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Louise Dupin’s Work on Women
 OXFORD NEW HISTORIES OF PHILOSOPHY

Series Editors
Christia Mercer, Melvin Rogers, and Eileen O’Neill (1953–2017)

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Lawrie Balfour, Jacqueline Broad, Marguerite Deslauriers, Karen
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those aiming to diversify the content of their philosophy courses,
revisit traditional narratives about the history of philosophy, or better
understand the richness of philosophy’s past. Examining previously
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Published in the series

Mexican Philosophy in the 20th Century: Essential Readings
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Sophie de Grouchy’s Letters on Sympathy: A Critical Engagement

with Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments
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 Edited by Jacqueline Broad

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Korean Women Philosophers and the Ideal of a Female Sage:

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Louise Dupin’s Work on Women: Selections

Edited and Translated by Angela Hunter and Rebecca Wilkin
Louise Dupin’s Work on Women
Selections

Edited and Translated by

ANGELA HUNTER AND REBECCA WILKIN
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ISBN 978–0–19–009010–4 (pbk.)
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DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190090098.001.0001
 Contents

Series Editors’ Foreword

Acknowledgments
Notes on Selection and Translation
Reader’s Orientation
Chronology: Timeline of Dupin’s Life

Introduction to the Volume

Part I: Science
Article 1. Observations on the Equality of the Sexes and on Their
Difference
Article 2. On Generation
Article 3. On Temperament
Article 4. On Strength
Article 5. Animal and Plant Analogies

Part II: History and Religion

Article 12. Foreword on History
Article 13. On Ancient History
Article 18. On Turkey and Persia
Article 20. Other Countries
Article 21. On the History of France
Article 8. On the Discipline of the Church
Article 10. On the State of Monastic Orders since the Council of
Trent

Part III: Law

 Article 27. Foreword on Laws
Article 28. On Salic Law, Considered as a Law
Article 29. On Different Forms of Roman Marriage, on the Property
Rights That Married Women Enjoyed, and on Marriage Today
Article 30. On the Power of Husbands; On the Prerogatives That
the Law Grants—and Could Grant—to Married Women
Article 32. On Adultery and Its Punishment
Article 36. On Tutorships and Testimony
Chapter 37. On Rape

Part IV: Education and Mores

[Article 22]. Foreword on Mores
Article 23. On Education
Article 39. The Effects of Education on Morals
Article 40. Further Reflections on Education
Article 42. Education in Marriage
Article 45. On the Spirit of General Conversation
Article 46. Observations on the Spirit of Theater

Appendices
Appendix A. Work on Women Articles and Manuscript Pieces
Appendix B. Anicet Sénéchal’s Inventory and Ordering of
Manuscript
Bibliography of Selected Secondary Sources
Index
 Series Editors’ Foreword

Oxford New Histories of Philosophy speaks to a new climate in

philosophy.
There is a growing awareness that philosophy’s past is richer and
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Series Editors
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 Acknowledgments

This book was a tremendous task to complete, and we wouldn’t

have been able to do it without many kinds of support, for which we
are extremely grateful.
We acknowledge the financial support that made it possible for us
to begin and to complete this project. We received a National
Endowment for the Humanities Scholarly Editions and Translations
grant (October 2021–June 2022). Wilkin received a National
Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend (2019); a Harry
Ransom Center Research Fellowship in the Humanities (2019–2020),
supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Fellowship
Endowment; and from Pacific Lutheran University, a Karen Hille
Phillips Regency Advancement Award (2014–2015); a Kelmer Roe
Student Faculty Collaborative Research Grant with Sonja Ruud
(2011–2012); and two sabbaticals (2014–2015 and Spring 2022).
Hunter received an ASECS Women’s Caucus Editing and Translation
Fellowship (2019–2020); an American Society for Eighteenth-Century
Studies fellowship at the Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship,
supported by the Mellon Foundation (2008); and from University of
Arkansas-Little Rock, Off-Campus Duty Assignment, Spring 2021;
and summer research fellowships in 2009 and 2017.
We thank the many people without whose support this book
would not be:
For welcoming Louise Dupin to the New Histories of Philosophy
series at Oxford University Press and for their guidance, Peter Ohlin,
Christia Mercer, Melvin Rogers; and for their assistance, Preetham
Raj and Anne Sanow.
For sharing expertise that helped us track down sources: Ann Blair,
Michael Johnson, Julia Lewandoska, Eric MacPhail, Steven Nadler,
Sasha Pfau, Jason Schroeder, and Troy Storfjell. For expertise on
salon attendees, Melanie Conroy.
For helping us decipher Latin, Marco Dorfsman, Michael Johnson,
and Molly Lindberg.
For her advice on Catholic terminology, Daniella Kostroun.
For their research skills and annotation assistance in a few articles,
PLU students Kasey Gardner and Anna Nguyen—through Kelmer Roe
Student Faculty Collaborative Research Grants—and in the final hour,
Molly Lindberg, freelance graduate student extraordinaire.
For making initial translations of portions of Article 23, the
students of Wilkin’s 2020 French Feminisms class: Anastasia Bidne,
Littlepage Green, Holly Knutsen, Jamie Rose McNeil, and Anna
Nguyen.
For providing key feedback on early versions of our section
introductions and chapters: Cynthia Bannon, Peggy Elliott, Julie
Candler Hayes, Daniella Kostroun, and Geoffrey Turnovsky.
For keeping us updated on Dupin manuscripts for sale: Volker
Schröder.
We are grateful to staff members of many libraries and archives:
Katie Wallis (for all the ILL) at PLU’s Mortvedt Library; Sal Robinson
and Roger Wieck from the Pierpont Morgan Library; Chantal Mustel,
Robert Thiéry, and Laurine Perreau for their welcome and for
information regarding the Dupin collection at the Musée Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, and Laure Quérouil, co-traveler to Montmorency
and unheralded transcriber of Dupin; and Elizabeth Garver of the
Harry Ransom Center for years of help (consultations, scans, and
more).
Merci to our friend in Dupin studies, Frédéric Marty, for sharing his
transcriptions of several articles for our comparison, his descriptive
list of the contents of the Fonds Dehaynin at the Abbaye de Chaalis,
and his thoughts on manuscript ordering. Angela especially thanks
him for the warm camaraderie in Montmorency.
For their encouragement and steadfast support of our scholarship
on Dupin: Julie Hayes, Marie-Frédérique Pellegrin, Lisa Shapiro, and
as ever, Geoffrey Turnovsky. For institutional encouragement, Dean
of Humanities Kevin O’Brien (PLU) and Dr. Jeremy Ecke (UALR).
 For their moral support: Rebecca thanks Cristina Thomas (so many
steps), Mei Zhu (so many texts), and Priscilla St. Clair (too few
hikes); her parents, David and Betty Wilkin (all the love); and her
daughter, Marian Picard (all the laughs). Angela thanks her parents,
Roy and Susan Hunter; her steadfast friend, Michael Johnson (who
accidentally introduced her to Dupin); and her children, Ayelet and
Delphine Benjamin.
Sonja Ruud deserves more than thanks can convey for being there
from the start with Rebecca on the Dupin journey and for returning
to this project to provide her scholarly acumen, transcription
excellence, and database creation as a Research Associate on the
NEH grant.
We gratefully recognize Cédric Picard and Marco Hunter Dorfsman
for keeping everything running during our long hours of work, and
for their love and boundless patience.
And, finally, we thank Louise Dupin for bringing us together.
 Notes on Selection and Translation

Selection
Out of the forty-seven articles that comprised the Work on Women
at the time Dupin stopped working on it, eight are missing and four
are in fragmentary or very rough form, leaving thirty-five in a
condition we would consider complete or likely near completion.
Twenty-six of those are featured in our edition. In making the
selection, we had two main objectives. The first was breadth, to
ensure that we had articles from each of the four thematic divisions,
and that together, they demonstrate Dupin’s methodology and style
as well as the major tenets of her argument. The second was
variety, to ensure we showcased the different ways Dupin engages
with traditions and contemporaries. In this, we were careful to
include pieces that feature her strengths, but we did not hide her
shortcomings.

Translation
We have worked to preserve the tone and economy of Dupin’s prose
and to capture her voice: her hyper-rational viewpoint, withering wit,
and occasional flights of idealism. We strove to transmit her ideas
clearly, rearranging clauses and altering sentence boundaries if
necessary. The breadth of the Work’s topics means that there are a
range of technical terms, from the sciences to the courts. The first
five articles (Part I) employ medical and scientific terms both general
and specific, which we have rendered using English equivalents from
the time period (e.g., “animal spirits”) and explanatory notes. See
the introduction to Part I for a description of how we handled the
word physique, which is particularly tricky as Dupin uses it frequently
and there is no perfectly fitting English substitute.
Court proceedings were a facet of everyday life for the wealthy
and working-class alike in eighteenth-century France, and the
language of litigation inflects Dupin’s prose. For most modern
readers this legal terminology is arcane, so we have used
explanatory notes to balance accuracy and ease. Dupin was working
at times with translations from Latin into French made by her
secretary, Rousseau. We chose to translate these passages from the
French in order to preserve consistency in style; for the most part
we have found Rousseau’s translations to be generally faithful. We
used The Roman Law Library as a resource throughout Part IV, the
Law section (https://droitromain.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr). Dupin used
the Port-Royal Bible—the French translation most commonly used in
the eighteenth century, produced at Port-Royal under the direction of
Louis-Isaac Lemaistre, sieur de Sacy, from 1657 to 1696. We
translated into English from Sacy’s French rather than substituting in
a standard English translation.
 Reader’s Orientation

Manuscripts
See Appendix A for the list of articles comprising the Work on
Women, including the current location of the manuscripts used; we
provide the same information for any draft referenced in
introductions and notes.

Abbreviations
Some article and draft titles are sentence-length, so they have been
shortened in places; they contain the relevant words to allow the
reader to find them in the appendix list. In the first note of each
distinct article, we provide the full name of the archive holding the
manuscripts used for the translation; otherwise we abbreviate the
three major repositories in the following way: the Harry Ransom
Center (HRC); the Musée Jean-Jacques Rousseau (MJJR); and the
Bibliothèque de Genève (BGe).

Notes and Sources

Dupin provides occasional notes in the manuscript, which we have
included in the body of the text {in braces}. All other notes are our
own. In the notes for each article, we provided bibliographic
information for the sources that Dupin mentions as well as the many
additional sources that we located. There are likely places where
Dupin used an intermediary source and we reference the primary
source instead; we did, however, attempt to locate intermediary
sources wherever possible. We often used the best possible edition
accessible to us, although we attempted to use the exact one Dupin
did whenever this information was known, whether because Dupin
provided it (rare), because the information was found by a later
scholar (common—see Sénéchal, Le Bouler and Lafarge, Le Bouler
and Thiéry, Marty), or because we were able to determine this
information ourselves. Further information about intellectual context
and interlocutors is found in each of the four section introductions.
Our focus has been on locating Dupin’s sources; we did not key
Dupin’s citations of Roman laws to modern editions and referencing
methods.

Bibliography
Bibliographic information for all primary sources is in a note at the
first use in each section; thereafter, a shortened reference is used. A
brief selected secondary source bibliography is present in the back
matter; due to space constraints, this bibliography simply touches on
the major issues represented in our work. For sources found in the
bibliography, shortened bibliographic information is used in notes
throughout. All other secondary sources have full bibliographical
information in notes.
 Chronology: Timeline of Dupin’s Life

The table below includes important events in Dupin’s life (drawn

from Jean Buon’s Madame Dupin) alongside key dates in French
history and relevant works published. The publications include other
feminist works and important texts by/about women, works by
authors in Dupin’s circle, and influential works. *Asterisk denotes an
attendee of Dupin’s salon, according to Buon.
Table R.1 Timeline of Dupin’s Life

Years Louise Dupin’s life Historical Relevant Publications

Context
1700– 1702: Louise’s mother, 1701: War of the 1700: Du célibat
1709 Armande Carton- Spanish Succession volontaire, ou La vie sans
Dancourt, marries begins engagement by Gabrielle
Guillaume de Fontaine Suchon
1705: Louise’s eldest
sister, Marie Thérèse, is
born 1706: Louise-
Marie-Madeleine-
Guillaume is born to
Samuel Bernard and
Armande Carton-
Dancourt 1709:
Louise’s brother, Jules
Armand, is born
1710– 1710: Louise’s sister, 1710: Louis XV is 1713: Projet pour rendre
1719 Marie-Louise, is born born 1713: Treaty la paix perpétuelle en
1712: Louise’s sister, of Utrecht 1714: Europe by Charles-Irénée
Françoise-Thérèse, is War of the Spanish Castel de Saint-Pierre*
born 1714: Louise’s Succession ends 1716: Examen pacifique
future husband, Claude 1715: Louis XIV de la querelle de Mme
Dupin, marries Marie- dies, Louis XV Dacier et de M. de La
Jeanne Bouilat 1715: becomes king at Motte sur Homère by
Claude and Marie- age 5 1715: Étienne Fourmont* 1719:
Jeanne’s son, Louis- Regency of Philippe Discours sur la
Claude-Charles, is born II, duc d’Orl é ans, polysynodie ou pluralité
1716: Dupin’s father’s begins 1717: des Conseils by Castel de
first wife, Anne- Voltaire imprisoned Saint-Pierre*
Madeleine Clergeau, in the Bastille
dies
1720– 1720: Claude Dupin’s 1721: Louis XV 1721: Lettres Persanes
1729 first wife dies 1722: Louis betrothed by by Montesquieu* 1727:
Louise marries Claude Philippe II to the Réflexions nouvelles sur
Dupin 1722: Louise’s infanta Mariana, les femmes by Anne
father gives her daughter of King Thérèse (Marquise) de
mother funds to buy Philip V of Spain Lambert
the Château de Passy 1723: Louis XV
1726: Claude Dupin reaches his legal
Years Louise Dupin’s life Historical Relevant Publications
Context
becomes fermier- majority and
général 1727: Louise Regency of Philippe
and Claude’s son, II ends 1723:
Jacques-Armand, is Philippe II dies,
born 1728: Claude Louis XV appoints
Dupin purchases title Louis-Henri, duc de
of Secrétaire de la Bourbon-Condé as
Chambre et du Cabinet his first minister
du Roi, which confers 1725: Louis XV’s
first degree nobility marries Marie
Leszczyńska,
daughter of King
Stanisław I of
Poland
1730– 1732: The Dupins buy 1733: War of the 1732: Le Triomphe de
1739 the Hôtel Lambert Polish Succession l’amour, play by Pierre de
1732: Louise opens her begins 1738: War Marivaux* 1733: Traité
salon 1733: The of the Polish physique et historique de
Dupins purchase Succession ends l’aurore boréale by Jean-
Château de Jacques Dortous de
Chenonceau 1734: Mairan* 1734: Lettres
Voltaire sends Louise philosophiques by
plans for a work in Voltaire* 1736: Traité de
progress, Alzire 1739: l’amitié by Anne Thérèse
Louise’s father, Samuel de Lambert 1736: Alzire
Bernard, dies 1739: by Voltaire* 1736:
The Dupins sell the L’Apologie des dames,
Hôtel Lambert appuyée sur l’histoire, by
Madame de Château-
Thierry Galien
[anonymously]
1740– 1743: Father Castel 1740: War of the 1740: De la douceur by
1749 introduces Rousseau to Austrian Succession Castel de Saint-Pierre*
Louise; Rousseau begins 1748: War 1740: Institutions de
develops a friendship of the Austrian physique by Émilie le
with Louise and her Succession ends Tonnelier de Breteuil,
step-son 1743: Marquise du Châtelet
Rousseau works as a 1745: Œconomiques by
private tutor to Claude Dupin 1746: Essai
Jacques-Armand Dupin sur l’origine des
Years Louise Dupin’s life Historical Relevant Publications
Context
de Chenonceaux for connaissances humaines
about 8–10 days 1743: by Étienne Bonnot de
Castel de Saint Pierre, Condillac* 1747: Lettres
friend and important d’une Péruvienne by
influence for Louise, Françoise Graffigny 1748:
dies 1745: Louise’s Mémoire sur les bleds by
mother dies 1745: Claude Dupin 1748: De
Rousseau begins l’esprit des loix by
working as a secretary Montesquieu* 1749:
for both Louise and her Réflexions sur quelques
stepson. During this parties d’un livre intitulé
time, Rousseau “de l’esprit des loix” by
accompanies the Dupins (et al) 1749: 1st
Dupins to Chenonceau volume of Histoire
several times 1749: naturelle, générale et
Jacques-Armand Dupin particulière by de
de Chenonceaux Buffon* 1749: Traité des
marries Julie de systèmes by Condillac*
Rochechouart-Pontville 1749: Conseils à une
amie by Madeleine
d’Arsant de Puisieux
1750– 1751: Rousseau leaves 1751: 1st volume of 1750: Dissertation sur la
1759 his job as secretary to Encyclopédie is question, Lequel de
the Dupins 1751: published 1754: l’homme ou de la femme
Jacques-Armand and Louis XVI is born est plus capable de
Julie’s son, Claude- 1755: Montesquieu constance? by
Sophie, is born 1755: dies 1756: Seven Mademoiselle
An alleged illegitimate Years’ War begins Archambault 1750:
daughter of Jacques- Caractères by Madeleine
Armand, Marie-Thérèse de Puisieux 1750:
Adam, is born and Discours sur les sciences
Louise raises the child et les arts by Rousseau
1758: The Dupins buy 1753: Mémoires sur
the Hôtel de Vins l’ancienne chevalerie,
1758: Louise’s brother, considérée comme un
Jules-Armand de établissement politique &
Fontaine, dies militaire by Jean-Baptiste
de la Curne de Sainte-
Palaye* 1754: Discours
sur l’origine et les
Years Louise Dupin’s life Historical Relevant Publications
Context
fondements de l’inégalité
parmi les hommes by
Rousseau 1756: Essai sur
les moeurs by Voltaire*
1758: De l’esprit by
Claude-Adrien Helvétius*
1758: Lettre à d’Alembert
sur les spectacles by
Rousseau 1758: Candide
by Voltaire*
1760– 1762: Claude Dupin 1762: Rousseau’s 1761: De l’amitié by
1769 retires 1763: Louise’s Émile burned on Geneviève Thiroux
daughter-in-law and order of the d’Arconville 1761: La
grandson leave the Parlement of Paris Nouvelle Héloïse by
Dupins’ home 1765: 1763: Seven Years’ Rousseau 1762: Du
Two of Louise’s sisters, War ends 1764: contrat social by
Marie-Louise d’Arty and Expulsion of Jesuits Rousseau 1762: Émile ou
Françoise-Thérèse from France 1769: de l’éducation by
Vallet de Villeneuve, Napoleon Rousseau 1763:
die 1767: Dupin de Bonaparte is born Entretiens de Phocion sur
Chenonceaux dies of le rapport de la morale
yellow fever, exiled in avec la politique by
present-day Mauritius Gabriel Bonnot Mably*
1769: Claude Dupin 1764 Essai pour servir à
dies l’histoire de la
putréfaction by
Geneviève Thiroux
d’Arconville
1770– 1778: Rousseau dies 1770: Marie 1772: De l’homme by
1779 Antoinette marries Helvétius* 1774: Les
future King Louis Conversations d’Émilie by
XVI 1771: Paris Louise d’Épinay* 1774:
Parlements are Vie de Marie de Médicis
dissolved 1774: by Geneviève Thiroux d’
Louis XV dies, Louis Arconville 1779: De
XVI accedes to the l’éducation physique et
throne 1778: morale des femmes by
Voltaire dies 1779: Charlotte Cosson de la
Serfdom abolished Cressonière
by comptroller
Years Louise Dupin’s life Historical Relevant Publications
Context
general, Jacques
Necker
1780– 1786: Louise’s stepson, 1783: Treaty of 1782: Adèle et Théodore
1789 Dupin de Francueil, Paris is signed, by Stéphanie Félicité de
dies 1788: Louise’s ending the Genlis 1785: Les Femmes
grandson, Claude- American comme il convient de les
Sophie, dies, leaving Revolutionary War voir, ou Aperçu de ce
Louise with no direct 1789: French qu’elles ont été et de ce
descendants Revolution; Fall of qu’elles sont de de ce
the Bastille, qu’elles pourraient être
Declaration of by Madame de Coicy
“Droits de
l’homme”: (August
26)
1790– 1792: Louise abandons 1791: Constitution 1790: Sur l’admission des
1799 Paris for permanent created by National femmes au droit au cité
residence at Assembly 1791: by Nicolas de Condorcet
Chenonceau, Revolution begins in 1791: Déclaration des
accompanied by the Haiti, against droits de la femme et de
family of her nephew colonial rule and la citoyenne by Olympe
1794: Louise’s nephew, slavery 1792: First de Gouges 1791:
Pierre-Armand de Republic of France Discours sur l’état de
Villeneuve, dies in begins 1793: Reign nullité dans lequel on
prison in Paris 1793: of Terror begins tient les femmes,
Citizen Dupin wins 1793: Louis XVI relativement à la
right to keep and Marie politique by Élisabeth
Chenonceau after a Antoinette are Bonaventure Lafaurie
National Convention guillotined 1794: 1792: A Vindication of
decree confiscated Reign of Terror the Rights of Woman by
domain properties (she ends 1795: Mary Wollstonecraft
proved it had always Constitution of 1794: Esquisse d’un
been a private property 1795 established tableau historique des
and was thus exempt) 1796: Napoleon progrès de l’esprit
1799: Louise Dupin named General of humain by Nicolas de
dies November 20. the army of Italy Condorcet 1797: Épître
1799: Napoleon aux femmes by
overthrows the Constance Salm (also
Directory, becomes known as de Pipelet)
First Consul
 Introduction to the Volume

“It is likely that chance laid the foundations, that ignorance supplied
the materials, that the desire to dominate began constructing the
edifice, and that the design to get away with the injustice [of that
domination] capped it off.”1 Louise Dupin imagines the development
of inequality between women and men through a construction
metaphor reminiscent of René Descartes’s famous architectural
analogy in the Discourse on Method (1637). Descartes’s analogy is
epistemological. He compares discarding his opinions to razing the
ricketty foundations of a city built by many hands. Dupin’s metaphor
is ethical. Through a kind of historical speculation practiced before
her by the Cartesian feminist François Poulain de la Barre, she asks
how it came to pass that men began to see themselves as superior to
women, and how it then happened that women became their legal
subordinates, excluded from goods both concrete (property) and
abstract (knowledge). Whereas Descartes uses the analogy of
compromised foundations to justify letting go “all at one go” of what
he thinks he knows,2 Dupin uses the metaphor of shoddy
construction to reveal the process by which an injustice develops,
takes hold, and comes to appear natural. Throughout a work that she
herself did not entitle the Work on Women, Dupin sketched out the
origin and foundations of inequality between men and women, just a
few years before Jean-Jacques Rousseau gained everlasting fame for
his Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among
Men.
The scope of Dupin’s Work on Women is vast; its philosophical
edge, sharp. It is a work of political philosophy that does not just
recognize marriage as the foundation of society (as almost all early
modern political philosophy did), but that describes it as a leonine
partnership which assigns all profits to one party, all debts to the
other, and that would under normal circumstances be null and void.
The Work is moreover a work of moral philosophy that shows how
masculine vanity—Dupin’s expression for that particular form of
prejudice that we today call sexism—distorts science, history, and law
by aggrandizing men and diminishing women, sometimes to the point
of erasing them altogether. And it is a work of feminist philosophy
that analyzes the systemic disempowerment of women and attempts
to overwhelm the power that subordinates them through a vast
program of feminist recovery.
Louise Dupin’s Work on Women is, at the same time, a story. It is a
story of the interplay of hands and minds in intellectual creation. A
story of the benign neglect that envelops women’s writing and leads
to their exclusion from the stories told by entire traditions of
knowledge. A story of auctions, archives, and painstaking
reconstruction. And a story that is hopefully just beginning. In its
broadest outlines, the story of the Work on Women is one that has
been told before and will be told again by overlooked and
undervalued classes of people, who force scholars to confront the
injustices of the present, and to revise the narrative of how our
uneven skyline emerged. But the characters, the circumstances, and
the plot points of this story are absolutely unique. The opening
premise of the story of Louise Dupin’s Work on Women is that it is
only thanks to Rousseau that any of it still exists. Well, thanks to his
handwriting. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was Louise Dupin’s secretary.

Reappearing Ink
“3000 pages of Rousseau dispersed in auctions!” announced Bernard
Gagnebin in the April 26, 1958 issue of the Journal de Genève.3 The
conservator of manuscripts at Public and University Library of Geneva
devoted over half a page of the paper to informing the public of the
contents of the Hôtel Drouot’s sale of thousands of pages featuring
Rousseau’s handwriting in five auctions in 1951, 1957, and 1958. But
the headline was the equivalent of clickbait. Gagnebin’s main worry is
that “an unscrupulous or simply ignorant bookseller [might try to]
pass off as Rousseau’s what is really only Dupin’s!” In the face of a
false alarm, the 1958 reader of the Genevan weekly might have let
their attention wander to the bottom third of the page, where Marcel
Raymond reviews Jean Starobinski’s Jean-Jacques Rousseau:
Transparency and Obstacle (1957).4 That instant classic uplifts
Rousseau’s ideal of transparency, his lament of its impossibility, and
the motif of the veil throughout his work.
One of the secrets Rousseau veils in his autobiography, the
Confessions (1782, 1789), was a project that occupied almost six
years of his life (1745–1751). He describes his secretarial work for
Dupin in a single sentence: “She never used me except to write
under her dictation, or in research of pure erudition.”5 Dupin likely
requested his discretion; members of her inner circle were aware of
her project, and others seem to have had an inkling of it,6 but she
had neither published it, nor circulated pieces of it in manuscript
form. In any case, Rousseau had no desire to flaunt his participation
in a feminist project.7 “To maintain vaguely that the sexes are equal
and that their duties are the same,” he declares in Emile, or On
Education (1762), “is to lose oneself in vain declaiming.”8
Declamations were rhetorical exercises of praise and blame typical in
the Renaissance Querelle des femmes that Dupin aspired to
transcend: “Wouldn’t we do better to seek to understand [men and
women] equitably without making declamations?”9 We wonder how
Dupin responded to her former secretary’s veiled slight that the entire
Work on Women was nothing but vain declamation.
Rousseau’s silence about his work for Dupin set the stage for the
nonreception of her Work for the next two hundred years. Poulain de
la Barre imagines that learned women in the past disappeared from
historical record because “the demands of etiquette” prevented them
from acquiring “any disciples or followers,” so that all of their learning
died with them.10 But the phenomenon of women’s “disappearing
ink” required the complicity of subsequent generations, Dupin argues
(Art. 12).11 The fate of the Work on Women itself exemplifies the
“process of submersion” that “later male gatekeepers” visited on
early modern women’s accomplishments.12
 In 1884, Gaston de Villeneuve-Guibert, Dupin’s great grandnephew
published a prized portion of his inheritance: the contents of a
“portfolio in red Morocco leather of the time, all stamped with fine
gold ornamentation and fastened with a charming closure of chiseled
silver.” Villeneuve-Guibert confirms his great-great aunt’s wit as a
salonnière and affirms her lesser-known credentials as a writer:
She had conceived the project of defending and avenging her sex in a work
on women. To that end, she had assembled countless documents, rummaged
through many libraries, consulted all the books dealing with illustrious
women; and more: she scrutinized laws and decrees that set out the rights
of women from the most distant past. [ . . . ] She approached this gigantic
task with great ardor, and Rousseau made himself useful to her.13

But this work existed only in “discontinuous scraps,” and Villeneuve-

Guibert judges them “too disjointed for us to reveal more than the
result of her research and the general work plan were we to try to
assemble them.” Instead, he publishes Dupin’s “little light writings on
several moral subjects” deemed acceptable for women: friendship,
happiness, and sentiment.14 On record as a salonnière with a few
musings to her name, Dupin is absent from the first histories of
feminist thought written two decades later, despite having written the
most in-depth feminist work of eighteenth-century France.15
The auctions deplored by Gagnebin dispersed Dupin’s papers to a
multitude of libraries, as well as to private collections. Yet if Dupin’s
papers were only preserved thanks to Rousseau’s monetizable
handwriting, it was only thanks to their sale that they became public
knowledge. In preparation for the auctions of 1957 and 1958, Dupin’s
heirs commissioned Anicet Sénéchal, a teacher at the Lycée Buffon in
Paris, to produce an inventory of the papers to be sold. That
remarkable document, published in the annals of the Jean-Jacques
Rousseau Society, provides a complete sketch of Dupin’s work (see
Appendix B).16 The biggest portions of papers relating to the Work on
Women ended up at the Public and University Library of Geneva; at
the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas; and at the Musée Jean-
Jacques Rousseau in Montmorency. Smaller pieces of the Work on
Women are in the collections of a half dozen other libraries. As
librarians and curators cataloged and organized these manuscripts,
fragments became accessible to scholars, who made sense of them,
traced their location and chronology, and edited pieces of them.17 In
2022, when this book was in press, Frédéric Marty made the Work on
Women available in its entirety in French for the first time.18 Through
our own labor of reconstruction, translation, and annotation, we have
removed obstacles that hinder access to Louise Dupin’s feminist
thought.

Bookends to a Book That Wasn’t

Accomplishing anything in the realm of knowledge requires access,
education, and skills, which women in Dupin’s time were
systematically denied. Since men were the gatekeepers to institutions
and the discourses they produced until the middle of the twentieth
century or later, most women who managed to achieve intellectual
distinction in France in the eighteenth century did so with the support
of men.19 Two men were crucial supporting actors in the story of the
Work on Women: Dupin’s mentor, Charles-Irénée Castel de Saint-
Pierre, known as the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, and her secretary,
Rousseau. Their contributions bookend the story of the book that was
not to be. Saint-Pierre provided a blueprint that Dupin did not follow,
and Rousseau provided the labor to support her own plan.
Saint-Pierre found his way to Dupin’s salon by the early 1730s.20 A
half-century older than Dupin, he had learned the art of politesse in
the salons of Madame de Lafayette and the Marquise de Lambert.
Passionate about politics and systems, reforms and fairness, he had a
plan for any social or political problem. He proposed a Hobbesian
social contract between countries for peace in Europe21 and lost his
seat in the Académie française for portraying Louis XIV as a despot.22
A devotee of utility, Saint-Pierre strove to be useful to Dupin. Familiar
with her “complaints against the injustice” of men, he penned an
essay on women for her. He calls it a “canvas, that you are infinitely
more capable of filling out than me with historical facts.”23 Saint-
Pierre follows up ancient examples of women rulers with modern
ones, and Western examples with Asian ones, a program Dupin
would indeed follow in Part II. But his canvas was too small, too old,
and not sufficiently philosophical for the tableau Dupin had in mind.
Saint-Pierre celebrated “warrior virtues” reminiscent of the femme
forte ideal of the seventeenth century and applied his erudition to
accumulating women’s names without distinguishing legendary
figures from historical ones. Moreover, he neglected causal analysis.
How did inequality come to be, if men and women were naturally
equal?
In an early document which we call the long “Preliminary
Discourse,” Dupin establishes her own blueprint in a prospectus of
the whole work.24 This document—very rough and all in her hand—
shows her to be deeply engaged with François Poulain de la Barre’s
On the Equality of the Two Sexes (1673). She narrates humankind’s
emergence from the state of nature; finds no significant physical
differences between men and women; describes the education of
boys and the noneducation of girls; and discusses “the manner in
which the idea of the inferiority of women is continually reinforced” in
the discourses of history, law, and politics—subjects she would
develop into multiple chapters. Did she assign her newly hired
secretary to read this “Preliminary Discourse”?
It was a different Castel—Louis Bertrand Castel—who sent
Rousseau to Dupin, impressing on him that “one does nothing in
Paris except by means of women.”25 The thirty-year-old interloper
from Geneva was not finding a receptive audience for his musical
annotation system and was in dire straits. On Father Castel’s
suggestion, Rousseau visited Madame Dupin and became friendly
with her stepson, Louis Dupin de Francueil, Claude Dupin’s son from
a first marriage, and a fellow music lover. In March 1743, the three of
them—Rousseau, Dupin, and her stepson—attended Guillaume-
François Rouelle’s chemistry lessons.26 Just a few weeks after Dupin’s
mentor, Castel de Saint-Pierre, died (April 1743); Rousseau had his
first job for the Dupin family. Madame Dupin hired him to chaperone
her thirteen-year-old son, Jacques-Armand Dupin de Chenonceaux,
for a week until a replacement could be found for the boy’s
governor.27 Rousseau then left Paris for a year as secretary to the
French ambassador to Venice, but in the fall of 1745, was hired back
as “a sort of secretary” to the Dupin family, his services to be shared
between Dupin de Francueil and Madame Dupin.28 “Madame Dupin
had not waited for Jean-Jacques,” Sénéchal emphasizes; “she had
already assembled ideas and documents and had put other
secretaries to work.”29
But Rousseau seems to have been a particularly valuable secretary.
The son of a Genevan clockmaker, well-read but mostly self-taught,
Rousseau had the skills, judgment, and tenacity necessary to support
Dupin in achieving the vision that distinguished her project from the
canvas offered to her by Saint-Pierre. With Rousseau’s assistance, she
would argue that “the usurpation of women’s rights was neither
primitive, nor natural; it was modern.”30 In working for Dupin,
Rousseau would in turn participate in the construction of a polemical
change-over-time narrative and gain access to rare books. Rousseau
left the Dupins’ service in early 1751, around the time that his
Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (1751) was published. This
winning submission to the 1749 contest sponsored by the Academy
of Dijon earned him recognition (and notoriety). He followed up with
the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among
Men, deploying arguments and strategies borrowed from Dupin.31
Dupin abandoned her project around the time of Rousseau’s
departure. Sénéchal reports finding sand, used for drying ink, still
stuck to a few folios,32 suggesting that she never revisited some
pieces. Were Rousseau’s services so essential that she gave up when
he left? We suspect that she had come to view publishing a book as
an impossible gambit. The misbehavior of her now adult, married son
could be used to mock anything she might say about education.
Furthermore, publication was a liability for women. Dupin knew
women who had published, all anonymously: Françoise de Graffigny,
author of the very popular novel, Letters from a Peruvian Woman
(1747), and Madame de Tencin, whose Siege of Calais (1739) she
ranks, with Madame de Lafayette’s Princess of Clèves (1678) and
Zayde (1671), as the best novels in the French language (“The
Learned”). Dupin paid attention when the Marquise de Lambert’s
moral writings were published without her knowledge, and under her
name. Among Dupin’s papers at MJJR, a page cut from the preface to
Lambert’s New Reflections on Women reproduces (in print) a letter in
which she expresses chagrin at the publication of her “manuscript on
women.”33 Likewise in science: since there would be no doubt as to
her authorship, Émilie du Châtelet framed her Foundations of Physics
(1740) as advice to her son.
Adding to the reputational risks of publishing as a woman, the
Work on Women was polemical and bound to offend multiple
categories of men. The Dupins’ critique of The Spirit of the Laws had
already enraged Montesquieu, leading to ad hominem attacks on
both Louise and Claude.34 Enmity was no prerequisite to misogyny
(see Art. 45); as the condescension of a member of Dupin’s circle
reveals: “Madame Dupin, who was very pretty, and who always liked
the idea of thinking more than she liked thinking, worked for ten
years to show that men have no superiority, even physically, over
women. I don’t think that her work, if it ever comes out, will change
received ideas.”35

The Work on Women under Construction

Dupin’s Work on Women never came out, and Sénéchal describes a
“construction site” (chantier):36 drafts and notes in various stages of
completion and assembly, some continuous and some evidently
disordered by previous handlers. There is only one possible title for
the whole work, in one of three drafts that Dupin had labeled
“Preliminary Discourse”—one that Sénéchal did not see, as it was
part of the Montgermont lot of Dupin papers auctioned earlier in
1751 (see Appendix B). Inside the cover of this draft, there is a title
featuring cross-outs and additions: “physical, historical, and moral
observations on the common prejudice of the difference of the sexes.”
The crossed-out adjectives correspond to three of the four sections of
the total project.37 On the outside cover of this draft, Dupin wrote
“first sketch,” identifying the contents as a draft. Another hand,
probably after her death, added: “Madame Dupin’s work on women.”
Villeneuve-Guibert referred to his great-aunt’s “work on women,” and
subsequent scholars made it into a title. Marty uses Dupin’s draft
title, but we have kept the working title as an homage to the
construction site.
To visualize how Dupin built the Work on Women, it is helpful to
imagine a filing cabinet with hanging file folders,38 though Dupin’s
folders were probably layered in horizontal piles in an armoire or
trunk. The basic ingredients of Dupin’s filing system were loose-leaf
pages and papers twice the size folded in half and labeled with their
contents. We have found holes at the edge of some folders (Art. 23),
which indicate that they were tied closed with string (see Figure 1).39
Folios traveled from folder to folder. Sénéchal saw folders containing
reading excerpts, labeled with the title of the book;40 folders
containing contents that did not match the folder title;41 and folders
labeled “Miscellaneous” (Mélanges) containing “drafts, notes,
excerpts, etc. without any order whatsoever”—the leftovers of what
Dupin did not use elsewhere.42 The folders that have been most
consistently preserved are those that were titled and numbered in
Rousseau’s hand—the criterion in Sénéchal’s system for distinguishing
drafts included in the Work on Women from extraneous pieces (on
our use of “article” vs. “chapter,” see Appendix B).43 Some numbered
folders contain complete, coherent chapters; others contain
unprocessed excerpts (Art. 8); end in lists (Art. 26); are only rough
sketches (Art. 7); or comprise “a discontinuous series of notes and
observations” (Art. 17).44 Some drafts lacking folders and numbers,
like “Reflections on the Adornments of Women,” are less rough and
more continuous than the contents of several numbered folders.
Figure 1 Folder of Article 23, “On Education,” with title, flourish, number in
Rousseau’s hand, and hole for string. Courtesy of The William Andrews Clark
Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

The construction site is a record of Dupin’s and Rousseau’s working

methods, and a rich example of the social character of authorship
and bookmaking in the eighteenth century. Rousseau performed
standard secretarial duties for Dupin. He took dictation, made clean
copies, and made reading excerpts, which sometimes involved
translating passages from Latin.
1. Dictation. We glimpse evidence of dictation in corrections that
Rousseau made “live” as he was writing down what he heard
Dupin say. In the Article 23 draft, we see Dupin backtrack mid-
sentence as Rousseau adjusts accordingly; he crosses out a word
he hasn’t finished writing (“determines absolu[tely]”) and follows
immediately with the correction (“not only encourages”). A
correction in the draft of Article 42 shows that Rousseau heard
“without” and then realized that Dupin meant “100” as she
continued speaking; sans and cent sound the same in French.
2. Copying. “Observations on the Equality of the Sexes and on
their Difference” (Art. 1) demonstrates Rousseau’s work as a
copyist. In an early draft all in Dupin’s hand, we find suggestions,
likely by Sauveur-François Morand, a founder of the Académie de
chirurgie (surgery) and the director of the Académie des
sciences.45 He recommends shedding the opening quote and
beginning the chapter with the next page. Further down, he
suggests: “Wouldn’t it be good here to give some general idea of
what is meant by sex. And then write a first article that would
have as a title ‘particular organization of the difference of the
sexes, etc.’ ” Dupin followed this advice; in a draft in Rousseau’s
neat écriture ronde (French round hand), the Sinibaldus quote is
gone and there is a section called “Particular Organization.” On
the cover, Rousseau identifies the cleaner draft as a “copy.”46
However, we do not always find rough drafts leading to cleaner
drafts of the same chapter. Often, Dupin cannibalizes bits from
one piece for another. In Article 23, a chunk on boys’ education
taken from the long “Preliminary Discourse,” and commentary
about how boys are taught heroism in school is taken from a
draft of a history of Macedonia, featuring Alexander the Great
(see Figure 2).
Figure 2 Draft of “Macedonia” repurposed with commentary on education of boys
for Article 23, “On Education.” Rousseau’s hand on the right; Dupin on the left.
Courtesy of The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California,
Los Angeles.

It was the job of the secretary to write neatly, and the prerogative
of the employer to write sloppily.47 Dupin’s angular scrawl was not
necessarily a mark of her lack of formal education, but her
nonstandard spelling was (see Figure 3). French spelling was
beginning to be standardized in the eighteenth century, based on
etymological principles relating to Latin. Latin was deemed
superfluous for girls, and although Dupin had some Latin training,48
evidently she did not learn these rules. Like most literate women, she
“fell back on the phonetic spelling the uneducated had been using for
generations, modified more or less by their familiarity with printed
models.”49 In copying out clean drafts, Rousseau would smooth out
Dupin’s spelling quirks (such as her doubling of consonants in
obbsservations); flesh out her abbreviations (h. for homme; f. for
femme; p for pour or premier; m for mais, q for que, and = ité for
égalité); and integrate corrections and additions she had made to the
previous draft. To accommodate corrections, the page is divided into
two columns. Rousseau writes in the right-hand column, where Dupin
makes small edits, crossing out words and inserting words between
the lines. The left-hand column is blank, to provide space for Dupin’s
additions.50 Dupin indicates the place where the addition should go
with matching symbols. Seeing a 0 in the right column, Rousseau
would look for the same 0 in the left column, and would, in the new
draft, insert that addition at that spot.
Figure 3 Dupin’s hand with abbreviations from Article 23, “On Education.” Courtesy
of The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los
Angeles.

3. Excerpting. Rousseau made excerpts from books assigned to

him by Dupin to skim or to search for passages she had seen
cited elsewhere. To say that these included over 100 titles does
not do justice to Rousseau’s labor, because many of these books
comprised multiple volumes. His longest series of excerpts,
according to Sénéchal’s inventory, numbered 178 folios of
passages copied from Claude Fleury’s 36-volume Church History
(1722–1736). He undoubtedly made good use of indexes.51 While
taking dictation and copying drafts were mechanical exercises,
good judgment—a prized quality in secretaries52—was required in
selecting passages. Rousseau fast forwards in excerpts of Jean
Gillet’s Treatise on Tutorships (1656): “After having thoroughly
declaimed against women, cited Seneca, Plato, and even the
Gospel that compares them to snakes, he adds [ . . . ].” Enticed
by her secretary’s snarky summary, Dupin evidently read the
book herself; she cites a passage from his Treatise in “On
Tutorship” (Art. 36) that Rousseau did not include in his excerpts.
Similarly, additions in Dupin’s hand to Rousseau’s excerpts of
André Favyn’s Theater of Honor and Ancient Chivalry (1620)
indicate that she went back and read around in it. Rousseau also
made pencil marks in the margins of books—lines down the side
of passages he thought might interest her.53 For Latin books,
Rousseau’s excerpts are also translations; this was especially
crucial for Part III, where Dupin compares what French jurists
said about Roman law to what Roman law actually said.

Rousseau’s excerpts informed Dupin of the content of a book,

especially when that book was inaccessible to her because it was in
Latin, and provided “stubs” that she could integrate into her drafts.
They were a paper quarry from which she could extract the building
materials she needed for work she was constructing. Rousseau
usually includes one passage to a folio, so that Dupin could extract a
folio from the series and integrate it into a draft. Often, she selected
excerpts to summarize. Four continuous folios from Fleury’s Church
History plopped in the middle of the draft of Article 8 indicate either
that she meant to mine their contents in a subsequent draft or that
she had already done so to her satisfaction and the folios had not yet
been removed from the folder. In other cases, she integrated the text
of the excerpts directly into her draft. In Article 23, Dupin takes a
folio containing a passage about the teaching vocation of the
Ursulines from Rousseau’s excerpts of Pierre Hélyot’s eight-volume
History of Monastic Orders (1714–1719); she changes some words
and adds text all around it to fit it in a development about the decline
of the education on offer for girls (see Figure 4). While building one’s
text from excerpts of other books may not meet today’s standards of
academic integrity, it was common practice in the eighteenth
century.54
Figure 4 Excerpt from Hélyot’s History of Monastic Orders in Rousseau’s hand, with
commentary by Dupin. Courtesy of The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library,
University of California, Los Angeles.

This brings us to Dupin’s sources. Sources identified in the left-

hand column are usually holdovers from Rousseau’s excerpts. Dupin
did not reference her sources consistently, which was hardly
unusual,55 and one source often hides another, as erudite titles mask
multivolume compilations. Jean-Pierre Le Bouler—the first scholar to
edit any part of the Work on Women—emphasizes “the difficulty
experienced by the reader (and editor) of Madame Dupin in
separating the listed references from those which, taken from this or
that ‘work, rich in citations [ . . . ]’ are ‘probably second hand’.”56 We
have pursued unmentioned intermediary sources to the best of our
ability and documented our findings in the notes to give readers an
accurate picture of what Dupin was reading. Her Work on Women
reflects the growing market for books that made specialized
discourses accessible to laypeople (law, for instance), and that
serialized popular genres of writing (like travel narratives). Dupin also
refers to books she read about in periodicals, sometimes citing the
book rather than the review she had read. The Dupins undoubtedly
subscribed to several of these periodicals (Le Mercure de France and
Le Journal des sçavans) and probably received books by subscription
as well, such as Jean-Frédéric Bernard’s Ceremonies and Religious
Customs (see the introduction to Part II). Letters written to her by
Saint-Pierre, Morand, and Voltaire reveal a steady book traffic among
friends,57 and she borrowed books from the King’s library, where
Claude Sallier, who was part of her circle, almost certainly set aside
books for her based on her interests.58 She also had access to books
in the library of the Académie des inscriptions.59 Dupin’s sources
were not just textual. She draws from engravings in Bernard de
Montfaucon’s Antiquity Explained and Represented in Figures (1719)
and from his Monuments of the French Monarchy (1729–1733). She
describes an image in an early sixteenth-century printed books of
hours (Art. 8); Marguerite Bahuche’s painting of the Sibyls in the
church of Saint-Séverin (Art. 8); and Jean-Baptiste Santerre’s
controversial painting of Adam and Eve sans belly buttons (Art. 45).
 Madame Dupin in Society
Books in the absence of the interpersonal exchange that Dupin calls
“commerce” would not have much value. As she recognizes in “On
Education” (Art. 23), social interaction is essential to accessing new
ideas and thus for developing one’s own. Women contributed to the
development and circulation of knowledge as hostesses of weekly
receptions in which men and women gathered for conversation or
entertainment. In the eighteenth century, these gatherings were
called assemblées, sociétés, or cercles, but since the nineteenth
century have been called salons; their hostesses, salonnières.60
Hostesses issued invitations, set the tone and guided conversation,
welcomed guests and connected them to each other, provided
refreshment, organized entertainment (musical performances, games,
readings of literary works).61 In so doing, they made intellectual
connections flourish and mediated between artists and writers “and
the public of wealthy amateurs and government officials who
controlled state-sponsored institutions of letters.”62 Salons were social
networks that overlapped with other networks: the cultural scene of
operas and theaters; the political network of ambassadors, visiting
dignitaries, and bureaucrats; and various formal and informal
philosophical, literary, and scientific networks, many of which
excluded women from membership. They were also social circuits.
Some guests were partial to a particular salon—and some had limited
invitations—while others frequented multiple salons, of which there
were dozens at any given time in Paris. Historians continue to explore
the doings, attendance, and discussions of specific salons, but
evidence suggests that among the most well-known eighteenth-
century salons, attendees were disproportionately male, aristocratic,
and well-educated.63
Friday was the day that Louise Dupin hosted gatherings in her
residence in Paris, first at the magnificent Hôtel Lambert (1732–
1739), and then, after 1741, at the less opulent but more convenient
Hôtel de Vins in the financial district (hôtel, in this context, refers to
an urban mansion). Contemporary accounts of Dupin’s salon, as of
other salons, enumerate its most illustrious guests and highlight the
burnishing and tarnishing of its attractions.64 Madame Dupin’s salon
flourished in the 1730s and 1740s. “As brilliant at that time as any
other in Paris,” Rousseau remarks, her home “drew together social
circles which needed only to be a little less numerous to be the elite
of every sort,” for she hosted “all the glamorous people: Nobility,
literary people, beautiful women. Only Dukes, Ambassadors, knights
of the cordon bleu.”65 A list of 223 women’s names and addresses
that Dupin used for social visits reveals acquaintances with
aristocratic women of the highest echelons.66 Of the prestigious men
in her circle mentioned by Rousseau—“M. de Fontenelle, the Abbé de
Saint-Pierre, the Abbé Sallier, M. de Fourmont, M. de Bernis, M. de
Buffon, M. de Voltaire,”67—most were born in the seventeenth
century, only two were younger than her, and all of them died before
her. Salon membership evolved and overlapped, but it appears that in
the 1740s, Dupin’s salon skewed scientific and academic, with
connections to the royal academies devoted to literature, archeology
and history, science and surgery (see the introduction to Part I).68
Claude-Adrien Helvétius visited her salon, and his wife—Anne-
Cathérine Helvétius—appears on the list of residences that Dupin
visited.69 Dupin was a supporter of the Encyclopédie project,70 but
not connected to its leaders—Diderot, d’Alembert, or d’Holbach—
except via her secretary, who wrote his entries on music while still in
her service. Nor was she closely connected with Émilie du Châtelet,
even though the Marquis du Châtelet bought the Hôtel Lambert from
Claude Dupin in 1739, and despite the fact that Émilie was the lover
of Dupin’s friend, Voltaire. In exile much of the time, Voltaire mainly
kept in touch with Dupin through correspondence, although he did
attend her salon and dinners when in Paris,71 and his niece and
intermediary, Madame Denis, attended in his absence.
Dupin’s husband merits special mention in this overview of her
social and intellectual connections. Claude Dupin was interested in
economics and politics, publishing (anonymously) in this area.72
Together, they collaborated with a couple of friends on a critique of
Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1748).73 This much-anticipated
book propelled Montesquieu to fame throughout Europe and was the
talk of the Dupin salon. Claude was an ardent defender of the ferme
générale, a system of tax and customs oversight across the kingdom
that Montesquieu had criticized; Louise objected to his comments on
women and luxury, marriage, polygamy, and the principles of
governments. They had a handful of copies printed for a limited circle
—Reflections on Some Parts of a Book Entitled On the Spirit of the
Laws (1749)—and hardly more of a revised version printed a few
years later: Observations on a Book Entitled On the Spirit of the
Laws.74 Both of these books were known to be Claude’s, and Louise’s
participation was not a secret.75 A cache of her preparatory materials
and early draft sections for this group refutation are collected at the
municipal library of Bordeaux. In this “Critique of The Spirit of the
Laws,” we see her work in several sections as well as in a long
preface.76 A note on a manuscript cover page may be evidence of the
spouses’ cooperative spirit: under the title in Rousseau’s neat hand
—“Preface to the Critique of The Spirit of the Laws”—is a crossed-out
but just barely legible line in Louise’s hand: “Went to sleep at four in
the morning, please don’t make any noise.”77 If these papers were on
a desk in a chamber adjoining her bedroom,78 the note was perhaps
addressed to Claude and the others reassembling the next day. The
group project lasted several months, just a fraction of the late nights
Louise put into the Work on Women over the years. Claude seems to
have respected the space and time she needed for her scholarly work
on women.

On Fortunes and Futures

Dupin’s participation in the world of elite sociability, and her access to
intellectual resources both human and material, was made possible
by the vast wealth accumulated by her father and husband. She was
the daughter of the powerful financier and banker Samuel Bernard
and Armande (Manon) Carton Dancourt de Fontaine, a Parisian
actress from a famous theater family.79 Bernard amassed his fortune
in banking and commerce, including capital investment in the slave
trade. He was Louis XIV’s principle banker, loaned large sums to the
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