The radical political writings of Sophie de Grouchy | Aeon Essays 13/02/2024, 12:00 PM

The radical political writings of

Sophie de Grouchy | Aeon Essays
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During the Paris Commune of 1871, all government officers and judges
had to be voted in by the people. Karl Marx celebrated this fact in the
pamphlet The Civil War in France. This idea had been in the air in French
revolutionary circles, but has its roots in the radical egalitarianism of the
17th-century Levellers in England.

However, when we trace the diverse origins of the proposal back from
later versions found in the work of 19th-century utopians and socialists,
we find that during the French revolutionary era of the late 18th century,
the most prominent advocate of (at least a part of) this proposal was the
aristocratic-born French translator of Adam Smith, Sophie de Grouchy
(1764-1822). The Letters on Sympathy, Grouchy’s only known, and
signed, authored work, were published in 1798 as an appendix to her
translations of the final edition of Smith’s book The Theory of Moral
Sentiments (1792) and of his essay A Dissertation on the Origins of
Languages (1792). These remained the standard translations of Smith’s
key works for two centuries. Consequently, Grouchy’s Letters on
Sympathy remained in wide circulation too, and were able to influence the
growth of political ideas.

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Sophie de Grouchy (1764-1822), miniature self-portrait. Source unknown

In the seventh of her Letters on Sympathy, in the context of her broader

argument on criminal reform, Grouchy wrote: ‘if all appointments were
granted by a general choice and a free election, our conscience would
only rarely need to resist the sort of motivation that leads to crime or
injustices inspired by ambition’ (all translations are by Sandrine Bergès).
Grouchy clearly assumed that a government and bureaucracy filled by
elected officers would be a source of legitimacy and justice.

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There are intimations of this approach in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The

Social Contract (1762) and Roman republicanism, but Grouchy’s
formulation of this hasn’t been sufficiently recognised. How did a woman
born of a rich aristocratic family become a conduit for radical democracy
during the French revolutionary era?

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In 1793, Grouchy worked as an artist, writer and translator from a tiny

studio on the rue Saint-Honoré, a few doors down from where Maximilien
Robespierre was lodging. Her husband, Nicolas de Condorcet, was in
hiding from the Reign of Terror a few kilometres away, and she visited him
when she could, bringing books and writing materials as well as moral
support. Below her studio she had set up an underwear shop, and the
brother of Condorcet’s secretary managed it. One day the militia, aware
that the wife of a renegade could be found at that address, knocked on
the door, intent on arresting her. But instead of dragging her to prison, the
arresting officer sat for his portrait in her studio – gratis, of course.
Grouchy was saved from the consequences of her radical political
philosophy (and that of her husband) by her artistic skills.

Grouchy was born in the Château de Villette near Meulan in 1764. Her
family was not only rich and aristocratic, but also literary: one of her
ancestors had been tutor to Michel de Montaigne, and her parents kept a
well-known literary salon in Paris. As a pious and studious child, Grouchy’s
favourite book was Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. But in her late teens, she
discovered the more dangerous thinkers Voltaire, Denis Diderot and
Rousseau. She became an atheist – to her mother’s horror – and a
republican.

Her political radicalisation is probably one reason she was attracted to

Condorcet (one of the leading mathematicians and social theorists of the

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age who, far ahead of his time, supported equal rights for women), and he
to her. They’d met through her uncle whose son she was tutoring. In
December 1786, Grouchy and Condorcet married in the chapel at Villette,
with the Marquis de Lafayette as their witness.

The newlyweds moved to Condorcet’s apartments in the Hôtel des

Monnaies on the Quai de Conti, opposite the Pont des Arts, where
Condorcet worked as the Inspector General of the Monnaie (that is, of the
Mint). Sophie’s English was excellent by then, and they entertained many
foreign visitors including Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Anacharsis
Cloots and Étienne Dumont. Their devoted friend Pierre-Jean-Georges
Cabanis, a medical doctor, physiologist and social reformer, who later
married Sophie’s sister, Charlotte, was also a frequent visitor. Cabanis was
also the ‘C***’ to whom Grouchy addressed her Letters on Sympathy.

She attacked monarchy as an economic extravagance, proposing that the

king be replaced by automata

From the beginning it was clear that Grouchy did not lag behind her
husband in terms of radical political thought. Reflecting on her role in the
revolution, a former friend, André Morellet, wrote that Grouchy was to
blame for her husband’s more extreme views. Her Letters on Sympathy
certainly display an uncompromising republican framework. But for fuller
evidence of her more radical views, we need to turn to the newspaper she
founded together with Condorcet, Paine and others: Le Républicain.
Published in 1791, the journal included anonymous articles by Grouchy
and her translations of some of Paine’s work. She became known as a
‘fierce’ republican, and, not surprisingly, as an anti-monarchist she was
mocked and caricatured in royalist journals.

In one of these articles, Grouchy attacked monarchy as an economic

extravagance, and at the same time showed that it served no purpose
beyond a ceremonial one by proposing that the king and his entourage be
replaced by automata. Given the cost of the real ‘moving sculptures’ and
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the difficulty of producing and maintaining them in good working order,

the claim that automata would represent a significant cost-saving was a
direct attack on royal extravagance. But more than an economic cost, it
was the psychological cost of monarchy that Grouchy was most worried
about. In the second article (which she may have redrafted from an earlier
one by her friend Dumont), Grouchy took on a theme she developed in her
Letters on Sympathy: the moral and psychological cost of domination, the
kind of domination characteristic of monarchy.

Being dominated is the chief and most pervasive political harm for
republicans, because, Grouchy argues, it removes our liberty. In this,
republicans differ somewhat from liberals, who see liberty threatened by
interference. To be dominated is not necessarily the same thing as being
interfered with. Being dominated means being subject to an arbitrary
power that has the potential to interfere at any point in time. Grouchy
argues that a king who is unconstrained by the law always dominates.
Even a benign king who does not wish to interfere with his subjects’
personal lives dominates. Louis XVI insisted that he cared above all about
the happiness of his subjects, yet his power over them was unregulated
by law, and therefore arbitrary and dominating in this sense. And, given
that a king’s attitude may change over the course of his reign, and that he
will, one day, be replaced by his heir, his benevolence cannot be relied on
to prevent future harms from interference. So, the king’s character does
not make a difference to whether we should accept rule by monarchs:
they still dominate, no matter how well meaning. As Grouchy writes in Le
Républicain:

How can it be a virtue to love kings, be they good or bad, stupid or

wise, good or evil doers, whether tyrants or the instruments of tyranny,
sunk deep in indolence and abandoning the government to corrupt
underlings?

This is the classic republican argument against domination: hereditary

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power is necessarily arbitrary, and causes harm regardless of the

character of the current holder of the title. But Grouchy goes further: even
if we could be certain of non-interference, being dominated is, itself,
harmful. Domination reduces subjects’ autonomy, making them constantly
anxious about what may happen to them, and unable to let their guard
down except through a general psychological repression of the truth – a
psychological ploy of denying the reality of the situation. A benevolent
king’s subjects, Grouchy says, are like children: immature, easily
entertained by trifles, and not fully capable of taking responsibility for their
own lives and their own thoughts. Only by rejecting the king’s rule
altogether can his subjects finally realise their humanity, and leave their
metaphorical childhood behind:

Their respect [of the French for their king] is annihilated, as is their
love: the heart of the French people, cured from this stupid and vain
passion, has risen to the love of laws and country. Their soul, exalted
by generous sentiments, will not go back to crawling at the feet of a
prince. A king is the most infantile of rattles degrading the childhood of
nations: the French no longer want rattles: they are grown.

Given she was arguing, firstly, that the king’s political role was so minimal
that he and his entourage could easily be replaced by automata – which
would be far less expensive to maintain – and, secondly, that simply
having a king infantilised the French people, it is not surprising that
Grouchy chose anonymity for her work. Even among the most radical
revolutionaries, such direct attacks on monarchy were rare, though Paine
certainly shared many of her beliefs on this. But if Grouchy chose
anonymity in publishing her political thought, she very much gave of her
person in public demonstrations of her republicanism. She was present
with many other women at the Champ de Mars on 17 July 1791, the day
her friend Lafayette’s army charged into the crowd. It was her home that
the Marseillais soldiers came to when they arrived in Paris to join the
revolution: she and Condorcet were feted by the soldiers as republican

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heroes.

When, as the revolution unfolded, her husband went into hiding,

Grouchy’s wealth was confiscated. Later, following a rumour that she had
emigrated, it was refused to her again. This period of relative poverty, her
daughter Eliza wrote, is what prompted her to publish the Letters on
Sympathy:

My mother was for several months without any income. When she
could no longer find portraits to paint, she translated Smith’s The
Theory of Moral Sentiments, to which she joined Letters on Sympathy,
addressed to Cabanis, which she had written earlier.

We have good evidence that the Letters were drafted earlier, in 1792, as
she had sent copies of them to her friend Dumont in the spring of that
year, and Condorcet refers to them in his 1794 ‘Advice to his Daughter’.
There may even have been earlier drafts: Pierre-Louis Roederer notes, in
his review of the Letters published on 14 July 1798, the existence of an
earlier manuscript that he had seen in the hands of Emmanuel Sieyès in
1789 or 1790. The Letters are, thus, the product of revolutionary politics,
though published somewhat later.

In her Letters, Grouchy argues that for Adam Smith morality needs reason
to mature but that it is born out of the human tendency to feel sympathy.
In other words, morality comes naturally to us, but we need intellectual
work to cultivate it. Smith does not explain, however, where that tendency
to feel sympathy for others’ pains originates. In the Letters, Grouchy
thoroughly agrees with Smith that reason plays an important role in
developing morality and justice from basic sympathy, but she goes further
than Smith. First, she asks where our tendency to feel for each other’s
pain comes from. She suggests that Smith ignores an important insight
when he merely postulates sympathy as a natural human trait. Second,
she asks how the theory of sympathy may be developed to help reform
social and political institutions after the revolution in France. These
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insightful ideas, and the brevity of her text compared with Smith’s own
hefty treatise, make the Letters well worth reading.

Parents and teachers should help children perceive pain in others and
learn from this pain

Grouchy’s first take on Smith, which she exposes in the first of her Letters,
is that he does not fully explain what sympathy is, or where it comes from.
He has done the work of ‘asserting its existence, and expounding its
principal effects’, but has not gone back to its first cause: he does not
‘show at last why sympathy is the property of every sensible being
susceptible of reflection’. Her own hypothesis is grounded in physiology,
which provides physical triggers that will bring about pleasure and pain
and eventually create sympathetic sentiments. She finds these triggers in
the very first relationship any human being experiences: that of a
dependent baby to the person who nurses it. The infant gets pleasure
from proximity to the person who feeds her and calms her hunger pains.
And that closeness also teaches her to recognise when her nurse is in
pain, and to feel that pain herself. This is something Grouchy may have
known from observing her own daughter, born in 1790, but also from
going on charity rounds with her mother as a child.

The next two of Grouchy’s Letters discuss how the origins of sympathy
affect its development through reason and education. She emphasised
the centrality of parents and teachers’ roles: they should not only help
children learn to think abstractly, but also teach them to perceive pain in
others and learn from this pain. Here, Grouchy builds on recollections of
her own childhood:

You have taught me that much, respectable mother, whose step I so

often followed under the decaying roof of the unfortunate, fighting
destitution and suffering! … Yes, seeing your hands relieve both misery
and illness, and the suffering eyes of the unfortunate turning to you,
softening as they blessed you, I felt my heart become whole, and the
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true good of social life was made clear to me, and appeared to me in
the happiness of loving and serving humanity.

The fourth and fifth Letters offer her own account of the origins of
morality out of sympathy. She mostly agrees with Smith. In the final three
Letters, Grouchy explores the implications of her theory for the legal,
social, economic and political reforms called for, and made possible, by
the French Revolution. Although there is much of interest there, one
particular set of arguments concern economic inequality, in particular,
extreme inequality.

The central argument of Grouchy’s Letters is that virtue, moral or political,

is born out of sympathy, the ability and propensity to feel others’ pain and
to want to relieve it. One of her central innovations is to focus on the
developmental, economic and social conditions that make sympathy
possible. For, in order for this to be possible, we do need to see the
suffering other as a human being, as someone just as capable of
experiencing pain as we are. As the philosopher Philip Pettit puts it in his
book On the People’s Terms (2012), we need to perform an ‘eyeball test’:
can people look each other in the eyes without fear or deference? This
means that we regard each other as members of the same species,
capable of experiencing the same emotions, and perhaps as importantly,
not as predators.

For Grouchy, the eyeball test becomes a test in emotional receptivity, or,
as care ethicists put it, ‘attention’: are we sufficiently close to others to
perceive their humanity? Extreme inequality can be an obstacle to this: the
very rich and the very poor do not regard each other as being of the same
species, so they cannot easily sympathise with each other, and will
therefore be unlikely to apply the laws of morality and impartial justice in
their dealings with each other. This, Grouchy says, leads to crime:

Let us only remove the extreme inequality that puts the poor too far
from the rich to be known by them, and the rich too far from the poor
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to see them, and to let the voice of humanity reach their hearts; then
unexpected misfortunes will become rarer and will certainly be
mended. Take away from all the small tyrants their desolating sceptre;
make these heaps of gold disappear, the smallest and least illegitimate
of which probably has, in secret, a thousand victims to its name; let
man no longer be elevated above man in such a way that he no longer
sees his duties next to his interest; and then theft and fraud will
become rare enough that the greatest danger and most dreaded
punishment will be their actions being made public.

Grouchy offers a concrete proposal to reduce extreme inequality. She

calculates that, given the size of metropolitan France, even assuming
some inequality in redistribution of land, there would still be enough for
everyone to live comfortably, either off the land, or by selling their land
and going into some other business. All it would take, she says, after an
initial repartition, is a set of good laws that protect property rights, and the
absence of corruption. Anticipating contemporary ‘limitarians’, such as
Ingrid Robeyns, she argues that, without extreme poverty or extreme
wealth, citizens would be in a position to view each other as political and
moral equals, and treat each other with respect.

Grouchy echoes Smith’s criticism of mercantilism and protection. But she

seeks to adapt his thought for a post-feudal, post-revolutionary France.
This includes changing the tax system, which benefits the rich at the
expense of the poor, and replacing officials who are appointed to protect
their own and their friends’ wealth with elected ones who will follow the
law and the people’s will. Her intellectual contribution to debates about
how to organise society after the French Revolution is enduring. The fact
that her Letters were so widely distributed as an appendix to her
translations of Smith’s work means that her thought may have reached
many more intellectuals than was usually possible for a woman writing
about radical politics in the 18th century.

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Grouchy lived through the end of the Reign of Terror, the rule of the
Directory, the First Empire, and the first years of the Bourbon Restoration.
She also remained at the heart of politics, holding salons in Paris and
Auteuil. Napoleon Bonaparte was among the people who frequented
these. One day, he told her that he did not like women who meddled in
politics, and she replied wittily that, in a country where politics could send
women to the scaffold, they had better understand why. Sadly, we do not
have any remaining works from Grouchy during that period of her life, save
for her editions of her husband Condorcet’s works. It is possible – likely,
even – that she wrote more but, while she and her descendants took great
care to preserve Condorcet’s papers, her own were somehow lost, or
destroyed.

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