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  • The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern
  • James Smith Allen
The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern. By Carla Hesse. Princeton, N.J., and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001. xvii, 233 pp. $22.95 (paper). ISBN 0-691-11480-3.

The social history of the book acquired new interest among intellectual historians in the late 1980s. Just before the cold war came to an abrupt end, the bicentennial of the French Revolution provided a new opportunity to assess the historical impact, both positive and negative, of the Enlightenment. Perhaps the most influential perspective came from Jürgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), which described the critical role played by public opinion on the eve of the Revolution. Since then social historians like Dena Goodman and Margaret Jacob have explored the implications of liberal ideas in the public sphere for other groups besides middle-class men. A sophisticated exercise in analytical bibliography, Carla Hesse's The Other Enlightenment belongs in this growing historiographical context.

The "other" Enlightenment Hesse refers to is that of women, whom the universalizing male philosophes did not consider free and independent enough to have one. No matter. "Political and civil equality," Hesse notes, "are not necessary preconditions for moral self-determination or participation in the advancement of reason" (xi). Her project thus has been to document women's surprisingly active participation in the modern public sphere, marked by their publications during the 1790s: "As with other social groups, 1789—that annus mirabilis—marked a dramatic and unprecedented moment of entry for women into public life" (38). Further study of their publications suggests women were not intellectual outcasts or rebels; rather, they were mainstream authors whose published writings ranged widely in genre and subject matter. The literary marketplace not only welcomed women writers, it enabled them to become self-conscious agents, whatever the lingering limits on their civic rights.

Hesse elaborates on these ideas in the first part of her book. Even before women were recognized authors, their control of the spoken word, be it in the salons or in the streets, was powerful and feared. The year 1789, Hesse argues, also marked the transition from oral to written culture, much to the disadvantage of the female guardians of eloquence like Corinne in Madame de Staël's celebrated novel and like the illiterate women in revolutionary clubs. Women who had turned to published expression, however, were more successful, remarkably so. The nearly fourfold increase in women's publications between 1789 and 1800 presented special opportunities and problems in the new legal context of literary rights, or their lack for women, under the Napoleonic Code. Hesse teases out how women authors worked with and around the laws that protected their husbands' property interests in their wives' publications. "Free to write, [women] were not free to make their writings public, or to create independent public identities" (74), at least until the twentieth century.

There were successful exceptions to the rule, however, and Hesse discusses them in the last three chapters. For example, she focuses on the remarkable historian Louise de Kéralio-Robert (1758-1822), who expressed her reservations with the institution of queenship. In the place of this unstable political [End Page 325] hierarchy, Kéralio-Robert invented a fictional republic for women, a symbolic history in the post-Napoleonic context. Similarly, Isabelle de Charrière (1740-1805) considered the moral duty of women after the Revolution, also in a novel. Given the ethical vacuum left by the revolutionary terror, Charrière recognized that women had a special problem as guardians of virtue in their subordination to men. Her Trois femmes (1795) "offers a critique of the Kantian moral system not only from the perspective of contingent versus absolute values but on the basis of even a more fundamental problem—the nature of moral autonomy itself" (118), especially for women. Hesse's final chapter ranges more broadly, from Madame de Genlis to Simone de Beauvoir, on modern French women's fiction as philosophy. The novel was women's preferred vehicle for expressing their cultural autonomy in the face of subordination. In fact, fiction's implicit...

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