De Grouchy, Wollstonecraft, and Smith on Sympathy, Inequality, and Rights

ABSTRACT

This article offers an analysis of Sophie de Grouchy’s Letters on Sympathy [1798]. The focus is on the republican implications of her views on sympathy, with comparisons to Adam Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft. Critical attention is paid to claims made on de Grouchy’s behalf that her philosophy is republican and that she offers republican arguments for gender and class equality. These claims are made by Sandrine Bergès [2021] in ‘Revolution and Republicanism: Women Political Philosophers of Late Eighteenth-Century France and Why They Matter’ to which this paper is an invited commentary. This paper does not dispute that de Grouchy’s thought is republican but concludes (1) that her Letters are conspicuously silent on women’s citizenship rights and that the gendered conceptual world of republican thought can account for that, and (2) that any commitment to equality of wealth is negated by her definition of property rights. Since gender and class equality would have been a subversion rather than an application of late eighteenth-century republican thought, this makes de Grouchy a more recognisable republican than Wollstonecraft, whose philosophy explicitly included a commitment to equality of wealth and equal citizenship rights for women.

KEYWORDS:

• Sophie de Grouchy
• Adam Smith
• Mary Wollstonecraft
• republicanism
• sympathy
• women

1. Introduction

In her lead article, Sandrine Bergès [2021] introduces three French female philosophers of the revolutionary period: Sophie de Grouchy, Olympe de Gouges, and Marie-Jeanne Phlipon Roland. She claims that these three intellectuals are properly regarded as part of the republican tradition of thought. More precisely, they were not only republicans in their activism and their allegiances in terms of the politics of the day; they were republican in their philosophical commitments. A second claim is that our view of republican thinking will be enriched by the realisation that republican thinking was not the completely male domain it has been thought to be. Her third claim is that because these women wrote in response to political events they have been regarded as pamphleteers, not philosophers. I share Bergès’s view that we get a skewed picture of the history of human thinking if we count as philosophy only texts that stand aloof from such things.

There is a slowly growing body of scholarship on women’s contributions to republican thinking in the eighteenth century. As Bergès points out, a lot of that attention has been on Mary Wollstonecraft and, although to a lesser extent, Catharine Macaulay. Wollstonecraft has become the token woman in the massively male philosophical canon. A reason, presumably, is that she has become almost synonymous with her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman [Wollstonecraft 1792]. Women writing about women can be allowed in since they are not a threat to the canon, women’s issues being marginal anyway.

Counting Wollstonecraft as a republican requires however that her full production is taken into account. When I first suggested that Wollstonecraft was a republican thinker (see for instance Halldenius [2007]), received opinion was that she was a liberal. That is now changing, for two reasons: women philosophers of the past are getting more analytical attention and republican thinking is gaining ground in how we read the history of political thought.

It is undeniable that republican theorising in the eighteenth century was occasioned by and an impetus for evolving political events. Maybe that accounts for the lack of attention to de Grouchy, de Gouges, and Roland. I would like to add, though, that the likelihood that a text written in response to or occasioned by events is marked down from philosophical to polemical increases if its author is someone who looks like an unlikely candidate for canonical status anyway, say because of her gender. No one would suggest that Leviathan should not count as proper philosophy because Hobbes wrote it in reaction to the English Civil War. There is much to count against philosophical attention being bestowed on de Grouchy, de Gouges, and Roland. They were women, they wrote in response to events, and they did not publish very much. Also, with the exception of de Gouges, they cannot really be counted in the history of feminist thought. Roland’s view of women was conventional for her time and de Grouchy, curiously, said very little about them. I will have reason to return to that.

2. De Grouchy, Wollstonecraft and Eighteenth-Century Republicanism

In what follows, my focus will be on Sophie de Grouchy. I will trace de Grouchy’s republicanism through the philosophy of ‘sympathy’ or ‘fellow-feeling’ so typical of the eighteenth century. I will analyse what she has to say about women and property rights in relation to equality and in that context set her in relation to Mary Wollstonecraft.

Bergès [2021: 354–5] articulates three criteria for eighteenth-century republicanism and claims that by these criteria de Grouchy, de Gouges, and Roland count as republicans. These criteria are, first, that liberty is conceived as independence or ‘non-domination’; second, that politics is ‘virtue-led’; and third, that there is an emphasis on political participation. Bergès also claims that these three women contributed to a modern development of republicanism regarding equality of gender, class, and race. As they are formulated, the three criteria of republicanism make for a rather blunt instrument. In the late eighteenth century, republican political theory mingled in various ways with only incidentally related ideas about natural equality, the malleability of the human mind, the importance of education, the natural capacity for fellow-feeling, and the moral capacity for sensibility. On the other hand, self-confessed republicans were a diverse lot also in terms of political principles and differed widely for instance in how they conceptualised rights, what form they thought that popular political participation should take, what role—if any—there could be for a monarch in a mixed constitution, what status one afforded to private property, and if virtue is a consequence of or a requirement for independence.

I will try to position de Grouchy in relation to this rather unstable conceptual world and assess to what extent, if any, it can be true to say that she developed a modern republicanism of gender and class equality. My tentative conclusion will be that she did not.¹ A related and more general point that I wish to make is that any commitment to equality of gender and class in the form of equal citizenship rights for women and economic equality between rich and poor would need to be analysed as a subversion of republicanism rather than an application of it. It could be a subversion from within, but a subversion it would remain.

The only published work that is known for certain to be written by de Grouchy is Letters on Sympathy [Grouchy 1798], published as an appendix to her French translation of Adam Smith’s [1759] The Theory of Moral Sentiments.² Smith’s book was published in the year Mary Wollstonecraft was born. By the time de Grouchy’s Letters were published Wollstonecraft—who had died in 1797—was a well-known figure in French intellectual circles. Her essay in defence of the French Revolution against Burke’s attack—A Vindication of the Rights of Men [Wollstonecraft 1790]—was circulated and read in France but not translated. Her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman [Wollstonecraft 1792] was, however, quickly translated into French in the year of its original publication. Her last and unfinished work, the novel The Wrongs of Woman: or Maria [Wollstonecraft 1798] was, perhaps more surprisingly, also translated into French in the year of its original, posthumous publication, the same year that de Grouchy published her Letters on Sympathy (on the French translations of Wollstonecraft in the 1790s, see Bour [2004]). It must be considered likely that de Grouchy was familiar with Wollstonecraft’s work, yet she does not refer to it. What is more, de Grouchy has virtually nothing to say in the Letters about the situation of women or women’s rights despite that fact that this was a debated topic in the 1790s and that one philosopher writing explicitly in defence of women’s equal rights was de Grouchy’s husband, Condorcet.

Reading de Grouchy’s [1798] Letters attempting to understand why this work looks the way it does, it is important to bear in mind that it was not intended as a contribution to republican theory but as a commentary on Smith. The ‘sympathy’ that she discusses is Smith’s concept, even though she frames it a bit differently. De Grouchy is thereby intervening in a philosophical debate about human mentality that had been going on for much of the eighteenth century and which occasioned a rather particular turn in the conception of and role for liberty and natural rights and, by extension, for republican thinking, even though neither Smith nor Hume before him were republicans.

Wollstonecraft’s thought can usefully be read against the same background. She used the language of sympathy sparingly, but we know that she was familiar with Smith’s writings on the subject. Her political conception of liberty as independence and her critique of inequality and property rights are integrated in a similar philosophy of human mentality, of the moral importance of fellow-feeling, and an analysis of what political and social circumstances need to be in place for fellow-feeling or ‘mutual sympathy’ [Wollstonecraft 1792: 244] to develop.

3. Women in Republicanism

One of Bergès’s [2021: 351] arguments for why we should pay proper attention to women philosophers writing in the republican tradition is that our ‘memory of the past’ will otherwise be selective and skewed. De Grouchy and her republican sisters show a ‘more accurate and less masculine picture’ of republican thinking [ibid.]. This is true in the obvious sense that given that there have been women writing and arguing under a republican flag, we have an incomplete picture of what has been going on if we ignore them. A more difficult question to answer is whether the very fact that women wrote and argued under a republican flag makes republicanism ‘less masculine’.

Feminists of today have not warmed to republicanism. An understandable reason for that is the sexism that is so evident not only in Rousseau, who is Bergès’s example, but in the foundations of the republican conceptual world. In the eighteenth century the concept of ‘natural rights’—which need have nothing to do with republicanism and often did not—was sucked into republican vocabulary in the linguistic shape of the ‘rights of man’. This expression was originally French—‘droits de l’homme’—and made popular by Rousseau [Hunt 2008: 23–4]. This matters to our present concerns in the following way.

Early modern ‘natural rights’ or ‘rights of humanity’ have a collective feel to them. They are rights that fall on, emanate out of, or can be claimed on behalf of humanity as such. With the linguistic turn of the ‘rights of man’ comes a metaphysical individuation of the rights bearer, whose worthiness also becomes a matter of individual evaluation. Enter the ancient notion of the man of civic virtue, the man of reason, bravery and valour, honour and trustworthiness: the man of the republic, the citizen. Being a bearer of the rights of man thus gets wrapped up in an idealised picture of a public spiritedness that was perceived as an essentially male quality. The virtue of women had nothing to do with any of this. Women’s virtue made sense only within the domestic sphere. A woman of virtue is chaste and obedient, with enough soundness of mind to educate her children.

The ‘rights of man’ is a mongrel concept. Seldom clearly defined it straddled the natural, political, and civic worlds and depended symbolically on the figure of the public-spirited man of civic virtue. It was in a way necessary to grant that women had ‘natural rights’ since denying it would be to deny that women were human, but it was comparatively safe to grant women natural rights since that did not amount to including them under the rights of man. There was a gap between natural rights and rights of man, a gap that effectively kept women out.

In the new republics in America and France, the ‘rights of man’ turned into the practical political matter of who can vote and be elected. The universal language of rights opened for claims from excluded groups—like religious minorities and workers—that their exclusion from citizenship was arbitrary and could not be legitimated. (For this development in the case of the French National Assembly after the revolution, see Hunt [2008]). On behalf of women few claims to citizenship were made, one exception being Condorcet’s [1790] pamphlet ‘On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship’. The exclusion of women was due not only to the general subordination of women to men; it was importantly a consequence of the republican notion that civic virtue is an inherently male quality. This notion was compatible with granting women equality in other respects, like inheritance and a fair trial. A female citizen was however unimaginable, and nothing in the republican tradition of thought made it less so.

Here a distinction needs to be made between republicanism as a motley phenomenon in the history of political thought and what one might like or expect republicanism to be and represent as a normative political theory. Republicanism as historical phenomenon is in its foundations a masculine tradition, no matter how many women wrote under its flag. On the other hand, I am the first to assert that there is considerable feminist potential in republican thinking, not least in its conception of liberty as independence [Halldenius 2014b]. Feminists with republican political allegiances—like Wollstonecraft—have exploited that potential, turned republicanism against itself and argued for civic equality between men and women on that ground [Halldenius 2015]. What needs to be remembered however is that such an intervention is a subversion of republicanism as historical phenomenon. It is a challenge to, not an application of it, albeit a challenge from within. This is what Olympe de Gouges [1791] did with her Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne. Mary Wollstonecraft’s [1792] A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a republican challenge to republican sexism. How difficult it was even for Wollstonecraft to articulate the idea of a female citizen within a republican framework is evident in her change of tone when this issue is approached. Regarding equality in property, marriage, and education her tone is confident and assertive, but on the possibility of women being elected to political positions she falters, acknowledging that her readers will laugh at the thought [ibid.: 237; Halldenius 2016].

According to Bergès [2021], de Gouges, de Grouchy, and Roland are distinctive in their focus on women’s citizenship. That is true in the case of de Gouges. De Grouchy likely shared that sentiment but wrote hardly anything about it. In Letters on Sympathy [Grouchy 1798: letter 7] she does argue that equality and mutual respect in relations of love requires equality in marriage and the possibility of divorce, but the argument stays within the family sphere and so is compatible with the republican emphasis on women’s role and virtue as domestic. The larger point that she makes here is significant, however. It is that unjust institutions, not human nature, are to blame for the moral failings of persons. As long as the laws give men power over women in matters of love and marriage, men will regard and treat women as their possessions. That this asymmetry of power has nothing to do with the nature of what men and women are like—men are not naturally possessive and women not naturally submissive—is emphasised in this passage (the ‘philosopher’ referred to could be Condorcet):

I have considered these passions here almost entirely in relation to men, but it would be easy to apply everything I said about men on this topic to women and to justify the opinion of a philosopher wiser even than he is famous: “The sins of women are the works of men, just as the vices of the people are the crime of their tyrants.” [ibid.: letter 7, 141]

The argument that a person’s character—male or female—will be degraded as long as unjust laws give the one power over the other can by extension be constructed into an argument for citizenship rights for women, but she did not do that. Wollstonecraft did but made it look like a joke while Condorcet, favoured by his status as a man under these unjust laws, was in a position to assert women’s rightful claim to citizenship outright. These facts taken together are indicative of the truth of an analysis which is at the centre of Wollstonecraft’s thought and also present in de Grouchy’s Letters: opinions, attitudes, and behaviour are shaped by the institutions of the societies in which we live and the norms that sustain them.

4. The Politics of Sympathy and Imagination

With The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith [1759] aimed to offer a science of human mentality as it pertains to action. De Grouchy, Smith, and Wollstonecraft are different in their philosophical and political commitments, but they have a crucial thing in common. They shared the conviction that, contrary to Kantian a priori morality in the form of laws without exceptions, moral philosophy needs to be grounded in an understanding of how human beings act and think under realistic, not ideal, circumstances. Such an understanding includes the insight that how human beings are inclined or able to act and think is dependent on (although not determined by) the conditions under which they live. People approve or disapprove depending on what pleases or displeases them, and what does please or displease them is variable and contingent on circumstances and prevailing attitudes. If you want to change people’s behaviour, you need to attend to whatever it is that shapes, sustains, and challenges their attitudes, which is likely to be a combination of social norms and material circumstances.

Importantly, this is not to relativize morality. The notion that unjust institutional arrangements and social norms can morally corrupt people’s minds and sentiments makes sense only on the assumption that there is a right way of acting from which people will be more or less likely to depart. Also, personal inclinations and attitudes and institutional arrangements are co-dependent and mutually reinforce each other. If laws give men more power than women, including power over women, those laws will sustain norms that legitimise men’s dominion over women as rightful. These norms in their turn sustain attitudes that cause people to approve of actions whereby women are treated as less worthy than men or—as de Grouchy and Wollstonecraft both put it—as men’s possessions. If morality were relative, then actual approval and disapproval would be the end of the matter, and it would not make sense to talk about such processes as a ‘corruption of our moral sentiments’ [Smith 1759: 72] or to state that our sentiments will vary in their degree of ‘perfection’ along a moral scale of perceived humaneness [Grouchy 1798: letter 2]. A point made is that for people to act morally in the familiar sense of acting on universal benevolence or respect for equal rights, society needs to be designed so as to facilitate the development of virtuous characters. Morality depends upon fellow-feeling but there will be no fellow-feeling in a society where classes live in hostile isolation from each other. As Wollstonecraft put it in her book on the French Revolution:

How, in fact, can we expect to see men live together like brothers, when we only see master and servant in society? For till men learn mutually to assist without governing each other, little can be done by political associations towards perfecting the condition of mankind. [Wollstonecraft 1794: 46]

Morality is a natural human tendency but importantly it is also an intellectual achievement; a commitment to universal benevolence will only come from reflection, and reflection is hampered by inequality. Wollstonecraft [1792: 91] is scathing here: ‘Many are the causes that, in the present corrupt state of society, contribute to enslave women by cramping their understandings’. De Grouchy and Wollstonecraft would agree that human arrangements, not human nature, account for any lack of morality.

‘Sympathy’, then, is the concept for this complex process. De Grouchy [1798: Letter 1, 59] defines it first as ‘the disposition we have to feel in a way similar to others’ but is quick to add that this disposition to feel, in order to be constant and make us ‘truly human’, requires not only feeling but also reflection. Our feelings are morally fickle; they might repel us from the sight of a person in pain. Only by reflecting on the shared fate of mankind—that it could be me in that painful state—will our feelings turn into the ‘permanent sentiment’ of humaneness [ibid.: letter 2, 68].

Two related things need to be noted here. One is that moral dispositions to act and act rightly require this constant work of identification. We are a spectator of others and of ourselves, impartial but not ‘unmoved’. Moral wisdom requires a constant labouring to understand others and ourselves: ‘we must mix in the throng, and feel as men feel before we can judge of their feelings’ [Wollstonecraft 1792: 196]. The other thing is that this activity of learning to feel as others feel is predicated on equality. It is a combination of recognising the other as in relevant ways like me (not only as my concern) and of recognising myself as ‘in no respect better than any other’ [Smith 1759: 158]. This moral identification with the other together with a detached evaluation of oneself is not a natural impulse but a product of reason and intellectual effort and the recognition of the other as a fellow-being and equal. An institutional and normative arrangement where some are made the masters of others therefore counteracts moral progress by effectively hampering this identification through sympathy: ‘the great never look upon their inferiors as their fellow-creatures’ [ibid.: 67].

Let us put this in connection with republican citizenship and the difficulty for even committed feminists of this period to claim equal citizenship rights for women. As normative theory this moral philosophy is committed to a principle of equality. It can thus be invoked in support of egalitarian political reform, like granting citizenship rights to previously excluded groups, which was done for some religious minorities in post-revolutionary France. As moral psychology it explains why it is difficult to gain support for or even articulate egalitarian proposals that go beyond what people are currently prone to imagine, even if those same people are committed to equality in principle. By the same token it serves to explain the republican resistance to citizenship rights for women, even under a universal formulation of the rights of man. In the republican tradition the civic world is gendered to its moral core, making the active process of identification through sympathy, recognising the other as like me and myself as ‘in no respect better’ irrelevant in the case of women and politics. Restricting citizenship rights to men can thereby be construed as an exercise of equality, not a violation of it. A female citizen appears like a logical inconsistency, an absurdity virtually impossible to imagine.

5. The Lure of Property Rights

Contrary to what Bergès claims on behalf of de Grouchy and the other two women—and given the fundamentally gendered civic world of eighteenth-century republicanism—an argument for equal citizenship rights for women would be a subversion of the tradition rather than an application of it. Bergès also claims that they were republicans committed to class equality. Can that be sustained in de Grouchy’s case, considering her views on property rights and inequality of wealth?

Republican political theory emphasises independence from the arbitrary power of others within a civic community of shared concerns (a ‘fraternity of virtue’ [Grouchy 1798: letter 3, 82]). The moral philosophy of sympathy is predicated on equality. Hence they can join hands over a critical appraisal of the vanity and egoism engendered by wealth and the morally damaging effects of the envy and contempt that arise between rich and poor. This is in fact a central theme of Wollstonecraft’s [1790] A Vindication of the Rights of Men: the impossibility of moral progress in a society where property, not virtue, is adored.

According to de Grouchy, dependence on others is a fact of human life as well as the initiator of morality; if we were not dependent on others as children we would never learn to care about them. But the dependence created by inequality of wealth is morally baneful. It separates rich from poor by the ‘insurmountable barriers’ of ‘wealth, egoism, and familiarity with power’ [Grouchy 1798: letter 1, 62] and reduces most men to a state where they need to constantly provide for their own survival, leaving no time for the reflection ‘necessary for the perfection of all natural sentiments’ [ibid.: letter 2, 69]. It is therefore an aim of good laws, she asserts, to establish equality of wealth.

Thus far she does seem committed to class equality, but for a thinker with republican sympathies this argument is difficult to sustain. The right to property is sewn into eighteenth-century republicanism and into republican sexism. Citizenship status depends upon property almost as much as it depends upon sex; the citizen is a man of independent mind and independent means. Freedom conceived as independence comes with holding property. In this respect republicans were inspired by John Locke’s identification of having rights with having property in one’s own self. If rights are property, then property rights are more than a social or legal arrangement. They are part of the inalienable status of being a free man. But in all realistic non-ideal political settings, property rights feed inequality of wealth and inequality of wealth feeds inequality of political status. There is no true equality of citizenship to be had—for men or women—as long as property rights allow hierarchies of wealth to define a person’s relative standing. Here is another juncture where Wollstonecraft subverts her own republicanism by making respect for property rights secondary to the pursuit of equality of wealth [Halldenius 2014a].

De Grouchy [1798: letter 6] does not subscribe to a Lockeanism of rights as property of the person, but she does employ the possessive terminology that rights are something that a person ‘has’. She also uses a variation of the Lockean idea that the right to possessions—say a harvest—is a matter of desert and that the ground for desert is work or effort. Schliesser [2017] has discussed de Grouchy’s view on property in relation to Smith’s and shows that de Grouchy is a sterner defender of property rights than Smith, whose interests lie mainly in the right to contract one’s work. In that sense, Wollstonecraft’s position is closer to Smith’s. Her emphasis is on economic independence, which in her view can be secured by holding property but also by contracting one’s work, that is, by working for a wage, something that most republicans would see as a mark of dependence. For Wollstonecraft the relevant difference in terms of freedom is not between having or not having property, but between having economic control—through property or working for wages under a fair contract—and living on hand-outs.

One might say that for Smith and Wollstonecraft the right to property is an exercise right: the right to exercise control over your means of living. For de Grouchy [1798: letter 6, 119–20], property right is more traditionally articulated in a Lockean vein as a ‘strict right’ to whatever stuff a man ‘bought […] through his labour’. Her insistence on the inviolability of a man’s right to whatever possessions he has rightly acquired is puzzling and out of harmony with other things that she says about rights. In a case of absolute necessity—say a famine—a starving man may be morally excused for stealing from another in order to survive, but, she insists, the other man’s right to whatever he owns is not affected by the starving man’s much stronger need. Property rights trump all other interests. This insistence stands in curious tension with de Grouchy’s [ibid.] general definition of what a right is:

a preference ordered by reason itself in favor of a person and because of which we must prefer that person's interest even when particular circumstances may make it seem weaker than somebody else's interest.

A preference favouring one person’s interest over another’s even if it is weaker shifts the balance in a weighing of interests but does not amount to an inviolable claim that holds strictly even in the face of absolute necessity. Her general definition of rights and her characterisation of the right to property are out of sync both with each other and with her prior stated commitment to equality of wealth. How can one account for such a muddle?

De Grouchy implies that her definition of rights as preference is compatible with natural equality through the condition that the preference be commanded by reason. In the case of property, what reason commands is the right to whatever one acquires through work or other effort. The labour component thus works against granting property rights that are not supported by any such merit. All claims to rights need to pass this test of reason: that they be supported by the principle of natural equality. This would rule out any claim to superiority over others. In terms of power she states that ‘the monstrous structure of the so-called rights of the despot, the aristocrat, and the priest, and all those whose power is unsanctioned will simply collapse’ [ibid.: 121–2]. This is an application of the republican principle of liberty as independence, but for de Grouchy this linking of equality to rights via a principle of natural equality remains a consequentialist weighing of interests: domination does more harm for the person who is made inferior than it does good for the dominator.

Wollstonecraft slices the cake differently. Her account of rights is non-consequentialist; rights are not property—as Lockeans would have it—but neither are they mere weights in a balance. Rights are moral powers, entitlements, the recognition of which marks the equal moral standing of the person. In the interest of a consistent argument for the priority of equality another republican tenet is subverted. Property is not a natural right; it is a convenience to be administered for the sake of the promotion of public good and moral development.

De Grouchy trips over conflicting republican commitments—the inviolability of property and freedom as independence—seemingly without noticing the inconsistency that is introduced. She ends up articulating a definition of property rights that seems to negate any commitment to equality of wealth. In the case of property rights, ‘reason itself’ gives a strict claim to whatever possessions result from effort, even if those possessions figure in a sympathy inhibiting hierarchy of wealth wherein the material needs of some force them to steal for survival (can there be a clearer indication of economic dependence?). In the case of all other rights, ‘reason itself’ shifts the balance in the weighing of interests in favour of whomever suffers most harm. It is peculiar, but it testifies to the lure of property over the eighteenth-century republican mind. For most republicans, the problem of inequality of wealth amounted to the problem of luxury, which breeds vanity and inhibits virtue and public spirit. The problem of wealth therefore did not automatically translate into a right of the poor to the means to escape poverty, for instance through decent labour contracts. It did for Wollstonecraft and Smith but not, it seems, for de Grouchy.

6. Conclusion

In her lead article, Bergès [2021] claims first that de Grouchy (along with de Gouges and Roland) should be regarded as part of the republican tradition of thought and second that they represent a modern republicanism of equality of gender, class, and race. The three criteria for republican membership are, on Bergès’s account, liberty conceived as independence, a politics of virtue, and an emphasis on political participation. I do not dispute that de Grouchy counts as a republican by these standards, but I do maintain that there is little or no textual ground to support that her republicanism was committed to either equal citizenship rights for women or economic equality. On the question of rights for women, she remains silent. Regarding economic equality, her definition of property rights seems to rule it out. Ironically, Bergès’s first claim could be strengthened by disputing the second: if class and sex equality cannot—at least not easily—be attributed to de Grouchy she will be a more recognisable republican. Wollstonecraft, who was explicitly committed to female citizens and rights of the working poor, was a peculiarly subversive republican exactly for that reason. Regardless of what personal inclinations de Grouchy might have had, the republican position that we glean from her Letters on Sympathy is undisturbed by such oddities.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for useful comments from the review panel.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I say ‘tentative’ for the simple reason that there is so little textual evidence to go on.

2 Bergès [2015] has argued that two anonymous texts published in 1791 in the journal Le Républicain can be attributed to de Grouchy. This might be correct, but I have chosen to err on the side of caution by not including them.