A Woman Between Two Cities: Louise d’Épinay, Paris and Geneva

In 1771–1772 Louise d’Épinay (1726–1783) wrote two letters from Paris to her friend abbé Ferdinando Galiani (1728–1787) in Naples that can fairly be called uncompromising statements of rationalist feminism. Of the many sources of her feminism, this essay will focus on a fundamental experience: her two-year visit to Geneva in the late 1750s for medical treatment. This visit gave her a new critical distance on the high society of Paris, from which she already felt alienated. It introduced her to a Republican political culture (although entirely seen through the eyes of the patriciate that ruled the city) and made her familiar with Stoic philosophy through her interactions with her physician Théodore Tronchin (1709–1781). Through her gigantic epistolary novel Histoire de Madame de Montbrillant, short essays she wrote in Geneva, and her correspondence with her partner Friedrich Melchior Grimm (1723–1807), I will show how the tensions between the Paris that had formed her and the Geneva that she felt transforming her generated her later feminist convictions. Those convictions took shape in a binary between an idealized Geneva, devoted to a work ethic and to civic duty, and a Parisian high society that she found superficial, false and devoted blindly to conspicuous consumption.