Keywords

Why not begin recklessly—with a generalization that is bound to get me in trouble? There is, I want to argue, a good reason to distinguish between early modern feminism and modern feminism, one that seems to me vital to understanding the career of feminism in France and perhaps in Europe over the long term. To understand early modern feminism, our point of departure has to be a foundational fact of life for elite women, not easy to fully grasp from within our modern cultures that put so much value on self-validation through labour: in the culture of France’s old regime elite—the titled aristocracies of robe and sword and the haute bourgeoisie that strove to emulate their way of life—protocols of gender and protocols of status interlocked to make it virtually impossible for cultivated women to perform strenuous and sustained intellectual labour, whether in the oral performances of polite society or in writing in the world of letters. As Mónica Bolufer has argued, in the early modern era the traditional granting of women’s “spiritual” equality with men as recipients of divine grace sometimes shaded into claims for their “intellectual” equality (Bolufer 2005; Stuurman 2005). It was still assumed, however, that women’s minds were too weak for the educated professions; their sphere of equality in cognition, perhaps even superiority, lay in taste, where spontaneous intuition in aesthetic appreciation, not reasoned judgement, was decisive, and in the art of conversation, for which women were seen to be far more naturally gifted than men.

We find this gendered differentiation challenged at several moments in the three decades prior to the French Revolution. One such moment—the one we will concentrate on here—is recorded in two private letters that Louise d’Épinay wrote to her close friend the abbé Galiani, the first dated January 4, 1771, and the second March 14, 1772, to be found in a remarkable correspondence the friends sustained from Galiani’s recall to Naples from diplomatic service in Paris in 1769 to d’Épinay’s death in 1783. In the letter of January 4, 1771, d’Épinay protests the injustice of women being excluded from all “useful occupations”, though they are not only as intelligent as men but also have a greater capacity to communicate ideas. The letter of March 14, 1772, has a more theoretical reach. Conventional gender differentiations have denatured women; if women were raised as nature intended, they would be as qualified as men for “serious occupations” (La Vopa 2017, 285–88).Footnote 1

D’Épinay was emphatic that Galiani keep the two letters in question absolutely secret. It was not simply that she feared ridicule by the public in general if she exhibited her intelligence publicly. Over the previous fifteen years or so she had become an active participant in the world of the philosophes; notably in her intellectual presence in the socially uninhibited gatherings she arranged at her father-in-law’s chateau La Chevrette, which sometimes went on for days, and in co-editing with Diderot the Correspondance littéraire during her partner Grimm’s absence from Paris on diplomatic missions in 1770 and 1771. Frequently making her own polite but intellectually pointed contributions to the journal, she became a “woman of letters”, though not one who dared to be recognized as such on the public stage. During her stay in Geneva from November, 1757 through September, 1759, she became a friend of Voltaire and a frequent guest at his home at Ferney. Voltaire liked to play the gallant with most women, limiting himself to amusing wit, but he called d’Épinay a “truly philosophical woman” (Weinreb 1993, 109–10). These credentials notwithstanding, d’Épinay knew that on the issue of women and work her friends among the philosophes would not support her.

To understand how d’Épinay came to her modern feminist conviction, we have to operate in two interpretive registers at once. One is intellectual history as it has usually been practiced. In its view of influence, we demonstrate that X read Y’s text and derived certain ideas from it. By itself, that would put us in a straitjacket in this case. In her writings d’Épinay had remarkably little to say about what she learned from specific texts in her readings, and in participation in conversations (and arguments) among Enlightenment men of letters. Discussing in her writing what she learned from specific texts would have been superfluous. In the second interpretive register, we find d’Épinay and the people around her immersed in rhetorical cultures, by which I mean shared resources of meaning that historical agents have to draw on in the social and cultural webs of their worlds. The resources did not produce a consensus, but they did allow shared perceptions of choices, and a shared language with which to make them (Manning 2013).

D’Épinay was raised in the rhetorical culture of polite sociability at the pinnacle of French society, which had embedded assumptions about how rank and privilege constrained one’s self-fashioning, plotted one’s life possibilities and perched one above the common need to perform “useful” work. It coexisted uneasily, and sometimes in open conflict, with another rhetorical culture—one that made utility and the labour it required the measure of a person’s social and moral value. It was in negotiating these tensions that d’Épinay found her way to a modern feminist logic of self-validation, and to a way of life that lived that logic without depriving her of the kind of sociability that came to matter to her.

Antoine Lilti has shown us in rich detail that the motive force in le monde was the pursuit of “reputation” (Lilti 2010). To rise in reputation was to ascend the pyramid of “honour” over which the Crown at Versailles presided, distributing titles and monetary rewards, and resting financially on the sprawling sale of offices (venalité) requiring considerable investment by families to secure lucrative positions in a bloated state bureaucracy. Marriageable daughters were subject to the family’s “dynastic” impulse to maintain or heighten its social status through marital alliances. It was not simply that the choice of a marriage partner was in the hands of the parents and other relatives. Making a daughter marriageable meant breeding her in polite self-representation—a virtually unceasing self-performance—that made the art of pleasing (complaisance) the sine qua non of female “honour”. For women (as for men in polite company), complaisance required that everything be done with seeming aisance. In polite sociability, and especially in polite conversation, a woman who appeared to make an effort in thinking or in speaking risked debasing herself. The politeness practiced in aristocratic sociability was not simply leisured; it was incompatible with an ethos of labour that was gaining purchase in eighteenth-century bourgeois society.

There was an underlying cultural logic to aisance that makes it, for us moderns, as hard to grasp as the apparently impenetrable logics of primitive cultures; however contrived it might actually be, seemingly effortless performance was valued as a natural exercise of freedom, in contrast to the determinism that labour to satisfy basic needs imposed on the great mass. Women’s role was to please effortlessly, and that required that they practice an aesthetic of play that had no room for even the appearance of disciplined effort. The woman who violated that taboo—who revealed herself to be seriously engaged in “study”—risked being stigmatized and perhaps ostracized as a femme savante, an unnatural creature (La Vopa 2017, 19–38).

An increasing number of women from the middle ranks of society did try to make a living by writing for a market, and especially by writing novels, but for women of the aristocracy and the haute bourgeoisie this kind of self-employment was virtually unthinkable, a complete violation of the aristocratic code of social honour. What became thinkable—or at least more thinkable—was concentrated and sustained labour in reading and writing in frequent periods of solitude. Whether the woman could expose herself by publishing the work, even anonymously, was a vexed question; perhaps better to read it to a select group of friends. What matters for my purposes is the emancipation of the female mind that the work itself signified. Gradually for some women at the top of the social pinnacle, social self-validation pivoted from natural freedom from labour to natural freedom through labour. However inconsequential this might seem, it was an act of existential defiance, a psychic condition in the transvaluation of values that made modern feminism possible.

The agenda of early modern feminism rarely took this turn; the agenda of modern feminism did take it, making women’s self-fulfilment through disciplined labour one of its central goals. In my sweeping generalization, the turn to emancipation through labour has its breakthrough moments in the second half of the eighteenth century. François Poullain de la Barre’s three feminist treatises of the 1670s might seem to fly in the face of this claim. In De l’égalité des deux sexes (On the Equality of the Two Sexes, 1673), Poullain did argue without qualification that women were as capable as men to engage in the strenuous Cartesian meditation that would free them from reigning social prejudices; and that that liberation would qualify them to exercise their critical faculties in all the educated professions that had been to that point exclusively male. It was a utopian vision of a new social order, aimed at eventually making “birth” irrelevant to access to positions in the entire occupational world. But in the treatise De l’éducation des dames (On the Education of Women, 1679), Poullain, looking for a way to make a start, backtracked to a more practical social strategy. Even as he realized that only the elite women of le monde had the time and the means to engage in Cartesian meditation, he had to face the fact their aesthetic code of social performance simply did not allow them to serve openly, in their speech and their behaviour, as the vanguard for a rational reordering of society. He assures women with “leisure and means” that Cartesian study will provide “a gentle and pleasant intellectual exercise”, entirely compatible with their usual “divergences”. The new science would be “a gentle, easy exercise for ladies” (La Vopa 2017, 51–60). It was a measure of the strength of the social aesthetic of play that Poullain, despite the stringent idealism of his commitment to Cartesian principles, had to accommodate to its code. While not implying that Cartesian study could be another worldly amusement, he knew that he could not ask the polite women he was addressing to tear away their inbred consciousness of breeding, and indeed of selfhood, as social beings.

Montbrillant and Character

The monumental edifice to d’Épinay’s commitment to freedom through labour was her Histoire de Madame de Montbrillant, an epistolary novel not published in her lifetime and first published in a reliable unabridged edition in 1951. The 1989 edition has 1479 pages of text in small print, not counting the editor’s notes (d’Épinay 1989). If it is monumental in size, it is still a work in progress that often seems temporally and spatially formless. Most of the letters are undated, though it is clear that they are arranged in a chronological order. The novel has a rich—perhaps too rich—tableau of characters drawn from her family, her friends, the people she encountered in le monde and the world of letters. They all revolve around Émilie, the main character, through whom d’Épinay represents herself. Over the course of the text we watch d’Épinay learning to be a novelist; the character portrayals become increasingly well-etched and lively as Émilie sheds the naivité of her youth, especially in exchanges of letters that have acute psychological drama. The role of invention in her portrayal of characters was not limited to adding fictional detail to the personalities and lives of real people. She also created characters, though they did not come into being ex-nihilo; she surely drew their attributes from the actual people of her social world. Not surprisingly, the novel has drawn the scrutiny of feminist scholars, whose valuable studies I have depended on. They have effectively brought both the novel and its author out of the shadows cast by the usual cast of male philosophes.Footnote 2

D’Épinay originally conceived Montbrillant, one might say, to outdo Rousseau. In 1756 she had offered Rousseau a refuge from Paris in a cottage on her father-in-law’s estate, where he read to her drafts of the first parts of the novel Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761). With Montbrillant d’Épinay wanted to experiment in the psychological realism and the true-to-life epistolary dialogue that she found lacking in Rousseau’s novel (d’Épinay 1989). Her characters would not be rhetorical mouthpieces for the author; they would speak for themselves, with the immediacy that the epistolary novel made possible. In this way, under the paper-thin cover of fictional names, she portrayed a number of Enlightenment luminaries in her circle of friends, including Rousseau, Grimm, Galiani, Duclos, Diderot, d’Holbach and Saint-Lambert.

I should note here that I am sidestepping a question that has preoccupied critics of the novel since its first appearance in 1812. It turns on the text’s extensively documented account of the feud d’Épinay, Grimm and Diderot had with Rousseau from 1757 on. Well into the twentieth century Rousseauists made d’Épinay the liar in this affair; to admirers of d’Épinay the liar was Rousseau. The dispute cannot be resolved with documentary evidence. More important, we don’t need to resolve it if we want to recover the full social and cultural meaning of the text. The dispute threatens to deprive the author of the right to use fictional techniques to convey with imaginative immediacy the meanings she actually lived in her social and cultural milieus.Footnote 3

Since Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748–49) had become virtually obligatory reading in a new age of sensibility, there had been a proliferation of epistolary novels (Stewart 1969). Even in this crowded field, however, Épinay made an original literary contribution to the genre. There is no other eighteenth-century fictional character quite like the Marquis de Lisieux, an old family friend who serves as Émilie’s tutor when she is a young girl and remains her indispensable mentor for rest of her life. Lisieux is at once an aristocratic man of the world, respecting l’usage of his social milieu, and a detached voice of reason. He pulls her away from the corruption of her social circles, even as he keeps warning her that she must remain a social being following l’usage of her world. He is a rationalist in two senses: as a man with clear and steady moral principles, and as a moral pragmatist. Émilie must find a way to live within that tension-ridden rationalism.

Lisieux is not simply one of the cast of characters whose letters appear in the novel; he has in effect created the “history” of Émilie by serving as its (fictional) editor in the aftermath of her death, having put together their letters to each other, the extensive journal he has had her keep only for his eyes, and her correspondence with a wide range of characters. At an early stage in this process, Émilie, exasperated by being slandered by her husband and other family members, makes a declaration of independence in her journal: “I will no longer take my family or my mother as judges … From now on I recognize only justice to judge between my husband and me” (d’Épinay 1989, 587).

It is Lisieux’s efforts that make the novel a complex exercise in self-reflection through memory. Its full complexity becomes apparent when we compare it to the famous discussion of “identity” at the conclusion of Book I of David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), though d’Épinay was not likely to have had a first-hand familiarity with Hume’s text. Hume the philosophical sceptic rejects the idea that “we have access to a SELF” that is “unitary” (a core substance that does not change over time) and has “simplicity” (its indivisibility bounds it, insuring against its being conflated into other selves). All we have is “a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with inconceivable rapidity and are in perpetual flux and movement”. It is the active force of the imagination, using the residue of perceptions stored in memory, that forms what is left of the inchoate bundle into the usable fiction of an integral self (Hume 2003, 165). The process is fictional in the sense that the storage of sensations in memory is random, and that the imagination forms the stored sensations into a pattern they do not actually have. If this self is fictional, however, it is indispensable to a person’s functioning in the material world and in her social field.

D’Épinay, of course, thinks that in writing Montbrillant she is recovering her real self, the essential person nature meant her to be. But the recovery is more mediated by artifice than it may at first appear to be, as it is the fictional Lisieux, not Émilie, who speaks for its authenticity, and he has made all the decisions about the epistolary flow of the narrative. Lisieux is insistent that he is giving the reader documentary fact in the letters and journal entries he himself possesses, and in the ones by d’Épinay and others that he has taken pains to retrieve. The art of this narrative trope—this illusion of strict attention to evidentiary fact—lies in making the reader feel that she is watching Émilie through the texts Lisieux has laid out, and indeed plumbing her consciousness, without her knowing it. In the documents the editor claims to have found and ordered, we watch her achieving an increasingly confident awareness that, looking back, she can judge her past self, with all its flaws, and can trace the interactions with others that have made her what she has become. There is a paradox here. Even as d’Épinay assumes the existence of a self whose ontological reality Hume has denied, she engages in an imaginative process of constructing the self in memory that is a variant on the process Hume had in mind. The fictional techniques narrate the very fact of selfhood that Hume denied.

Character

The key word in Montbrillant is not the self, but character, which appears often in d’Épinay’s self-reflective exchanges with her tutor. Its resonances are not epistemological in Hume’s sense, but emphatically social. With the inter-lacing of documentary fact and imaginative fiction d’Épinay narrates an interior moral progression; Émilie confirms to herself and to others that, against all the odds, she has acquired a “character” in social interactions; and above all that, shedding a virtually pathological youthful naivité, she has learned to read character or the lack of it in others.

The word character was then, as it still is today, the repository for a cluster of moral attributes that made a person’s behaviour consistent and trustworthy. The attributes of character were assumed to embody universal moral principles, but in Montbrillant, as in many other novels of the era, they take on meaning as they are refracted through quotidian detail and the language specific to rhetorical cultures, which individualizes character in a specific social field. The underlying question was about the relationship between the individual and society. It was not of course specific to eighteenth-century France; arguably it has been one of the central themes of western religion, philosophy and literature. How far could one detach oneself from society and its norms (the norms of l’usage) without sinking into a delirium of self-absorption? Lacking nourishment from others, did not the self consume itself? On the other hand, how far could the self conform to others’ expectations without emptying itself of any capacity for autonomy? (Seigel 2005).

For women in France’s eighteenth-century elite of birth and great wealth, this question was not speculative. Some of them, even as they had no choice but to engage fully in the practice of complaisance, yearned to withdraw from it. This is the framework for understanding d’Épinay’s and Lisieux’s perception of choices, which were much discussed in literature offering moral guidance, and fiercely debated in Diderot’s dispute with Rousseau over the latter’s decision to leave Paris for a secluded life in the country (in the cottage Émilie provides for him). To be a woman of character Émilie has to learn to walk a fine line between a hermitic solitude that would remove her from sociability and a hyper-sociability that would leave no room for the solitude essential to moral autonomy.

In the very first letter in the novel, Émilie’s great aunt the Marquise de Beaufort—who for lack of “fortune” has withdrawn to a “convent” where she can live a respectable aristocratic life without making a splash in le monde—has learned of the death of Émilie’s father and urges the Marquis de Lisieux to serve as her tutor. Due to her “sweetness” and “weakness of character”, the girl’s mother has failed to cultivate the right people and to “inspire in her the dignified sentiments of her birth”. Now Lisieux must prepare her to marry “some gentleman who will hold still to the honor of a military career and his family name” (d’Épinay 1989, 7–8).

As her tutor Lisieux becomes Émilie’s interlocutor in her struggle within herself. We might liken him to the impartial spectator in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), guiding her to develop an independent conscience, an inner voice that when necessary ignores the mere “opinion” of others, but at the same time keeping her attached to the social duties of “propriety”. Lisieux honours the spirit rather than the letter of the Marquise’s request, which is to say that he is less concerned with saving the honour of a family in the nobility of the sword than with giving her character a social solidity in her performance of a way of life, a “station” to which she has responsibilities.

His end in publishing Émilie’s “history”, the tutor tells us in a preface, “is to justify her in the eyes of the public that suspects her of fickleness, coquetry and lack of character” (d’Épinay 1989, xiv). Today, we sometimes use the word coquette to evoke a mildly mischievous teasing. In the eighteenth century, coquetry was a much more serious charge; it meant that a woman was character-less, lacking in sincerity in all her relationships, ruthlessly manipulative, not to be trusted about anything. In the early years of her marriage Lisieux is concerned that, in the efforts to please her husband, Émilie is being drawn too deeply into the mondain night life of Paris (d’Épinay 1989, 229–30). It is a world in which the art of pleasing all too easily stigmatizes a young woman as a coquette. Ironically it is René (Rousseau) who, with characteristic “frankness”, describes the reputation she has acquired: “in general you have several faces … You are believed to be without character, a good woman but false, inclined to intrigue; inconstant, fickle, much finesse, much pretension to intelligence (l’esprit), which, it is said, is very superficial in you” (d’Épinay 1989, 867).

In her guilt about her new life Émilie yearns for “an absolute retreat”, but Lisieux warns her off it (d’Épinay 1989, 364). She must maintain a life that honours l’usage, by which he means the social conventions of her station in a hierarchical society. Her retreat into herself cannot be absolute; there is a sense in which character exists only if it finds confirmation in the perceptions of others. And yet—here is the fine line she must walk—she cannot develop character unless she spends more time alone with herself than her station customarily permits. She must approach reading and writing not as mondain amusements, but as a solitary “occupation” requiring self-discipline for a serious purpose.

The act of writing does not simply produce a text; it is a form of introspection on the road to self-knowledge; it will habituate her to centre herself despite the myriad social distractions that threaten to scatter her, and indeed to make herself an individualized self, a fixed character rather than a cameleon. In a letter to a friend soon before she leaves Paris for Geneva, she writes “I have begun to dare to be me … I no longer arrange my society for others, but for myself alone” (d’Épinay 1989, 1201–02).

The question I am posing is how this assertion of authenticity made discipline in work—the work that character requires—central to a modern feminist position.

Between Paris and Geneva

D’Épinay’s youth and early adulthood made her an unlikely candidate for modern feminism. Both her parents were of the nobility of the sword, but the lineage was not backed by wealth. With the sudden death of her father in 1736, when she was ten, mother and daughter were taken in by the mother’s sister and her husband, who as a farmer general was one of the richest men in France. From 1737 to 1744 d’Épinay lived in their imposing chateau on the outskirts of Paris. Her early education was limited almost entirely to books of devotion. Her mother’s extreme piety and timid politeness, perhaps unavoidable in her close dependence on a sister who took on all the airs of a farmer general’s wife, led her to teach her daughter to be ever-complaisante. She should always please others, never offend anyone, however much dissimulation that required.

One of the ironies of the novel is that Émilie falls victim not to an arranged marriage she has to enter against her will, but to a love match in the key of sensibility. With the parents on both sides giving their permission very reluctantly, she and her cousin Louis-Joseph—her aunt’s eldest son—marry in 1745 in a rush of ardour. In the early years of the marriage, she tries to live in total devotion to her husband, in the spirit of her mother’s piety and the ideal of marriage as a spiritual communion she absorbed from the culture of sensibility (d’Épinay 1989, 233). In 1746, in an act of nepotism typical of the old regime, Louis-Joseph becomes a farmer general. A future of wealth and luxury seems assured. In Montbrillant d’Épinay could only look back on herself as an absurdly naïve young woman. Given his behaviour to that point, it should have been obvious to Émilie that Louis would neglect his position and throw away their considerable fortune on gambling, mistresses and lavish consumption. Only tenuously attached to the titled nobility by birth, he flaunts the privileges of wealth in striving to live the reckless and dissipated life of an aristocratic libertine. He sinks deeper and deeper into debt and at times creditors try to press their case by virtually occupying the reception hall at La Chevrette. D’Épinay makes it a measure of Émilie’s helplessness that that she does not legally separate herself from his collapsing finances until 1749. She was, Émilie later recalled, a young woman without a will of her own.

A crucible in d’Épinay’s efforts to make labour essential to “character” lay in her juxtaposition of binary imaginaries, one distilled from her life in Paris and the other from a two-year stay in Geneva from 1757 to 1759. La Chevrette was close enough to Paris for coach rides into the city to attend the evening entertainments with which le monde displayed itself to itself. In Geneva she received medical treatment for a chronic illness, probably stomach cancer. In Montbrillant and other texts we find her highly selective vision of the two cities, each fashioned as the foil to the other. To the visitor to Geneva, Paris meant le monde, and le monde was corrupt, a treacherous world of false appearances, a dystopia of idleness and absurdly excessive conspicuous consumption; to the alienated Parisian, Geneva was pure, simple, austere, a community of virtue and sincerity.

Rousseau, of course, was very much in fashion in the late 1750s and 1760s, particularly among women of le monde. It is striking that, at the very time when d’Épinay, Diderot and Grimm fell into a fierce dispute with him, she often echoed him in the writing of Montbrillant. This was not just fashion: she found in Rousseau an idiom for her alienation from Paris, which was rooted in her anxiety about the most heartbreaking and frightening events of her life. Chief among them was her husband’s relentlessly profligate life, which repeatedly put the family on the precipice of a financial collapse that would topple her and her children from France’s elite of birth and wealth. She spent many hours trying to straighten out the tangle of her husband’s debts and warding off creditors. The irony about her escape to Geneva is that Paris accompanied her there in the person of her ten-year old son Louis-Joseph. She brought the boy with her to the city in the hope that its innocence and work habits would free him from his father’s influence. Instead, he joined a group of boys from wealthy families who cavorted in the city in emulation of their Parisian counterparts. In the last two of her letters to him while they were in Geneva—a last-ditch effort to straighten him out—she stresses that he will need to work in a profession to prove his merit. “You are without birth”, she warns him, “and merit approval of the public only by your efforts and your success”. And she urges on him the Stoic ethos, “a sure means to live with [oneself], to be free and independent” (d’Épinay 1989, 79–87). Again, there is a symbiosis between the freedom to be found only in inwardness and the social recognition earned in disciplined labour. Louis-Joseph was imprisoned for indebtedness in 1770, not for the only time.

D’Épinay did not discover in Geneva the ideas that gave her a critical distance on the world she had been brought up in. The distancing had begun in late 1740s, when engagement with the philosophes guided her into extensive reading. Soon after detaching herself from her husband, she began attending the salon of Mlle Médéric, a celebrated but, to some, notorious actress, where the free-wheeling conversation often ignored the boundaries of polite decorum. “I do not know”, she wrote to her tutor, “but it seems to me that the conversation of Mlle Médéric and those I’ve seen at her place have given a new turn to my ideas. They have enlightened my spirit; my imagination is more alive, and I sense (sens) with more warmth” (d’Épinay 1989, 583). She was being pulled out of the orthodox religious culture of her childhood and into an Enlightenment world of letters, many of its members involved in the Encyclopédie. Her intellectual intimacy with her friend and later partner Grimm (Vaux in the novel) played the key role in this transformation. Upon hearing that in a particularly serious bout of her illness in Geneva she had called for a confessor, he is alarmed that she is backsliding into the superstition of her youth. She reassures him that she is not: she thinks there is a creator of the universe, although she is not sure; she’s convinced that if there is one, “we can never have anything to untangle together” (“je suis très persuadée que nous ne pouvons jamais rien avoir à démêler ensemble”, d’Épinay 1989, 1268). She is a philosophe, she is telling Grimm; all the devotional books of her youth have been thrown overboard. This turn away from orthodox Catholic fideism, and indeed from any version of Christian fideism, was a sine qua non for her reconception of herself and the reorientation of her way of life.

But what was the social meaning of her transformation? She felt she had found in Geneva an ethos permeating an entire society. It is well known that a principle of utility—a belief that all members of society should be useful by contributing to the common good—permeated the rhetorical culture of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, in an implicit and sometimes explicit rejection of the premium put on leisure and lavish outward display in aristocratic society. We also know that utilitarian logic drove the upsurge of patriotic sentiment in France in the second half of the century. This is not the utility of present-day algorithmic market calculations; utility was a shorthand for a morally meaningful civic ideal. The Geneva d’Épinay imagined was a city devoted to the practice of civic utility—a community whose division of labour seemed entirely motivated by that principle, from top to bottom. The more Émilie admires the practice, the more she realizes that she has been living in a parasitical world that prides itself on its freedom from the demands of usefulness. That was a pivotal step toward the feminist thought she expressed to Galiani twelve years later. Usefulness of course required self-disciplined labour, without which one could make no claim to character and perhaps to the stable sense of selfhood around which character was built. It would be hard to exaggerate the degree to which d’Épinay’s determination to acquire character by practicing labour of some sort was reinforced by those two years in Geneva. Notwithstanding the risk of being tagged a femme savante, the practice of labour in “study” and in writing becomes Émilie’s existential centre of gravity, the opposite to the social life of Paris, the key to developing a sense of independence and indeed of autonomous selfhood. The more centred she feels in Geneva, the more she devalues le monde as a world working to decentre, to scatter the self by subjecting it to the myriad gazes of others, a world of false appearances, scandalous gossip and the quietly ruthless struggle for reputation.

When she returned to Paris in 1759, d’Épinay lived a life that was, by the standards of her upbringing and marriage, a kind of soft retreat from le monde. Freed from her husband and living on the modest but comfortable sum of 8000 livres she had secured from what was left of the family fortune, she moved to a distant quarter with her mother, her daughter’s governess and four domestics, without an équipage (a carriage with horses and attendants). She wrote her tutor that she had “the space necessary to enjoy her books, her music, her papers, without disorder and without confusion; there are all the pleasures of this kind, of which the privation would cost me infinitely more than that of my équipage, of my valets, of devices (appareil) and opulence ….In truth I am curious to see the impression that this prodigious change of situation will have on all my friends, on my children, and even on my family” (d’Épinay 1989, 1430–31). “A little house between court and garden”, she writes in another entry, “with good air and a good view. Our table is frugal, but properly served and good enough to receive one of two friends every day” (d’Épinay 1989, 1435).

The lack of an équipage is emblematic of how prodigious the change was for her. Her husband had spent a fortune on a lavish équipage he could not afford. She had had to deal with the irate creditors demanding payment.

Stoicism

Théodore Tronchin, the physician who brought d’Épinay to Geneva and treated her there, was the pivotal person in making her experience of the city at once transformative and bounded. Cushioning his medical expertise in a remarkably personal attention to care, Tronchin had gained European-wide fame, bringing to Geneva society women who found at least some relief under his tutelage. In July, 1756, before she came to Geneva, Tronchin wrote d’Épinay a letter advocating a Stoic ethos as the guide to her cure. The “truth” of Stoicism, he wrote, “is that our happiness will be in ourselves, and that it weakens from the support that comes from outsider itself”. Tronchin had made the basic tenets of Stoic philosophy the lodestar of his therapy (Weinreb 1993, 30–31).

We must be careful not to exaggerate the degree to which Tronchin had committed himself to the Stoicism of the ancients. Eighteenth-century people selected from and melded the ancient philosophies. D’Épinay and others saw no need to master Stoicism as an intricate and internally consistent philosophy; what mattered was living an ethos of independence through self-command that could be reconciled with what her tutor called l’usage. He meant the demands of her station in life, which brought social responsibilities that could not be ignored. Falling into the great mass of labouring people without wealth was unimaginable to her. She wants to be free of the fear of falling. In a plea to her father-in-law to insure her a secure income independent of her husband, she writes that she is only asking for a way to secure her own and her children’s “station” with “economy” (d’Épinay 1989, 517).

A highly successful physician in the Geneva patriciate, Tronchin practiced Stoic moderation in what remained a quite comfortable bourgeois life. We might call this patrician Stoicism. D’Épinay rejected his counsel to lessen her need for friends, but otherwise, feeling oppressed by the social regime of le monde, found relief in seeking this modified route to apatheia, or equanimity of the soul. Acting as a friend as well as a physician, Tronchin taught her not to mistake capricious desires for basic needs. He imposed on her a daily regimen, including a well-ordered schedule for her day, an exercise routine and time for her reading. In the language of the eighteenth century, d’Épinay’s alienation from the rampant luxury (or luxus) of her social circles and above all her husband was confirmed. In her self-defence as her marriage is crumbling, she writes that “my manner of life is proper to my station, my principles and my taste” (d’Épinay 1989, 538). This was still an aspiration, not a reality. But Tronchin’s patrician Stoicism powerfully reinforced d’Épinay’s wish to change her way of life within the framework of what she saw as her responsibilities to her station.

This is to say that the imagined community for d’Épinay’s aspirations was hierarchical, not egalitarian; and that hierarchical distinctions were integral to her feminism. D’Épinay idealized Geneva during a fraught period of internecine conflict in its history, and she could do so because she saw the conflict from only one side. Thanks especially to the work of Helena Rosenblatt and Richard Whatmore, we now have an in-depth knowledge of the drawn-out struggles between Geneva’s Council of 100, a governing body composed mostly of wealthy merchants, bankers and educated professionals with international dealings, and the merely advisory council of 1000, whose artisans and shopkeepers engaged in local trade demanded a more democratic government (Rosenblatt 1997; Whatmore 2012). In the detailed descriptions of the city’s municipal organization that Émilie writes for Vaux (Grimm), she gives the democratic movement only a dismissive nod (d’Épinay 1989, 1297). She derived her impressions almost entirely from Tronchin and his patrician circle of relatives and patrician friends. She simply misses what the political conflict entailed, including the popular complaint that wealthy Genevans’ entanglement in French state finances and copying of the mondain way of the life was making the city a little Paris, no less morally degraded than her Big Sister. What she admires is a materially comfortable but work-devoted elite who resists pressure from the lower orders—a counter-imaginary to her negative imaginary of the Parisian elite. From our standpoint, the transformation of her views may seem to have been blatantly elitist; coming at it from what preceded it, it is, despite its elitism, a marked turn for a woman of her background. It inspired her to embrace a work ethic she had already begun practicing in her earliest writings. A good part of Montbrillant was written in Geneva, despite Tronchin’s efforts to limit her to a life of rest. She seems to have finished a full draft of the novel in 1762. Back in Paris, and all the more intent on demonstrating her “useful” character as a woman of letters, she worked steadily on Conversations d’Émilie, based on her tutoring of her granddaughter, with an implicit refutation of Rousseau’s views on the education of girls (d’Épinay 1774). The public vindication of her character finally came in January, 1784, just three months before her death, when the French Academy awarded Conversations the Montyon Prize for a work of exceptional “utility” for “the nation”.

Conclusion

We can return now to the two letters to Galiani in 1771 and 1772, and especially to the second one. D’Épinay’s commitment to the work ethic, I am arguing, makes her a prime example of the transition from early modern to modern feminism. Am I simply saying that she exemplified Enlightenment feminism? To be sure, her feminism was inconceivable without the Enlightenment. She was certainly a rare case of a woman directly involved in the intellectual life of the Parisian philosophes, in her relationships with Voltaire, Diderot, and especially Grimm, in the gatherings at La Chevrette, and in her work on the Correspondance littéraire. The fact is, though, that her feminist position was the exception to the rule among Enlightenment thinkers. Diderot’s essay “Sur les femmes”, which d’Épinay first read in a soon-to-be published version in March, 1772, puts him at the opposite pole from her feminism; however imaginatively some scholars have tried to read it against the grain, it is a fiercely misogynistic text. (La Vopa 2017, 256–97). It helps explain why d’Épinay was so insistent to Galiani that her letters be kept absolutely secret. There is no way of knowing whether she confided her feminist views to Grimm, though he did strongly support her writing of Montbrillant. I tend to doubt it.

D’Épinay’s life and thought should make us especially cautious about drawing neat distinctions between “bourgeois” and “aristocratic” culture in the final decades of the old regime in France. Her birth and upbringing show us a bonding of the two that had practical advantages for both sides, with lineage and wealth mutually supportive in filling the need to exhibit “reputation” in social performance. But the bonding was fraught with tensions; the attributes of “character” seemed to make it the needed fixed point of moral reference in a society where reputation was becoming a commodity ever in flux. The idea of character in that sense seemed indispensable to an essentialist feminism, appealing to universalist qualities of a human nature that contingent social circumstances prevented women from developing. Here too, though, there was tension, particularly as the practice of self-disciplined labour came to be seen as formative of character. Intellectual labour in writing gave women an interior freedom, an independence from the particular circumstances of their social being; and yet, as d’Épinay/Émilie has to learn from her tutor, the freedom has to be practiced in a relational social position, a particular manner of intersubjectivity with others. In the eighteenth century—and perhaps today—intersubjectivity necessarily positions her in a hierarchy that privileges her, even if it has room for her to distance herself significantly from the way of life she has inherited.

It is tempting to say that despite being raised in aristocratic privilege, great wealth and deeply rooted gender assumptions; d’Épinay committed herself to the way of life that was being preached widely by bourgeois authors. Men of letters were defining themselves as the nation’s moral tribunal, in direct contrast to the aristocratic ethos of conspicuous leisure and aisance. It was central to their claims that public cultural and moral authority had to be grounded in concentrated and sustained intellectual labour (Bonnet 1998; Bell 2001; La Vopa 2017). It was a precondition of d’Épinay’s feminism that she became alienated from an aristocratic way of life; but this is not to say that she was absorbed into a bourgeois alternative. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the bourgeois ethos confined women’s work to the domestic sphere, in contrast to aristocratic women’s parasitical life of scandal and promiscuity. D’Épinay’s writings challenged that rising notion of a gendered division of labour, and so did her life. Her home, detached from the relentless perils of aristocratic sociability, became a haven for the solitude—the being alone with oneself and the shared solitude of close friendship—needed to develop a character in and through the labour of writing. Her juxtaposed imaginaries of Paris and Geneva played no small role in that quiet but resolute deviation.