Chapter 7 - The Poet, 1804–1810

Summary

Chapter 7 explores the final years of Grouchy’s intellectual life, under Napoleon’s Empire. It shows how, growing increasingly distrustful of the ability of the state to foster the faculties of sympathy and reason, Grouchy grew interested in the power of the written word, rather than state-sponsored education, to imbue morality in the population. She turned first to the possibility that the model of an enlightened philosophe, martyred for justice, could inspire proper political sentiments. This provided a rationale for her publication, together with Cabanis, of the first Oeuvres de Condorcet in 1804. She then, together with Fauriel, and inspired by the aesthetic philosophy of Schiller, began to explore the importance of poetry, and particularly the idyllic image of humankind in harmony with nature, to replace the state as educator of human emotions. At the same time, she used the moving of her salon to her countryside Maisonnette, and the shifting mode of sociability that this entailed, to model the idea of a civil sphere, protected from the state, where moral and political sentiments could be fostered. Despite this new interest in poetry and civil society, her aims, the Chapter concludes, ultimately remained political.