BOOK REVIEWS

Les Lettres sur la sympathie (1798) de Sophie de Grouchy: philosophie morale et réformesociale. Edited by Marc André Bernier and Deidre Dawson. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. 2010.viii + 220 p. £60 (hb). ISBN 978-0-7294-1000-7.

As Elizabeth Badinter has it, the life of Sophie de Grouchy remains to this day relatively badlyknown, partly because of the small amount of her correspondence available to researchers. Onemight add that her contribution to late Enlightenment thinking is itself likely to be overshadowedby the works of thinkers she was closely associated with, such as Nicolas de Condorcet, towhom she was married until his death in 1794, or Adam Smith. This volume, combining herLettres sur la sympathie with insightful studies of her life and achievements, shows, however, thatnot only her translation of the latter’s Theory of Moral Sentiments but also her own additionalreflections on it have had a lasting and transforming effect on our understanding of the conceptof sympathy.

If, as Marc André Bernier and Catriona Seth point out, Smith’s other major work (along with theWealth of Nations) was already well known in France, having been translated twice, these transla-tions had either been labelled as inaccurate or simply ignored. The marquise de Condorcet’s version,on the other hand, was to be the reference edition for more than two centuries. This is undoubtedlydown to her knowledge of English, but also to the much more colourful, concrete way in whichshe translated some of Smith’s passages. Which leads us to the second, and not the least, of deGrouchy’s contributions: the reinterpretation of the principle of sympathy, itself a rather abstractconcept at the core of Smith’s opus, in relation to physical and sensorial experience. The lettersthemselves show an attempt to root Smith’s sympathy in the sensualist tradition, stemming fromJohn Locke and developed in France by Etienne Bonnot de Condillac and the Ideologues, of whomCabanis was one of de Grouchy’s close friends. Daniel Dumouchel makes this clear when he extractsfrom the letters the various stages of the progression from purely sensorial sympathy to friendshipand even love, a feeling that Smith himself tends to neglect, and through to justice, with thesuperimposition of reason.

Michel Malherbe then proceeds to distinguish justice from morals in de Grouchy’s system, notingthat for the marquise, while sympathy might lead the rich to want to help the poor, there cannot beany legal obligation in that respect, as this would unsettle the very structure of society. Sympathyhelps reassert that all individuals are initially the same and should therefore have the same politicalrights; it cannot be, for de Grouchy, the basis for a social revolution. But good laws can feed the loveof justice, which can in turn contribute to the equalisation of society.

In the same way that there are good and bad laws, there is true and false eloquence; Marc AndréBernier focuses on de Grouchy’s dismissal of the speech tricks that reflect the corrupted state of theancien régime, and her faith in a rhetoric that would speak the true language of sympathy as well asencourage it. Last but not least, the author of the Lettres is also at the centre, with Germaine de Staëland Mary Wollstonecraft, of a debate on the rights of women to independence and happiness, andDeidre Dawson shows how these three philosophers endeavoured to free sympathy from the genderprejudices within which Smith had confined it.

This volume offers a precious insight into the life and thoughts of an important figure of theRevolutionary and post-Revolutionary days. The care with which the Lettres are edited andthe articles are arranged, as well as the quality of the latter, make for a valuable introduction to theongoing reflection on the concept of sympathy in the eighteenth century and to Sophie de Grouchyherself. They succeed in both edifying and igniting curiosity in the reader.

Benjamin BâcleUniversity College London

Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 37 No. 2 (2014)

© 2014 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies