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Notes
1 I would also like to thank Jacqui Broad, Alan Coffee, and Karen Detlefsen for their editorial work.
2 For a discussion of what this means, see O’Neill [Citation2007], Coffee [Citation2013], and Brace [Citation2016].
3 O’Neill [Citation2007: 175] reminds us that the place of manners in eighteenth-century philosophy covered much more than simply behaviour or politeness, but enlisted the very structure of society in order to create a framework of acceptable interactions between its members.
4 At least two discourses remain: one to the National Assembly in July 1792, and one to the Societé des Républicaines Révolutionaires on 16 September 1793. Both can be found on Gallica [Léon Citation1792 and Citation1793].
5 The revolutionary period is awash with counter-revolutionary texts outrightly insulting the looks and manners of revolutionary women. See for instance Suleau’s Journal: ‘The ugly, starting with the rotund Staël, thought that by painting themselves with the colours of the nation they would in turn take on a human appearance, and that by piling on tricolour fripperies, they would succeed in hiding their deformities. In the lepers’ infirmary, I would place (starting with the Condorcet woman) these young meats who, with a varnish of health and engaging figures still chose to throw themselves in the rights of men cooking pot. We must not be mistaken: despite their fresh faces and eager demeanors, these poor creatures are infertile and covered in ulcers, mange, gripe, ring worm, the clap, sores, yaws, farcy, bleb on their necks, suction cups on their chests, poultices on their thighs, and plasters everywhere – we find such pleasant accouterments behind all the pretty faces who gave themselves to the cult of demagogy’ [Suleau Citation1791: 27–8].
6 My translation.
7 As Alan Coffee [Citation2021] points out in his coda, reading late eighteenth-century women philosophers as republican thinkers in their own right can help us reframe our understanding of that tradition, making it more diverse, and also the way in which that tradition impacts on current debates.
8 ‘No one saw the conflict between the two types of liberty better, or expressed it more clearly, than Benjamin Constant’ [Berlin Citation1969: 163]. See Schliesser [Citation2017] for an argument both that Constant had in mind republican liberty rather than positive, and the suggestion that Berlin might have done better to look at Grouchy than Constant in order to understand different sorts of liberty.
9 Staël was Swiss, of course, and had inherited her parents’ ‘reasonable Calvinism’. See [Rosenblatt Citation2018: 403].
10 Her calculations in Letter VII are based on an annual income from the land of 1200 million livres and a total of six million families. Even with the unequal repartition she proposes, the poorest families would retain an annual income of fifty livres.
11 But see Eileen Hunt Botting [Citation2017] on early writings in which he is just that.
12 My translation.