of Pescia, Don Placido Puccinelli, (MEMORIE dell’ insigne e nobile terra di Pescia, 1664) dedicated his work to Guido Vincente Forti, “il Corifeo di essa (nostra patria - Pescia)... il primo tra suoi migliori servitori”. Over the centuries members of the family had been eminent benefactors who dedicated chapels and endowed canonries and other benefices in the Churches of Pescia. (Aggiunta di Pescia, 352-3, 418). The Fortis Galeotti, Cecchi in

Pescia, Di Poggio in Lucca and El Forese in Florence. Apart from their palazzo in Pescia, they owned properties in the surrounding country including Compugliano at Collecchio, the Villa Chiari and Chiarino an il Vignone. Their town house and the villa at Collecchio with its private chapel and family tombs (still in the hands of Serina’s descendants) were to be the home of Antonio and Serina.

The Fortis had fought and suffered for the Ghibelline cause like most representative families of Pescia, Lucca, Pisa, Siena and other Tuscan places which rivalled with and

210 Antonio under Alesssandro VI and Giulio II)

127 had to defend their independence against the overwhelming Guelfish power of Florence.211 Charles and Antonio must have talked of these things in their reading and debating club. The Sismondes’s Italian roots were soon recognised in Pescia. As early as a year and a half after their arrival, in mid-1797, they were styled Simonde Sismondi in official documents in the context of Serina’s forthcoming marriage. The Sismondi family had been one of the seven oldest and noblest families of Pisa. According to the local genealogists, whose reliability was however doubted by Muratori (Antiquit. med. aeri, dissert. t.III, 1104-1161; Hist. Rep. Ital.I, 202, N.2), they were of German origin. The first member of the family had come to Isa in 982 on a diplomatic mission on behalf of emperor Otto II and had decided to stay when the emperor suffered a crushing defeat in Calabria by the Saracens and died a year later in Rome. In 1005 a female member of the family, Chinzica, became the legendary heronine of Pisan history.212 She sounded the alarm when the Saracens attempted to take Pisa by surprise from the sea one night and thus saved the city and its population from destruction and massacre. In 1509 the condottiere Sismondi d’Oleastro213 left Pisa for service under François 1er and finally settled in France as a getilhomme, changing his name to Simond214 while preserving his Pisan family crest.215 Rightly or wrongly, reliable genealogy or poetic myth, the Italianate quality of his ancestry and character became an acknowledged reality for Charles as well as for his Italian friends and later followers. But in the first place the newly-chosen name of Sismondi served to make the family appear less outlandish and more acceptable in Pescia.

Antonio Forti became not only Charles’s friend and the family’s adviser. Soon he fell in love with Serina. She was so different from Italian girls of her age and class. She had enjoyed a fine classical and French education, was at home in English, studied

211 Charles himself was later to be a Neo-Guelfish in his endeavours to restore the natonal unity of Italy. 212 Monument 213 Sismondi was to use the name Charles d’Oleastre as a pseudonym during the Cent Jours of 1815 214 it was under this name that the first Simonde arrived in Geneva in 1698 215 H.O. Pappe Geneve et l’Italie, 321; for a somewhat different version see de Salis, p.7. However this author mistakenly attributes the first adoption of th name Sismondi to the period in which the Hist. Ital. Rep. was commenced in 1807

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Italian literature seriously with the family, played the piano well, and, to add to all these accomplishments, she preferred serious conversation to feminine tittle-tattle. Though the extent of her emancipation would not have satisfied Mary Woolstonecraft’s requirements, she was used to greater equality with men than Rousseau’s Sophie. When her piano arrived from Geneva she asked Anton Cosimo, or Tonino as he was soon to be affectionately called, to get his violin teacher to tune it; soon they were playing duets together. Moreover, she gave him English lessons and read with him English authors. Already on April 20, 1797 Serina had been “uneasy all day... displeased with myself not knowing my own heart.” She would not seek help from her mother who had guessed what was going on, for “Maman is displeased also she is sure I have loved him and says t’is lightness of temper and a broad disposition so I dare not speak on it at large with her” (Serina’s Diary No.26, Friday April 20, 1797). However, she misread her mother’s feelings. Madam S. had long suspected what was going on, and despite her cautionary remarks to Serina, she confided to her own diary that “that sentiment of theirs is now the only thing that can give me some pleasant thought, it soothes me in all my disappointments it recalls the long forgotten feelings to my withered and half dead heart all the tender glances every fond word every accent every notion that make their way to Serina’s heart passes through mine in short it is the only thing that revives me”. (Diary, April 13th, 1797).

Poor Madam E.! Her husband did nothing at the time to give her comfort. He was restless and unable to settle in the alien world of Pescia. Although he had tried hard to find a cheaper place elsewhere in Tuscany, at the same time he gave himself airs and was inclined to overspend and fare il signore. At the end of 1797, when he had to make a considerable payment for Valchiusa, he bought an expensive mirror and a marble table, and then found himself out of pocket and unable to pay part of Serina’s dowry at the right time. The financial problems led to heated arguments between husband and wife. (Madam S., Diary, December 27, 1797). Unlike his wife, Mr S. was horrified at the idea that his daughter should marry a Roman Catholic. Though

129 tolerant in his views, he was a Calvinist clergyman and dreaded the devious ways of Rome. There were additional complications in his case as will be seen later.

Nor was it easy for Tonino to convince his family of the wisdom of an interdenominatial marriage. His father was no longer alive, but his mother, Signora Irene, and her brother, the archdeacon of Pescia, did everything to discourage him. However, he was not to be deterred; his short-lived giansenismo and giacobinism and the attraction of the unusual made him forget the seriousness of the undertaking. And, of course, he was in love. On April 24 Serina recorded in her diary: “Went upstairs we were both standing at the piano he took me in his arms and... yesterday he had better success but today he made great many attempts and with force too - I said laissiz-moi many times... but he made little of it and Mamma was not come.” They read no more that day. Later they went for a walk; she withdrew her hand “with je ne vous aime pas he did not seem to believe it T’es troppo cattiva - ... he spoke so well so feelingly he is such an honest man righteous and good, I forgave him everything... I assured I did not love him (I love you so much!)”. In the next two months, Tonino made a point of being seen with Serina on walks and especially in the theatre where he watched plays by Metastasio, Alfieri and others from the Sismondis’ rather than his mother’s box. (Serina’s diaries of May and June 1797).

In fact, if Madame S.’s diary entry of ten years later is correct, Tonino had first declared his love in a letter to Serina as early as 23rd January 1797. Serina had given the unopened letter to her mother to read. It contained Tonino’s “most explicit and most tender declaration of his sentiments and hopes”. Serina’s own reaction was “I know... it is impossible. - why so.. why - our religions - my friends perhaps - my Papa yourself my uncle Juventin -”. But Madam S. felt that “in the present circumstances it is not impossible nor is it quite easy either, but if it was what says your heart... would you acquiesce cheerfully? Oh yes yes my dear mamma I never saw the man I would like better”. (Diary of October 1807). The religion of the two women was that of the

130 heart, Rousseau’s religion de Genève, the desire to be true to one’s authentic beliefs and inclinations. From the fullness and purity of their hearts they came to a decision which was to cause no little distress.

For Tonino to obtain his mother’s consent appeared to be a minor obstacle as compared with the need for a papal Dispense for the marriage. There was no question of Serina’s converting to Catholicism. Moreover, there was the problem of an appropriate dowry for Serina, appropriate, that is, to an alliance with a noble and affluent family. Both these questions cast a shadow over the preparations for the marriage. In a document dated April 1, 1797, Signora Forti gave her formal consent to Tonino’s marriage with ‘la Nobile Sig.ra Sara Giustina Eugenia de Sig.re Gedeone Francesco Simonde Sismondi di Ginevra di religione Protestante’, subject to the obtaining of a papal Dispense. She declared not to have done anything nor to intend doing anything, directly or indirectly, to impede the granting of the Dispense. (Blb.Mun.Pescia). This document was to be submitted to the Curia by the bishop of Pescia. However, Tonino feared that his uncle, the archdeacon, had prevailed upon the bishop to comment adversely on the application (Mme S’s Diary April 7, 1797). Indeed when the Dispense finally arrived at the end of August, the Rescritto Pontifico stipulated that Serina had to promise later to become a catholic and never to visit Geneva or any other Protestant countries.

The bad news awaited the family as they returned from a shopping excursion to Florence on the 28th August. It was too much for Mr. S. He began talking of going to Geneva to look after his affairs. When the family got up in the morning of the 31st August, they found that Mr S had disappeared; his room was stripped of all his personal possessions; in fact, a trunk with his things was found to have been dispatched the previous day. He had left an evasive note stating that he had gone to Florence and Leghorn. Madam S was deeply perturbed, “there is no image to paint my children’s and my own consternation Serina was out of herself I trembled, Charles

131 seemed to run mad”. There was no cash left in the house. Charles offered to set out immediately on horseback to overtake his father; both his mother and Serina gave him moving letters for Mr S, imploring him to return (Mother’’s Diary Aug.31, 1797). Two days later they received word from Charles in Florence that he had “done whatever he could but his father fell in a rage against him”. However, Mr S stayed in Florence for the time being. He wrote a stern letter to Tonino insisting on an amended Dispense “without any oat whatsoever”. He refused to return to Pescia until the matter was settled. Tonino behaved impeccably in this crisis. He got his mother to support his new application for a suitable Dispense. He was protective, tender and highly considerate toward the women. (Diary, Sep.2,4,5). Finally, Mr. S returned to Pescia on the 18th September via Leghorn where his Calvinist friends had added fuel to his suspicions. He caused another upset early in November when Tonino had gone to Florence to buy costly jewels for Serina. Mr S made quite a scene and forbade the giving of any such presents before the wedding.

It was a hectic and difficult time for the family. They completed the purchase of Valchiusa and moved in; naturally, much work had to be done to make the place comfortable and in accord with their taste. All the time they continued their common readings in which Tonino joined them. They took their accustomed walks and found time to make some excursions to beautiful places in the vicinity such as the picturesque hillcrest hamlet of Montecarlo which has preserved its beauty (and its fine wine) to this day. However, the preparations for the wedding kept them constantly busy. Serina’s trousseau had to be assembled from purchases in Geneva, Florence, Pistoia and Pescia. A marriage settlement had to be prepared as well as various documents concerning the ecclesiastical requirements. After much hesitation and uncertainty the date of the wedding was finally fixed for the 22nd January 1798.

Charles was deeply involved in all these events, especially as his father was more and more inclined to shirk his responsibilities. The financial vicissitudes occasioned by

132 the need to provide a substantial dowry for Serina as well as the procrastinations and obstacles caused by the religious incompatibility of the two families might have been enough to crush his spirits. However, the experience eventually made him a wiser man and added decisively to his mature insights as an historian and an economist. He was certainly not dispirited; his youthful buoyancy was not prematurely to be replaced by dejection and resignation. His upbringing as an adored son secure in the love of an understanding mother and nurtured in an environment of beauty and intellectual pursuits, provided Charles with a protection against the harshness of the outside world. His new practical interest in agriculture has been mentioned; his creative work as a writer in these difficult years will soon attract our attention. As regards the conflict inherent in different religions and national traditions, he remained a Utopian for a long time. Was he not a cosmopolitan, at home in Geneva, in England and in Italy, tolerant and religious but not prejudiced in favour of a particular mode of worship? His friendship with Tonino and like-minded people as well as with a highly educated French emigré in Florence, the Abbé Le Camus, appeared to bear out the rightness of such views. Moreover, for the first time in his life, at the age of 24, he was in love.

The marriage settlement placed a tremendous financial burden on the Simondes and Charles too in later life. Mrs S. undertook to pay Tonino 6,000 Scudi fiorentinin or 40,000 Lire di Toscana, the equivalent of £6,300 pounds Sterling; this dowry included

£ST400 in English funds and £1,000 in English currency. Serina was to inherit half of her parents’ estate, though this provision went far beyond what was due to a daughter in Tuscany, “considerandi ancora che le leggi di Ginevra sono molto pim favorevoli alle femine”. Finally, Mr S promised to make regular contributions to the running costs of Serina’s household, obviously on the rash assumption that the possessions of the family in Geneva were yielding considerable sums in rent and interest.

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These promises, in particular the guarantee of regular contributions to the Forti establishment, were to impoverish Mr S until his death as well as Charles for the next twenty years. In fact, the property at Chênes was run down and, owing to the critical political situation, was worth only half of what it had been at the onset of the revolution. The house in the Bourg-de-Four, which contained eight ample apartments, yielded rent only sporadically as tenants were often unable to pay. At the same time there were regular outgoings by way of rates and repairs.216 There was a dire need for Mr S and Charles to open up new sources of income beyond what the Geneva houses and Valchiusa could yield.

Serina’s trousseau was prodigious. It cost 2,800 Lire di Toscana, equivalent to about 440 pounds Sterling. Amongst other things it contained eight woollen skirts and petticoats, 20 pieces of muslin for gowns, 6 pieces of blue cloth for riding habits, another 100 pieces of muslin for various purposes, linen for 66 chemises, 6 pairs of silk stockings, 12 pairs of cotton stockings, 56 pieces of linen for handkerchiefs and bonnets, 36 pieces of satin, 32½ pieces of cotton, quantities of lace, ribbons, silk, lining, feathers, flowers, gloves, cambric handkerchiefs and other articles. Part of the trousseau had been ordered from Geneva, most of it was bought in Florence; other articles had been acquired locally from merchants in Pescia and the Ebreo in Pistoia (Note du trousseau de Serina et son reçu. Pescia 12 Gennaio 1798. Bibl.Com.Pescia).

Tonino signed a formal Promessa di matrimonio before two lawyers in Florence, the Marchese Guadagni and Ottavio Micheli (from Lucca). He acknowledged that Serina was of religione protestante and would be free to persevere in it until the end of her life. Their offspring, both fanciulli e fanciulle would be brought up in the catholic faith. However, Tonino stated that he had pledged his word of honour to Mr S that Serina would not be importuned by anyone for her religious beliefs and practices; that

216 Amongst the expenses was the effort to keep bugs under control, that all-prevading bane of city life, happily all but forgotten since the introduction of potent chemicals in the last forty years. Madame Juventin’s letters in the Pescia library give a lively picture of the various difficulties arising in the context of the family’s affairs in Geneva.

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Roman ecclesiastical canons, decrees and decisions did not apply to Serina in questions of marriage and divorce; that she was entitled to worship privately in her house and publicly in Leghorn, and that he would pay her travelling expenses; that teachers and servants would respect Serina’s religion and refrain from influencing her children against her; finally, that she would enjoy full freedom in her movements, in particular to visit Geneva and other non-Catholic countries, and that she would never have to renounce this right. (Promessa di matrimonio, 3 January 1798, Bibl.Com. Pescia).

Considering the world in which he had grown up and was to live, these stipulations were a heavy burden on Tonino’s tolerance and steadfastness. In other marriages between catholic husbands and Protestant wives within Sismondi’s orbit, like that of Manzoni and Henriette Blondel in 1808, and Victor de Broglie and Albertine de Staël, the men had not to undergo similarly harsh tests as their wives eventually converted to their husbands’ faith. Tonino did his best in later life to live up to his promises, but not always with full success. There were to be times of alienation between the spouses. One of their two daughters, Enrichetta, came to combine in her character all the finest qualities of both traditions. But their two highly gifted sons suffered from the conflict between the dominant culture of their mother’s heterodoxy. One of them, Pietro, came to seek security in orthodoxy and thus must have grieved his mother. He took holy orders and eventually became one of Pescia’s most eminent bishops.

Francesco became a brilliant jurist but found himself caught up in revolutionary romanticism and was never able to make his peace with his father or, for that matter, with Charles. His rejection of established values alienated him from his family and contributed to his premature death.217

There were hurdles for Toniono to cross until the very last moment which must have brought home to him how far he was straying from the values and expectations of his own kind. Before he was able to obtain the final consent of the Archdeacon, his uncle,

217 Bust in Palazzo dei Vicari and Biography

135 he was made to pronounce a promise under oath that he would do his utmost to prevail up[on Serina as well as Charles to recant their heresy and to embrace the catholic religion; obviously this document dated 8 Gennaio 1798 must have remained secret at the time (Bibl. Com. Pescia). On the 11th January the Archdeacon issued a decreto authorising Antonio Cosimo Fort’s marriage to Sara Giustina Eugenia Simond Sismondi of communione Eterodossa, referring to the Rescritto Pontifico emanato p.il canale della sacra Penitenzieria di 15 Agosto 1797. The parish priest of the Santissima Annuziata, a church practically next door to the Casa Forti, was authorised to proclaim and celebrate the marriage, but only privatamente, e senza alcuna Ecclesiastica Solemnita e Benedizione di Nozze. Serina was to be a legitimate wife but had to pledge herself under oat to have her children baptised and educated in the catholic faith. (The document was signed by Archdeacon Ferruccio Ferrucci as Esecutore Apostolico and Dott. Luigi Sorini, the episcopal checellor, with Foriere Antonio Pacini and Paolo Narducci as witnesses).

Finally, despite the obstacles on the part of the Forti family and Mr S, the wedding took place on the 22nd January 1798. A crowd had assembled in front of the Casa Forti. As its reaction of the wedding might be expected to be unfriendly, rumours were set afoot that the marriage rites were to be performed at the Fortis’ country seat at Collechio, that the ceremony had already taken place, or was not to take place until the following day. When the crowd had dispersed, Serina, supported by her father and

Tonino, walked in the dark to Casa Forti rather than using a carriage which would have attracted attention. The ceremony in the Church of the Annunziata was short and without solemnity; only the nearest family and two witnesses, Vincenzio Sanini and Bandino, were present. Afterwards there was a very formal supper party with the Signora Irene, Tonino’s mother, the family’s confessor, Father Pommi, and the Rector of the Annunziata who concentrated on the food without speaking a word. Serina looked delightful in a gown of Indian embroidered muslin, wearing all her jewels and with a crown of white roses in her hair. Her mother stayed the night in Casa Forti and

136 was able to evict from the couple’s bedroom the chamber maid (a married woman specially appointed for the occasion, not Serina’s own maid) who had attempted to insist on her traditional right to disrobe the bride.

The following day, with Serina in a satin gown and a lovat toque, a dinner was given for eighteen people. Some of those invited had declined; the, largely Giacobino, friends present included the marchese Justiniani, Demenico Santorelli, Francesco Cecchi, the canon Orlandi and the priest Pommi. Everything was exquisite; the dessert, taken in the salon with the coffee, consisted of a choice of ices with a centre piece in the form of a vase and flowers, all made of delicious ice-cream. After dinner more guests arrived in colourful masks, and finally, all went to a reception for fifty guests in the theatre. The celebrations went on the following day. (Mother’s diary entries of January 23, 1798).

The wedding took place only two months after the family had moved for the first time to a place of their own, at a time, that is, when they were still strangers in an alien place where they had previously only occupied lodgings. The consequences of this precipitate event were momentous. Life was never to be the same again for them.

Charles had enthusiastically taken sides in favour of his mother and Serina. He had grossly overestimated the degree of his assimilation to the Italian world while playing down the religious problems. He obviously did not fully understand the financial implications of Serina’s marriage. these marks of his immaturity were accentuated by the fact that he was in love himself for the first time in his life. While siding with his mother he found himself bitterly opposed to his father. Mr S had done everything in his power to thwart Serina’s marriage. At least ever since Mr S had failed to accompany his family during their emigration to Italy, Charles had come to feel his own importance as the protector of his womenfolk. Now he had openly crossed his father’s wishes and turned his back upon his values. Serious fissures revealed themselves in the once closely knit texture of the family.

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Indeed, Mr S decided to return to Geneva - to look after their affairs, to open up, if possible, new sources of income, and to escape from the catholic atmosphere of Pescia as well as his wife’s overbearingness. The worries of emigration brought out the restless, unreliable side of his character. He became involved in a love affair with Madame Micheli, the capricious woman with whom Charles had fallen in love. The Michelis had returned to Geneva late in 1797 and had rented an apartment in the Simonds’ Bourg de Four house as their town residence. It was a cruel coincidence that the political situation in post-revolutionary Geneva made a return to the city feasible once more just when the family following Serina’s marriage had struck deep, though slender, roots in Pescia.218 Mr S set out for Geneva on the 1st February 1798, only a week after the wedding. He had been preparing his departure for some days, but did not tell Charles until the previous evening, and his wife only on leaving the house; “though I was prepared to his departure it has left me very sad” (Diary February 1, 1798).

For Madame S there was no prospect of a return to Geneva. She had actively encouraged Serina’s marriage in Pescia. She could not now leave her behind on her own. But Charles was still with her, and they had a beautiful property in a genial climate to live in. She was busy running the house, looking after Charles, talking and reading agriculture, history and literature with him, visiting Serina and in turn receiving her visits. It was a full life for her, and she enjoyed it since after all, Mr S might return some day. Even her femine pride, which had been hurt by his defection was restored by the admiration which she received from the Abbe Le Camus, a jansenist French emigré living in Florence, but in constant touch with his family by correspondence and mutual visits. His tolerant views and encouraging advice seemed to confirm Madam S’s disregard of her husband’s religious and cultural scruples concerning Serina’s marriage. Like most French-speaking educated people, who had come in touch with her, Le Camus could not fail to be deeply impressed by Madame

218 Serina’s friend Isabelle Pictet wrote to her on September 22, 1798 that “Geneva is very tranquil at present... plenty of people are returning, soon there will be no accommodation for them to find.”

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S’s intellectual distinction and fine sensitivity. Though their relationship remained entirely within the bounds of propriety, there must have been an affectionate though innocent, bond that lent it strength and vivacity. Mr S came intensely to dislike the very presence of this admirer of his wife who had also become his son’s mentor for a time. Tonino in those days was too pliable and considerate to be a suitable target for Mr S’s resentments. These were directed against the Abee who, he felt, undermined his authority in his own house. Mr S became plainly jealous, for with all his fickleness he had never ceased to love his wife; though he was irresponsible at times he was basically a man of good principles. He had made his wife suffer by his escapades. Now it was to become his turn to suffer the pangs of jealousy. On his return to Pescia three years after he had left, he found himself nearly superfluous. It was a wholesome experience which made him conscious of what had been wrong in his relations with his wife and caused him to be more considerate in future.