How to Be Sociable: Charrière’s Dialogue with Rousseau in Lettres trouvées dans des portefeuilles d’émigrés
Giulia Pacini, College of William and Mary
Volume 17, no. 2, January 2005
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
Alphonse, the hero of Isabelle de Charrière’s Lettres trouvées dans des portefeuilles d’émigrés (1793) extols the value of the arts, as well as the importance of being sociable. Similar statements echo troughout this epistolary novel, its plot consisting of efforts to maintain ongoing conversations and attempts to establish useful international relations among friends and strangers across Europe. Geographically and ideologically separated by the outbreak of the French Revolution and consequent civil war, Charrière’s protagonists develop a support network that is crucial not only to their understanding of current events but also to their survival and future happiness. As the narrative insists upon the value of discursive practices both public and private (two dimensions that are clearly intertwined in this text), it illustrates Charrière’s ideal form of sociability. This novel offers one of Charrière’s most eloquent reactions to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s political theory. Lettres trouvées dans des portefeuilles d’émigrés dialogues with Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes; and, in unison with another of Charrière’s texts, Eloge de J.-J. Rousseau (1790), this novel rewrites the philosophes “chimerical” descriptions of an ideal social contract. In die process, Charrière tackles moral and political problems posed by the French civil war, and ponders the possibility of a more peaceful and equitable society.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Charrière” include:
The Trans-National Dimensions of the Émigré Novel during the French Revolution
by KATHERINE ASTBURY (ECF 23.4, Summer 2011)
Une nouvelle géographie épistolaire dans quelques romans féminins de l’Émigration
by ÉRIC PAQUIN (ECF 14.1, October 2001)
De Neuchâtel à la Martinique: espace et mouvement chez Mme de Charrière
by GUILLEMETTE SAMSON (ECF 12.1, October 1999)
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