The Creator of the Bentham Brand: (2) Dumont in the French Revolution

Abstract

The character of Etienne Dumont had been formed and tested in the Genevan cockpit. His experience had been enriched in St Petersburg and his exposure to life among the Whig elite in England. But if 1782 was the first crucial turning point in his development, 1789 was to be the second. However, if the events of 1782 in Geneva had strongly reinforced his inbred sense of moral values and nationalistic zeal, 1789 was to do the opposite. The French Revolution impacted on Dumont in the same way it did on very many of his contemporaries:¹ it wrecked his system of beliefs. But he did not take the path followed by many others — including his friend Francis d’Ivernois — to reaction. Rather, he reached out and grasped what seemed to him to be the new system of beliefs promoted by Bentham, which enabled him to retain an essentially liberal outlook while eschewing the wilder shores of Jacobinism or the republicanism of friends like Badollet and Gallatin. This system cannot have been totally unfamiliar to Dumont because much of it overlapped with the views of his great friend and Bentham’s friend Romilly. What caused Dumont to jump ship from the Genevan nationalist virtuism he had espoused in his youth were the shocks to his system of all that he witnessed in the National Assembly in 1789. Although he was still defending the Revolution to friends in early 1792, he had converted to utilitarianism by then.