The Introduction defines the book’s major concepts, such as belonging with, elucidates its major keywords – movement, listening, radiance, resuscitating, restoring, and recycling, and explains its foundational ideas and methodology. These intertwine feminist, historical, ecological, and subject–object analyses to underpin how diminishing women and objects is a related activity. Second, it establishes how texts heal injurious mergings between women and matter and jettison the supposed “female virtues” – dissimulation and passivity – in order to embrace actual ethical beliefs and independence, reconnect women’s corporeality, reason, spirit, sexuality, and virtue, rendering these cooperating, rather than sparring, bodies. Third, it argues that these materialist ethics reveal how consumption can be constructive, a finding that disputes mainstream concerns that women were merely thoughtless consumers. Finally, it illuminates how the political and personal need to incarnate ideals by rendering concrete such abstractions as the “rights of man” entwines with gender debates and subject–object explorations during the revolutionary years.

This chapter presents a brief background. It treats the Old Regime in Central Europe, the impact of the French Revolution, the postwar settlement, social and economic change, revolution in 1848, and national unification.

By the end of the eighteenth century the plural language of liberty was under widespread attack, denounced by radicals as a denial of innate human rights and a tool of monarchical despotism. This evolution was partly powered by the consolidation of nation-states that picked up speed in the sixteenth century, but this centralization was long incomplete. In this situation the terms “liberties” and “privileges” were almost universally regarded as equivalents, even by so radical a movement as the English Levellers of the seventeenth century. The dissolution of this equivalence took place in France, first as the monarchy’s political and fiscal shenanigans sapped people’s faith in the system, and then as the Revolution mounted a full-scale attack on privilege as a source of inequality and despotism. Supporters of the Revolution followed its lead, but the old language still played a role in Britain and Germany, a reminder that the old language, even with its equivalence of liberties and privileges, long persisted in fostering self-government and resisting oppression.

Chapter 3 describes Grouchy’s thought during the first four years of the French Revolution. It explores both the philosophical foundations for and the results of the strong political and intellectual partnership that developed with her husband, Condorcet, from around 1790. Grouchy took advantage of the symbolic political power with which marriage was imbued in revolutionary discourse to use her own union as a microcosm of the polity she and Condorcet were advocating. They demonstrated that sentiment not only allowed individuals to reason rights, but created bonds that enabled independent people to work together for the advancement of political goals beyond their basis self-interest. This created the basis from which citizens could contribute to the creation of a just constitution. The state, in turn, had a central role in fostering the emotional faculties of the citizenry. Women, moreover, had an identical capacity for moral and political judgement as men. They made this argument both in the public display of their collaboration, and in texts that they co-authored together. This Chapter makes the case for Grouchy’s co-authorship of Condorcet’s influential 1791 Cinq mémoires de l’instruction publique and argues for her centrality to Condorcet’s revolutionary thinking and career.

The conclusion turns to the implications of this study today, both in terms of our own view of liberal democratic society and the place of women in it. Grouchy shows us, firstly, how significant ideas can persist through an era of upheaval like the French Revolution: through constant negotiation, continual re-interrogation, and a determination to hold on to core concepts while adapting and discarding others. It argues, furthermore, that Grouchy’s politics and philosophy provide further evidence that women in history have thought and acted politically, but not always in the ways we commonly understand as ‘thinking’ or ‘acting’. It expresses the hope that the example of Grouchy will provide inspiration for other historians who wish to reconstruct the ideas of those in the past – in particular women and other marginalised groups – who did not do all, or any, of their thinking over the course of long texts. The reconstruction of this rich history will, in turn, help combat the problem of authority still encountered by women today in political and intellectual spheres. Finally, it ends with the suggestion that Grouchy’s thought may be of use for those twenty-first century theorists who argue that emotions are essential to successful liberal democracies.

As well as providing a brief biography of Sophie de Grouchy, the introduction sets out the aims of the book. It describes how A Republic of Sympathy is the tale of how thought could be produced by an eighteenth-century woman in a time of Revolution: with all the possibilities, limitations, and opportunities that this period offered. It outlines how over this period, Grouchy developed her own, unique form of republicanism, by appealing to sympathy as the glue between the individual and the republic. It emphasises that Grouchy’s thought consisted of a series of shifting, adapting ideas, which nevertheless consistently relied on this sentiment. It describes how Grouchy not only experiment with variations of her theory over this period, but with different mediums of expressing her ideas: including pedagogical treatise, journal articles, translated texts, commentaries, collaborative projects, or embodied in her lived relationships. It also highlights Grouchy’s key interlocutors: from Adam Smith, to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from her husband, the marquis de Condorcet to Benjamin Constant, from Thomas Paine to Jacques Pierre Brissot.

This chapter looks at the impact of the French Revolution on this German discussion of the meaning of Protestantism, as well as at the internationalization of its themes through Charles Villers’ Essay on the Spirit and Influence of Luther’s Reformation (1804). A French exile in Germany, Villers synthesized a German historical discourse about the Reformation and progress and repackaged and publicized it to a European audience in response to a prize essay competition by the Institut de France. Accompanied by a brief discussion of Johann Gottfried Herder’s historical theories, the chapter also shows how Villers’ intervention (and its reception) signaled a return of the themes of nation and religion as forces of historical discourse.

Chapter 4 explores Grouchy’s first elaboration of a specifically republican political philosophy during the French Revolution. It describes how, together with Condorcet, Paine, Brissot and others, she founded the first explicitly republican journal of the Revolution in 1791: Le Républicain. It explores the context for her declaration of republicanism: the flight of Louis XVI from Paris in June 1791. It demonstrates how, in the articles she contributed to this journal and other anonymously published pieces, Grouchy elaborated on the theory she had been developing between 1786 and 1791. She added an unambiguously anti-royal element to her thought, arguing that a king can never feel sympathy with his people, and can therefore never be a just ruler. This Chapter explores how she drew, in particular, on the ideas of Paine, but also describes a major intellectual and political fissure that developed between Grouchy and her ‘Brissotin’ allies during this period. While they advocated an offensive European war after 1791, she argued against one. Due to her reliance on mutual sentiment between ruler and ruled as the basis of political society, she opposed, on philosophical grounds, the sending of ‘armed missionaries’.

Sanja Perovic’s chapter treats one of the most significant events in French history and an unprecedented period in theatre history. While the Revolution is often overlooked as a ‘dead period’ in French theatre, Perovic describes the scale and ambition of this extraordinary period. Never before had so many newcomers been able to forge successful careers as writers, actors and directors. Artistic innovation peaked, as revolutionary performance was more akin to what today is termed performance art, than to the kind of repertory theatre that preceded or followed it. Covering some of the major events, influential figures and key texts of this extremely fertile period, Perovic shows how theatre addressed the questions key to revolutionary culture: who is the audience? Where is it located? Who speaks on its behalf, and in what (theatrical, artistic) language? She concludes by contrasting two utopian works – Louis Beffroy de Reigny’s Nicodème dans la lune, ou la révolution pacifique (Nicodème Goes to the Moon, or the Peaceful Revolution, 1790) and Sylvain Maréchal’s Le Jugement dernier des rois (The Last Judgement of Kings, 1793) – with Beaumarchais’ La Mère coupable (The Guilty Mother, 1792), an altogether more sombre assessment of the effects of revolution.

The chapter begins with an effort to explain the book’s starting-point in the Enlightenment. Moving from historiography to the events of the time, it begins by telling the tale of the essay competition on the question “What is Enlightenment?,” in which Moses Mendelssohn came first, followed by Immanuel Kant. Mentioning that some 200 years later, the French post-modernist historian-philosopher Michel Foucault wrote yet another essay under the same title, in which he explicitly combined German and Jewish history, the chapter moves once again from historiography to history, concentrating on the biography of Moses Mendelssohn, especially on his repeated confrontation with the religious intolerance of some of his enlightened colleagues and then, stressing the ambivalence of the situation, typical of the German Enlightenment as a whole, the chapter ends with a comment on Lessing’s Nathan der Weise.

In The Prelude (1805/1850), Wordsworth reimagines time through the ritual calendar and festivals of revolutionary France. The Revolution’s rituals, moreover, complicate the common notion that Wordsworth retreats from politics into poetry. By way of ritual, Wordsworth enters what Walter Benjamin calls now-time or higher time, moments in which the past – via memory – becomes simultaneous with the present. Such now-times allow Wordsworth to juxtapose, on the one hand, his own past calling to a poetic vocation with, on the other hand, the Revolution’s founding vocation to bring liberty. In that juxtaposition, Wordsworth’s own faithfulness to his poetic calling tacitly critiques the Revolution’s infidelity to its origins. The higher time of ritual, then, mediates between Wordsworthian memory and revolutionary history. Wordsworth provides foundations for many Victorian liturgies. His sacralization of material reality, his resistance to the market’s dehumanizing rituals, his imbrication of memory and higher time – each of these undergoes further elaboration as the century unfolds.

The blockade has been a long-standing economic and military tactic to isolate enemy nations and force them to endure siege conditions. This chapter examines how British or pro-British cultural actors managed to disseminate propagandized cultural texts and information via secret channels of communication, smuggling in the cultural capital of the enemy nation(s). The first example is the Bibliothèque britannique, the Geneva-based journal which commissioned and published many translations of British scientific and literary works during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars; second, the translation activity during 1914–18 with poetry as case study; third, the role played by the pro-European group, the Federal Union and finally the internationalism and human rights discourse of writing advocated by PEN in London during the Second World War. The chapter concludes with a Cold War section examining soft diplomacy in the use of literature and art to disseminate liberal thinking behind the Iron Curtain. How far do these blockade moments articulate federal and internationalist aims and projects while risking isolationist rhetoric in the construction of liberal ideals in wartime?

The chapter focuses on the influence of French cuisine in Britain. The innovations of French courtly cuisine were frequently mocked in Britain which had its own tradition of sound and economical country house cooking. The Industrial Revolution brought a loss of cooking skills among the urban poor. The affluent benefitted from the flight of French chefs after the French Revolution, leading to the culinary pretensions of the (equally mocked) Regency period. French chefs set up French restaurants and cooking schools, popularising French cuisine, thus influencing the tastes of the middle classes and stimulating a range of gastronomical writings. Examples from Antony Trollope’s Vanity Fair, Virgina Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Mike Leigh’s Life is Sweet, Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, the Wife and Her Lover and Elizabeth David’s postwar books serve to gauge the extent of French infuence and help define what makes British food, British.

Chapter 14 traces the development of Romanticism and positions Goethe within it. It addresses the factors that shaped Romanticism, such as the rise of the prose novel and the revival of interest in folklore, and positions the movement in relation to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Above all, the chapter demonstrates that – despite his well-known ambivalence about aspects of Romanticism – Goethe contributed to it throughout his life, paving the way for it with his early works, and embodying many of its tendencies later on, above all in Faust.

Chapter 6 explores the impact of the French Revolution on Goethe and examines the development in his responses, especially as reflected in the literary works he composed between 1789 and 1797. Goethe was horrified by the violence of 1789 and its aftermath; at the same time, he was critical of the French elites, and saw their fate as a warning to their German counterparts. This chapter highlights the ambivalence of his attitudes and aligns him with the reform conservatives, who favoured the maintenance of privileges but also reform from above.

Chapter 13 examines the development of Weimar Classicism, from the impact of Goethe’s own experiences in Italy to his collaboration with Friedrich Schiller. A crucial factor in any classicism, including that of Goethe and Schiller, is the absence of the ancients, and the chapter argues that Weimar Classicism was far from the settled, canonical project for which it is often taken. Rather, it emerged from historical crisis, above all the French Revolution, and it is characterised by internal tensions, between antiquity and modernity, desire and restraint.

This chapter addresses the political and intellectual context for Wagner’s revolutionary socialism. The nineteenth century stood in the light and shadow of the French Revolution, emboldened and fated to revisit and to relive many of its questions and practices. Wagner’s life mixed revolutionary theory and practice: in the Dresden uprising of 1849, but also in its ‘Vormärz’ prologue and in its apparently counter-revolutionary aftermath. Wagner experienced revolution on at least three geographical levels, European, German, and Saxon, the third receiving particular attention here. The focus is on Wagner’s most unambiguously revolutionary period, the 1840s and early 1850s, yet these ideas continued to play out in life, thought, and dramatic oeuvre: not only until completion of the Ring in 1874, Wagner’s revolutionary ‘fire cure’ reaching fulfilment in the final conflagration of Götterdämmerung, but in Parsifal and beyond. Earlier themes did not go unchanged; they provided shifting foundations for further dramatic exploration.

This chapter addresses the limitations potentially placed on the success of revolutions by “human nature” - which in psychological terms are the hard-wired characteristics that limit change in behavior. It is argued that in the long term, even behaviors that we conceptualize as hardwired at present tend to change (particularly through changes in the environment). The avowed goals of the French, Russian, Chinese, Cuban, and Iranian revolutions are examined, and it is concluded that none of these revolutions achieved their goals. Despite failure, the regimes that survive in China, Cuba, and Iran continue to use the rhetoric of revolution. Four ways in which human nature seems to doom revolutions are considered: extremists come to power; an “ends justify the means” approach is adopted and corruption results; the style of leader–follower relations persist after revolutions, with the result that one dictatorship replaces another; and revolutionaries typically fail to set up the necessary conditions to achieve the behavioral changes necessary to reach their revolutionary goals (such as collectivization).

This chapter addresses Wollstonecraft’s Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794), the work in which she engages most explicitly with contemporary political economic thought. Noting that she gives particular prominence to the liberation of the grain trade in the early years of the Revolution, it explores how Wollstonecraft uses the issue to yoke commercial with political forms of liberty. The free circulation of grain was a totemic issue in Adam Smith’s new political economy of ‘natural liberty’, but it also pitted the market against traditional notions of ‘moral economy’. The chapter also explores Wollstonecraft’s links with Girondin politicians, including Jacques Pierre Brissot, and theirs with the Shelburne circle of the 1780s, and discusses the involvement of Americans Joel Barlow and Gilbert Imlay in provisioning the French Republic in the mid-1790s: activity which informed the hostility to commerce of Wollstonecraft’s later works.