François Guizot met Pauline de Meulan in 1807 through an act of intellectual chivalry. Daughter of a noble family ruined by the Revolution, she wrote brilliantly and anonymously to support her young sister and widowed mother. Her devotion touched Guizot—a young law student, fourteen years her junior, who yearned to join the world of letters. And she needed his help. Sapped by overwork and domestic cares, she had fallen so very ill she could not complete an important commission for the literary journal Le Publiciste. Guizot—never short of energy—decided to secretly supply the needful articles himself, on her behalf, and in secret. Moved by the generosity of her anonymous benefactor, she set about discovering who it had been. Soon they were collaborators, cofounding the periodical Annales de l'éducation in 1811. Partway through its run, they married. François and Pauline Guizot forged a remarkable intellectual partnership which they exalted into a sentimental communion until they became “always united, always one career, always one life.”Footnote ¹ Together they engaged with the predicaments facing a France still recovering from the profound shock of the Revolution of 1789.

Their creed proceeded from their initial pedagogical work. It is all too easy to deprecate it as moralizing pap, notable only as a prologue to the subsequent political career of François Guizot, the grey eminence of the July Monarchy (1830–48). Sympathetic biographer Gabriel de Broglie skips lightly over the whole subject by mentioning offhand that Napoleonic censorship constrained Annales de l'éducation to treat its subject “without ever risking an allusion to politics.”Footnote ² As its last issue regretted,

Yet even this statement alludes to the significance of pedagogical reflection in formulating “liberal ideas.” Their educational writing provided a seedbed for a wide-ranging philosophy of human relations that would blossom into the gouvernement des esprits (a suggestive term that loses something by translation into “government of minds”Footnote ⁴) and which would intellectually underwrite a Doctrinaire liberal political project well into the 1840s.

The gouvernement des esprits announced a theory of power: the imperious imposition of an iron will undercuts itself by provoking resistance in those it would command. Meanwhile, indirect moral ascendancy secures the lasting inward adherence that overwhelming force cannot. Suasion trumps coercion. The Guizots advanced this as an all-embracing social truth applicable to many different domains from domesticity to government. During the Restoration of 1814–30, François Guizot pursued it in explicitly political and historical writing, while Pauline Guizot forsook literary journalism in order to write the tales (contes) for children that won prizes from the French Academy in 1821 and 1828. Her stories—along with a remarkable later tale by her niece Élisa Dillon—extend political arguments into concrete depictions of people who learn to change their lives and communities. The gouvernement des esprits enunciated a protean ethos of versatile application to any situation involving the wise exercise of authority, but domesticity assumed special prominence in its early theorization. Some of the keenest analyses of its dynamics occur in children's literature, ingeniously capitalizing on resources unique to that genre. In some sense, the government of minds worked on this smaller stage in a way that it could not quite do on the larger one of public life. The reasons for this apparent paradox will take us to the very heart of the social form of post-Revolutionary France.

THE POST-REVOLUTIONARY LANDSCAPE

The post-Revolutionary generation faced stiff intellectual challenges. Once, corporatist and seigneurial structures directly cemented pre-Revolutionary French civil society. Mediating between the sovereign and his subjects, they provided specific explanations for why social relations stood as they did. The end of seigneurial privilege on the night of 4 August 1789 and the obliteration of corporatism by the 1791 Le Chapelier Law disarticulated civil society from the state. France became a society of individuals, a proposition that seemed to verge on anarchy. Pierre Rosanvallon explains how “individuals could, then, no longer be implicitly considered as silent pawns, mechanically obedient to the injunctions of a mechanical administration,” since the Revolutionaries had disassembled that Old Regime governmental machinery and putative Revolutionary replacements had malfunctioned. The post-Revolutionary era marked a watershed in how the French thought about social relations. They needed a new sort of “interior” or “spiritual” power which did not emanate from a state “overhanging” civil society, but was coextensive with it.Footnote ⁵ Meantime, disorder threatened.

François Guizot charged the French government with a solemn duty to “deliver society from its daily fear of perishing,” in a country where all feared imminent chaos.Footnote ⁶ It is a truism to say people fear disorder, but Rosanvallon suggests that such fears ran especially high in France because the Revolution had left institutional forms thin on the ground. France's Revolutionaries eradicated particularizing powers—guilds, monasteries, parlements, estates, seigneuries, a whole network of structures that concretized social practice—to leave only state and citizen. Speaking to the Chamber of Deputies in 1819, Guizot proclaimed,

In contrast, as he often noted, across the Channel the English government set itself to the protection of such individual particularities and local autonomies which continued to regulate daily life.Footnote ⁸ To highlight this point, let me compare two moralizing tracts: an English one by Hannah More and a French one by Madame Guizot.Footnote ⁹ Both describe, from the vantage of someone high in the pecking order, a hierarchical society in search of social peace. More's characters do not live in a country which had just passed through a quarter-century of revolutionary upheaval. Law and public institutions seem solidly inescapable for them. But neither quite becomes real for Guizot's. These contemporaries imagine the basic facts of social existence in a very different way.

More told the story of respectable Mrs Jones, who starts a Sunday school for the good of the poor.Footnote ¹⁰ When she assembles the poor women of the locality to warn them that they should send their children to the school or be held responsible for their eternal damnation, they immediately acquiesce. This done, she goes to rich Mr Hoskins to secure funding for her school. At first he frets that if his laborers became “scholars” they might “fly in my face.” She calms his fears: “Do you think either man, woman, or child ever did his duty the worse, only because he knew it the better?” Her school would bolster his authority, just as he in return should bolster it: “you must exert yourself besides in insisting that your workmen send their children, and often look into the school to see if they are there, and reward or discourage them accordingly.” Convinced, he gave a guinea to the good cause.Footnote ¹¹

Here is a robust social form, well able to handle challenges. Going home, Mrs Jones ran across an itinerant woman selling indecent song sheets to the local girls. Luckily, upstanding Mr Simpson happened along just then to halt this traffic in smut: “I am a magistrate as well as a minister, and if I know it, I will no more allow a wicked book to be sold in my parish than a dose of poison.” The humiliated vendor slunk away never to return. As for her farm girl customers, who witnessed the whole exchange, they thanked the minister–magistrate, threw away the insalubrious music, and “begged Mrs. Jones would take them into her school after they had done their milking in the evenings, that they might learn to read only what was proper.”Footnote ¹²

More's uncomplicated celebration of social institutions has no real counterpart in Mme Guizot's Jules ou le jeune précepteur. Jules de Villiers's family has a country house. When they summer there, the ten-year-old walks down to the river during breaks in his educational routine, escorted by Maillard the gardener. Jules sees ragged children lolling on the riverbank, “as though it were all the same to them whether they amused themselves or were bored.” As in England, the poor have no morals. The young moralist gets into trouble when he tries to stop an older boy from stealing a nut from a little girl. Maillard drags Jules away, insisting that he should mind his own business. Jules feels confused. Hadn't he done the right thing? He asks his father. Monsieur de Villiers explains that while Jules will always have the gentlemanly leisure to do good deeds, he must never again do them by trying to impose his will on others, despite his “good sentiments” and “useful knowledge”: no one ever respects anyone with whom they have had an altercation.Footnote ¹³

Heeding his father, Jules takes his dinner down to the river in a basket, as a fund of potential rewards for children who do right. But he still works too mechanically and obviously. One boy has stolen a baton from another. Jules trades a pâté to the thief in exchange for the toy, which he restores to its rightful owner—who, on the whole, would rather have had the pâté. A fight ensues. Jules goes home defeated. The next day, though, he hits upon the right plan. Enlisting the help of Thibaut, who may be poor but “had a more intelligent air than the others, spoke a bit less badly and with less crude a tone,” Jules institutes games like running and boxing among the idle children. Playing these rule-governed games, they learn about justice. Soon they can regulate themselves in relative peace. But they remain a rough lot, so it seems wrong to leave faithful Thibaut with them. After determining that the boy is an orphan, M de Villiers takes him in—as Jules's servant. Thibaut is ideally suited for his new life, “active, intelligent, and surprisingly compliant in learning all the new habits that one would want to give him.” Recognizing his master's superiority, the little servant's only idea is “to do as M. Jules does or to do what M. Jules wants.” Once they have grown up, Thibaut becomes the concierge of Jules's property and they live together in perfect harmony “because esteem and mutual services had given each of them obligations to the other that they held equally dear.”Footnote ¹⁴

Reading Guizot after More, you wonder where Mr Simpson is. Where is the avatar of the law who will stamp out immorality wherever it appears? There is only a naive little boy. And where is Mrs Jones? Where is the doughty institution-builder creating a durable framework to raise the poor up from ignorant licentiousness to consciousness of their duty? No one comes to the door telling M de Villiers he ought to contribute a louis toward a Sunday school that will gather up the neglected children by the river in order to make them solid citizens and good Christians. De Villiers knows all about the river children—but uses them only as a pedagogical device for his son, who learns how to be a gentleman by interacting with them. Never could he follow Mrs Jones in unselfconsciously confronting the children's parents with the plain fact that their sons and daughters are on the road to hell. The only decisive move he makes is adopting Thibaut, an action which itself discloses a larger incapacity to act on a social scale. It is as though a gentleman could do nothing for poor children, short of incorporating them into his household. This is where he can be effective. Elsewhere, matters are very uncertain. M de Villiers and son can certainly never just lay down the law, the way Mr Simpson and Mrs Jones do. To insist on their authority undermines it. Drawing attention to power invites resistance and manipulation. It is better to devise situations that draw the benighted into consciousness of their place in the world and its prevailing standards, without trying to overpower them. Authority worked best when it seemed to be just natural, no one's project, with no determinate locus. It worked better in the milieu of domesticity than in civil society. It worked by persuasion, love, and good examples—not by confrontation, rules, and commands. Hannah More believed otherwise and, accordingly, Pauline Guizot pointedly criticized her.Footnote ¹⁵

François Guizot spoke of this new post-Revolutionary social world when, critiquing the conduct of the French government during the Restoration, he insisted that although “direct and visible instruments” like prefects, tax collectors, and soldiers might seem like the expressions of power, they were not “the real means of government.” Perhaps this had once been true in an earlier age when the government could stand outside the nation to act upon it, but that time had passed. It now had to be admitted that “human society is not a field that a master will exploit; it lives by another life than the movement of matter; it possesses and produces its own surer means of government; it lends them freely to those who know how to handle them.” A good government ought to grasp these forces within society, not bear down upon the nation with mechanical instruments of its own device. In short, “it is vain to pretend to rule it [society] by forces external to its forces, by machines built on its surface but without roots in its depths and which do not take their principle of movement therefrom.”Footnote ¹⁶ Monsieur Guizot has written a concise history of power in his times. Madame Guizot's story of Jules registers the same transformations and announces the same objectives, though in a different way and a different theatre.

Their view of power grasps a distinction of real import. Franco Moretti has said that the passage to modernity involved superseding mechanisms of power whereby “the spokesmen for the social . . . must be always physically there, ready to reiterate over and over again the dominant values, or else things fall apart.”Footnote ¹⁷ Perhaps because the venerable structures of English life survived the eighteenth century intact, Hannah More envisions spokespeople for social morality marching hither and thither to reiterate such “dominant values.” Luckily, Simpson and Jones caught the song peddler red-handed. Had they not happened along, though, her activity would have demoralized the community. Things would have fallen apart. Meanwhile, the French historical experience had eviscerated the corps of social spokesmen along with the corps sociaux—but that very fact of sociopolitical upheaval pushed forward social theory. To put it Guizot's way, the direct and visible instruments of power could never be everywhere at once and they worked but crudely. Government did not consist of “magistrates placed here and there like machines, to intervene only at fixed times and dates, in rare and regulated cases!”Footnote ¹⁸ No, it was a spiritual principle overarching and determining the social order itself, whose extent must perforce exceed any specifiable personnel assigned to implement policies and enforce laws.

Rosanvallon aptly remarks that post-Revolutionary liberals posited “the entropy of classic political technologies.”Footnote ¹⁹ What terms, though, could convey such an epochal change? Denise Z. Davidson has discovered that, especially during the Restoration, the French struggled to identify “social markers” that could render post-Revolutionary society “legible” to people whose basic analytic categories derived from a disappeared Old Regime.Footnote ²⁰ Her study traces this problem through the development of new urban cultural practices, but it also extends into literature and political thought. To communicate the changed nature of power in his lifetime, for instance, François Guizot could not use any well-established explanatory sociology—but he could nonetheless allude to processes which he perceived, yet did not fully understand, as he spun lyrical and allusive metaphors about “another life than the movement of matter.” Jules ou le jeune précepteur, though of a different genre, communicates its message in a similar way by offering a parable about the “entropy of classic political technologies.” The deceptively simple story shows how the boy fails to the extent that he makes his personal intervention the necessary condition of instituting justice. The truly successful methods instill dispositions that do their work long after he has left the scene. The story's charge comes from the sense that these methods require a deeper understanding of human nature than Jules initially has. To maximize the effect of his actions he must minimize the extent to which the other children perceive him as acting at all.

The story's setting also determines the meaning of its method by contextualizing it. As with so many of her stories, Pauline Guizot has Jules living in a tranquil provincial town—a milieu of which this lifelong Parisian knew very little before her marriage to François, a méridional from Nîmes. In fact, her impression of a French countryside emptied of social forms and devoid of politics tallies with her husband's reflections on the condition of the post-Revolutionary provinces. During a rare visit home in 1821, he sent a reflective letter to his confidant Prosper de Barante back in Paris. Guizot saw almost no identifiable public life in Gard. While he enjoyed the easy sociability of the gentlemen in his pays, he despaired that “in the present state of the administration and the social order, the departments are condemned to a state of political uncertainty [une politique expectante]; the smallest political activity is absolutely impossible for them.” Not only did this circumstance render the country ungovernable, it constituted a moral debacle. He described himself

This situation obviously had to change, but it had to do so in just the right way. There was no question of imposing a standardized public life from the outside. Waxing philosophical, he explained that “reason cannot come but from on high, that much is sure; however, life cannot come but from below; it is in the roots of the society as it is in those of a tree.” Below the surface of provincial life, a vital principle waited to flower forth. Its nature was of its own kind, its time would be its own, and none could impose a different stamp upon it, “for everywhere there is a government in embryo: one must accept it and regulate it.” It followed that one must never allow a central body in Paris to legislate its social vision on the departments—this had only ever preempted the true sources of national revitalization. Throughout the Restoration, he devoted considerable thought to where those true sources might be found.Footnote ²¹

THOSE SLOW AND GENERAL CAUSES

After the fall of Napoleon brought forth the Restoration of the Bourbons in 1814, Guizot unexpectedly found himself in a position to advise the new monarch, as the deputy to the abbé de Montesquiou at the Ministry of the Interior. Louis XVIII (younger brother of the last pre-Revolutionary king, the guillotined Louis XVI) had passed a quarter-century in exile, so Montesquiou bid Guizot prepare a series of memoranda apprising Louis of the state of his realm. Guizot confided to his sovereign that France was an institutional wasteland. The social orders of the Old Regime had deliquesced, while no structures adequate to the new reality had yet crystallized: “our morals, broken and destroyed by so many successive reversals, no longer offer that ensemble of penchants and habits which alone can give force and consistency to institutions. Nothing has replaced these habits, these supports of morality.” The chaos prevalent in the disordered country had prevented any new moral sense from taking hold. Public life no longer conduced to the development of this moral sense, even though the new regime ultimately ought to take the reestablishment of public life as its proper goal. In fact, a suitable atmosphere still persisted only in one place, as isolated from society at large:

To revitalize the country, the monarchy needed to tap the reservoir of moral potentials in the domestic sphere to repopulate the evacuated public sphere.

Guizot feared that the king might overreach his grasp by mobilizing the full power of the centralized state to enforce his will. This mistake, he thought, had brought the downfall of the Empire. Napoleon's obsession with strength had, paradoxically, made him weak. According to the Napoleonic style of rule, “authority was concentrated into a single point, and one applied oneself to increasing the number of its agents and extending their influence, without concerning oneself with winning the affection or exciting the zeal of its subjects.”Footnote ²³ The Empire governed this way because its basic nature precluded access to the “roots of the society.” Along with the mainstream of educated opinion during the Restoration (ranging from liberals such as Benjamin Constant to conservatives such as vicomte Chateaubriand), Guizot thought the Empire had originated in the illicit seizure of state power by a usurper without organic connections to the life of the country. He pinpointed the cause of these political problems in an elementary mistake of perspective. The state lacks the power to somehow remake society because it exists within it, rather than standing above it. Accordingly, government should translate existing social relations into institutional forms. Rosanvallon explains that in his eyes “the State is nothing but a product of the society,” so that “it is from [society] that it takes its form and its substance.” Law and policy should merely codify “the implicit rules that emanate from society and result from its natural functioning.”Footnote ²⁴ Guizot castigated the Empire for diverging from this principle. It tried to reshape France in its image, multiplying its agents and institutions to create a force sufficient for the purpose.

The Empire sensed its basic illegitimacy, thus “felt the weakness and instability of its power: guided by this sentiment, it tried to invade everything, out of fear that whatever did not belong to it would be turned against it; the smallest germ of independence became for it the principle of its destruction.”Footnote ²⁵ The Empire exhausted itself overawing its subjects:

Against the unbridled license of the Revolution, Napoleon counterposed the principle of unchecked force. He utterly failed to establish a durable public authority this way, as he relied exclusively on “direct and visible instruments of power” with no spiritual reach. By telling this cautionary tale, Guizot meant to convince his king to adopt a very different mode of rule.

Guizot's contention that the state should look to “domestic exempla” in order to access “the roots of society” expresses more than a piety about family values. States wield immense powers to allocate resources, confer legitimacy and compel obedience—but, as social structures go, they tend toward instability. When he wrote his initial memorandum in 1815, France had seen eight regimes in his lifetime. Two more would follow that year. Politics are proverbially contentious: Bill Sewell suggests that “states and political structures are consciously established, maintained, fought over, and argued about rather than taken for granted as if they were unchangeable features of the world.” Some structures, he explains, are powerful—able to directly mobilize social resources. Other structures are deep—seeming like aspects of humanity itself rather than historically specific constructions. Despite their power, states are not very deep. Just as Guizot implied of the Empire, whose overweening governmental apparatus and formidable army made it more powerful but less stable, the shallowness of the state follows from the nature of its power: “state structures are relatively mutable precisely because their massiveness (power) and the obviousness (lack of depth) of their resource effects make them natural targets for open struggles.”Footnote ²⁷ Writing in a post-Revolutionary context when the new regime had even less depth than usual, Guizot felt painfully aware of this paradox of the state making itself less durable as it sought to enhance its power. His metaphors about surface and depth, redolent of the literary salons he frequented, grasp a social-scientific postulate. In light of that truth, he and his wife tried to rethink the exercise of power.

The gouvernement des esprits as a program sought to integrate the state with deeper social structures like the family and (as we shall shortly see) property, weaving it more tightly into the warp and weft of everyday life. The Guizots wanted the state to run according to a different dynamic. Perceiving a particular logic of human relations in the sentimentalist pedagogy which sought to regulate domestic life, they creatively applied it to a different domain. In effect, they transposed the relational schema governing one social structure to a range of others. This explains the elective affinity they saw connecting their pedagogy to “liberal ideas” which the Empire suppressed. Actually, in their hands “the Empire” becomes a component within a complex analytic device. “It can be argued,” says Melvin Richter, “that every western political vocabulary contains a regime type that designates total domination.”Footnote ²⁸ The Guizots thus said “Buonaparte” to designate a certain approach to the exercise of power: the acme of direct physical coercion as a means to induce consent. This, they felt, all too accurately described a certain self-undercutting potential of the state. They urgently needed to discover a new, “liberal,” structuring logic that could stabilize the state—could deepen its foundations—while retaining its power to govern.

If he initially hoped that the restored monarchy could succeed where the Empire had failed, François Guizot soon grew disillusioned. The regime and especially the king's influential brother the comte d'Artois (the future King Charles X) grew much more intransigently reactionary after Napoleon's alarming return to power during the Hundred Days. Guizot found himself gradually marginalized, then cast out of government entirely (even losing his history professorship at the Sorbonne). He lamented that the Restoration had fallen irretrievably into the same mistakes Napoleon had made:

Faced with political instability resulting from the structural shallowness of a powerful state, the ministry tried to stabilize itself by wielding that power more forcefully—exacerbating the initial problem rather than solving it. Guizot looked on, horrified. Government had made itself so counterproductive that “everything is now up to the action of those slow and general causes which escape the hands of men, and quite often their awareness.”Footnote ³⁰ The reconsolidation of French civil life would not be happening thanks to the policies of the state, whose clumsily ham-fisted authoritarianism bitterly disappointed him.

One later Madame Guizot story gives a tantalizing glimpse of what such a reconsolidation of French civil life would look like if it grew entirely out of the above-mentioned “domestic exempla,” which would act as one of those “slow and general causes” whose operation no ministry had foreseen. We owe this story not to Pauline de Meulan but to a second Madame Guizot, her niece Elisa Dillon. In an arrangement which Pauline apparently blessed shortly before dying of consumption in 1827, Elisa married François—sixteen years her senior—in 1828.Footnote ³¹ Though not quite her aunt's double, she was on some level meant to take her place (François even remarked, “Elisa, she was Pauline when young”Footnote ³²). Elisa now took up the role of her husband's literary counterpart—a role which, as a member of the Guizot household since her teens, she had observed her aunt playing and assisted so far as she could. The only work she published before her own untimely death in 1833, following complications from a difficult childbirth, was Caroline, ou l'Effet d'un Malheur, extraordinarily similar to the work of her late aunt in its subject matter and moral. The story follows the Manzay family, especially the eponymous girl Caroline, from childish self-obsession into civic-minded maturity. As in her aunt's Jules story, we find ourselves in the midst of a French community that has been hollowed out. This time, however, the scope for successful intervention seems exponentially greater than anything open to Jules de Villiers.

Elisa Guizot came to intellectual maturity in her mid-twenties, perhaps not coincidentally just as her new husband triumphantly reentered public life under the moderate Martignac ministry of 1828. She brought to the conte a robust sense of the possibilities for social reform outside the confines of domesticity, but always on the basis of a sentimentalist ethos formed therein. She believed that this mission particularly suited the predispositions of women, for “they have affection, sympathy, an imagination easy to kindle [émouvoir], tears quick to flow, tender and penetrating words, all that which makes human creatures mutually understand and accept each other, almost to love each other, even if they never see each other except in passing.”Footnote ³³ These sentimental affections, formed in familial experience, would bind together a stable post-Revolutionary community whose creation had hitherto eluded politics. Her story of Caroline de Manzay supplies us with the example of a young woman who succeeds at doing just this, in just this way.

The progressive, well-educated Monsieur de Manzay made his money in Paris. Years ago, however, he moved his family to a country chateau once owned by the ancient Solanges family. The Solanges, landlords of the old school, had benevolently overseen all the affairs of the little people in the village of Montfort. But they never managed to understand the changes modernizing the French economy. They lost everything. Before the story proper even begins, they have sold their estate to the Manzays and moved away. Though more up-to-date and enlightened than their predecessors, the Manzays never take the same lively interest in the daily round of peasant life. They attend to their own domestic bliss, caring for their children and cultivating their minds, without a thought for the wider world. As a result, “people thought they were indifferent, because they were exclusive; proud, because they were self-absorbed, and every day they regretted the departure of Monsieur and Madame de Solanges.”Footnote ³⁴ The story begins, then, in the post-Revolutionary France becoming a society of individuals as the vestiges of the old order crumbled away. The Manzays incarnate this problem of social atomism, but they will remedy it by the end of their tale. They will do it, moreover, not by abandoning domesticity but by acting on its basis.

We find our heroine Caroline de Manzay, the cosseted daughter of Monsieur and Madame de Manzay, consumed with egoism and spoiled by parents who lavish all the more care on her since they have lost seven previous children to illness. They indulge all her whims lest the smallest hardship should undermine her frail health. She has outgrown her youthful frailty by the time we meet her at the age of fifteen, “but Caroline had long since been habituated to getting her own way [à faire sa volonté], and the effect had outlived the cause. She knew no other rule but her own caprice.”Footnote ³⁵ She has many good qualities—but, unused to constraint, explodes with rage if contradicted. Here is the titular “effect of an illness” (effet d'un malheur). Caroline's childhood has left her with an egoism that, in a way, mirrors the situation of her insular family within their community.

The central drama of the story concerns Caroline overcoming her own egoism. The process begins when her twenty-year-old cousin Robert de Puivaux calls her a spoiled child. She resents the insult. We, however, see her petty selfishness when she interacts with her young cousin Denis and her ten-year-old brother Etienne—as does Caroline's invalid mother, who pointedly refrains from defending her daughter. Robert, a brilliant student at the Ecole polytechnique who is visiting his uncle M de Manzay in the country, decides that his cousin has been spoiled rotten and he takes it upon himself to upbraid Caroline for her tantrums. However, as so often happens in the Guizot universe, direct confrontation only makes things worse. Watching his misbegotten interventions, we perceive a defect in Robert. He means well, but lacks empathy: “naturally serious, and disposed to regulate his conduct according to what he saw as reason and duty, he could not understand Caroline's fickleness.” Seeking to make up for the indulgent laxity of Caroline's parents, he seized every occasion to show her “his disapproval and disdain; and in keeping with the unfavorable sentiment which she inspired in him, he did not recognize the good qualities that hid themselves behind this inauspicious appearance, and which the future would unveil.”Footnote ³⁶ It should go without saying that by the end of the story Robert and Caroline will wed. In the meantime, however, each must overcome an equal and opposite character flaw.

Caroline must first outgrow her selfishness to realize the duties she owes her family. These duties are brought home to her by her mother's death after years of illness. Overcome by grief, her father withdraws into himself. The old servant Pierre sees that the Manzays are in trouble, so he gently suggests to Caroline that she must do something. Suddenly, she has an epiphany. As she thinks about her attentive father, who now seems so lost and alone, she realizes all that he must have given up for her. He had devoted himself to her education, which he personally directed, giving up all of his previous interests and diversions. He had given her everything and asked nothing in return. “And her, what had she done for so much affection?” Deep emotions well up within her, teaching her the lessons that her cousin's reprimands could not. In a tearful scene, she goes to her father and pledges that she will take her mother's place (“Embrace me, my father, I want to correct all my faults, and be like Mama”)—even summoning her little brother Etienne to solicit his approval to become his mother from that moment forward.Footnote ³⁷ The power of sentimental bonds between family members has dispelled her self-confessed egoism. Ensconced in a motherly role ratified by sentiment, if not exactly kinship, sixteen-year-old Caroline ably knits her family back together.

Familial duty inexorably leads Caroline to civic duty. Her rebellious younger cousin Denis, who has lived with them since the death of his parents, seems well-nigh impossible to teach. No tutor can control him. Caroline's distant and abstracted father offers no help. He halfheartedly suggests sending the boy away to a collège for some discipline, but Caroline knows that harshness will only entrench his defiance. This is a low point. She and Denis engage in a stalemated war of position, their wills clashing without any real resolution ever emerging. Whether or not she gained the upper hand at any particular moment, “she was agitated, chagrined, and felt astonished every day to find life so laborious, duty so difficult.”Footnote ³⁸ Having exhausted her domestic resources to deal with the situation, she turns to the wider world. She stumbles upon a newspaper article extolling an innovative school in the distant village of L. . .., which teaches by “mutual instruction.”Footnote ³⁹ It occurs to her that Montfort could use such a school, that it might help Denis, and that she could open it. As an unexpected bonus, her newfound zeal rouses her father from his torpor. Until then, he had usually shut himself away with his own thoughts and his own private studies, becoming a man who wasted his life “in generous but useless emotions, in beautiful but sterile conceptions, who had never tried to communicate his ideas to others.” Inspired by his daughter's example, however, he begins to consider a reality beyond the walls of his study and throws off his “insouciant languor.”Footnote ⁴⁰ By reaching outside the family, prompted by the sentiments it had engendered in her, Caroline can finally solve two problems whose solution required forces it could not furnish.

For present purposes, leave aside the details of the innovative method Caroline champions. Suffice it to say it is innovative and she is its champion. As wise M de Manzay knows, innovation arouses suspicion. He advises her to have a chat with the priest before she actually takes the step of opening the school. It does not go well. The priest reacts with resentful frustration at this presumptuous girl from a family that has so shamefully neglected so needy a community for so long. After curtly rebuffing her repeated entreaties, he contemptuously dismisses her, saying “Go away, Mademoiselle Caroline, play piano, embroider, enjoy yourself, but don't pretend to teach others; we can do without you for that.”Footnote ⁴¹ He reduces her to tears. She cannot understand what happened. Indeed, the priest's response seems wholly disproportionate. This is because it actually expresses the deepest divisions in French society rather than any considered appraisal of a girl he scarcely knows. To open her school, she must first heal those old wounds.

She gets help from an unexpected quarter: the priest. Filled with remorse, he apologetically explains himself upon a chance meeting with Caroline a few days later. He admits to holding a long-standing grudge against her father, because he once heard him praise the Revolution as a “glorious event”: “From that moment everything was finished between us; he seemed to me like a Jacobin ready to set fire to our church and once again force us to say Mass in the woods.” When he heard about the school, he thought it must be M de Manzay's scheme to shoulder him aside and wrest control of the village. It had given him pause, however, to see the deeply sincere Caroline in tears. He reflected and it came to him that he was being irrational and his fears had been misplaced all along. He has done a disservice to the whole parish: “Monsieur votre père has the best of intentions; he is full of compassion [plein de coeur] for the poor, and nevertheless, I asked nothing of him, and did not profit from such a good neighbor.”Footnote ⁴² Now, perhaps, they can make up for lost time. With the priest onside, the school opens and he steers the villagers in its direction. Meanwhile, M de Manzay spearheads agricultural improvement and other good causes. Instead of jealous factionalism, charitable fraternity reigns supreme.

Finally, to cap it all off, Robert the disapproving cousin returns from the Polytechnique. Having inherited the family estates, he resolves to rejuvenate them with his newfound technical expertise by establishing useful manufactures there. These estates being near Montfort, he inevitably meets Caroline and is impressed by how she has changed. She awakens in him tender sentiments he never knew he had. Under her influence, he loses his judgmental inflexibility. Though vicissitudes predictably intervene, it soon becomes obvious that they were made for each other:

The story ends with their marriage, under the approving gaze of M de Manzay. Indeed, the newlyweds will continue the projects initiated by the bride and her father: “The two chateaux belonged to the same commune, to the same parish, had the same interests, and the good that M. and Mme. de Puivaux did would be the continuation of what M. and Mlle. de Manzay had done.”Footnote ⁴³ The community's future was assured. Once desolate, it thrummed with useful activity. Once factionalized, it overflowed with comity. It was all thanks to one teenage girl. More than that, it was thanks to the effusions of sentiment which motivated her and to the form which the family had given those sentiments.

The story illustrates Suzanne Desan's thesis that following the Revolutionary assault on “Old Regime sources of social cohesion,” an ideological turn to the conjugal family positioned it as “a ‘natural’ force for social unity.”Footnote ⁴⁴ But what sort of family could restore social unity? The Manzays differ markedly from the ruined Solanges family which for generations had presided over village life. The Manzays do, however, resemble the heroes of all the contes written by both the Mesdames Guizot. These fictional families seem gentlemanly, with chateaux and servants. Displaying as they do the nobiliary particle, their very names bespeak gentility: de Villiers and de Manzay and de Puivaux. Yet they do not appear aristocratic. They eschew titles, have no ties to the court, and do not stress their lineages. One might almost call them bourgeois, except they seem to lack the requisite involvement with industry, finance, or commerce. Robert de Puivaux wants to improve manufacturing and M de Manzay wants to improve agriculture, but their pursuits seem more like avocations than occupations. They may just as likely live from rents. Their precise social position remains indeterminate. Despite their wealth, these families occupy no definite place in their communities—even though they have much to offer them, at least potentially.

Doctrinaire liberals believed that the natural elite of post-Revolutionary France existed as a pregnant principle which had not yet taken shape because the quixotic ultra-royalist denial of the present had precluded its assuming sociological contours: “it is impossible that the veritable, the natural aristocracy of the new order should already be formed and properly distributed across the surface of the country.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Since no one could quite predict the eventual form of this new meritocracy, no one really knew what social logic government should express. Consequently, public reason never appeared as a unitary principle amenable to embodiment in a single agency—whether an absolute monarch or a sovereign people—which could act straightforwardly on its behalf. “On the contrary,” Vincent Starzinger tells us, “reason was elusive, multifarious, and fragmentized throughout all the various interests of society,” awaiting some force which could aggregate and assemble its disarticulated components.Footnote ⁴⁶ Given time, the process of representative government would draw together reason from the far reaches of the country where its fractions latently awaited recombination into a coherent whole. In this manner, says Rosanvallon, “the Doctrinaires resolved in a sociological mode the problem posed by the combined presence and absence of reason.”Footnote ⁴⁷ During the July Monarchy which succeeded the Restoration in 1830, this political theory upheld a juste milieu based on the sovereignty of reason—as opposed to either reactionary divine right or revolutionary popular sovereignty—where the collective spirit of this natural elite represented reason acting in the world.

If elitist liberalism held that “in every society there is a sum of just ideas and legitimate wills that are unequally dispersed among individuals,” then these fragments of reason coincided with the local notability—respectable men whose wealth rooted them in the social order, ensuring that they would make decisions with the whole of society and its long-term interests in mind.Footnote ⁴⁸ This doctrine made a virtue of necessity. The tortuousness of overland travel and the narrowness of the civil service constrained government to rely upon this notability for the everyday maintenance of order. Such abject dependence upon the notables “put the State at the mercy of preponderant local interests.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Representative government activated these notables not as freestanding individuals but as local expressions of an underlying social logic. Lucien Jaume explains that the Doctrinaires wished “to bypass the individual qua atom of citizenship . . . to valorize this individual as the bearer of an influence or the vector of a social clientele; but it is no longer the individual qua abstract subject of a liberal politics, it is the situated and enrooted notable.”Footnote ⁵⁰ In 1816, Guizot put the matter baldly by supporting high property qualifications on voting. “In society,” he proclaimed, “there are natural, legitimate electors, readymade electors, whose existence precedes the thought of the legislator and whom he must simply set about discovering.”Footnote ⁵¹ Manzay the enlightened landowner would probably be this kind of person (whereas one gets the impression that Pierre the servant will not qualify). He partook of the rising, vital forces in social life. The projects of such as him would, it was hoped, create a stable society safe from revolutions.

Guizot imagined government as an immanent spiritual force working through such situated local actors. Introducing his signature elementary-schools law in 1833, he would not envision a centralized institutional administration controlled from Paris but rather an ensemble of local projects administered by the natural elite of each commune and arrondissement—men, “by their position, strangers to the pettiness of the local spirit, and possessed of the fortune, the enlightenment and the leisure which their duties demand.”Footnote ⁵² Government policy would not subsume them, but pervade them with a moral influence to activate them as part of a national order. They, in turn, would transmit this moral influence to the common people with whom they came in contact. A spiritual mode of governance would arise—never limited to a determinate locus which could be identified and resisted, all the more effective and profoundly implanted for being incorporeal. He told the Chamber of Deputies,

This pronouncement reiterates the obsolescence of “direct and visible instruments of power,” the superiority of moral to physical power, and the futility of direct commands when compared to pervasive influence. A renovated post-Revolutionary social order would emerge as a moral principle uniting one mind to another to form a veritable gouvernement des esprits.

Elisa Guizot's characters make Montfort into a unit of such a stable post-Revolutionary order. While she did not remember the Revolution, she shared the endemic fear that a new insurrection might begin at any moment unless social relations were put on a sounder footing. The vector for this new upbuilding of the social would be preeminently sentimental, endowing the ties between people and classes with an affective charge. She worried,

The phrase “those easy and gentle relations” seems like “that easy, regular unseen empire,” repositioned to a sentimental rather than political context. Or perhaps she merely uses sentiment to describe social relations at a level of concrete immediacy that political theory seldom examines.

Her sentimentalism holds great interest. After the brief but spectacular hegemony during the early 1790s of a public idiom of politicized sentiment as a compulsory vocabulary of citizenship, the chastened French retreated from this political style so fatally identified with the Terror. There followed a “process of relocation by which feeling was gradually relegated to a secondary role, to a better past or a utopian future, or to a safe haven in the feminine space of the home.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Sentiment now pertained to the intimate sphere, not the public (which ran according to reason, virtue, and honor). Yet the separation of public from private did not preclude continuous interchange between them. As with the enlightened Scotswomen rediscovered by Jane Rendall (one of whom, the philosophical pedagogue Elizabeth Hamilton, Pauline de Meulan found especially inspiring) reading the Mesdames Guizot “requires the transcendence of sharp distinctions between public and private worlds and an understanding of the different possibilities of familial, social, civic and patriotic identities.”Footnote ⁵⁶ If the Revolution featured sustained attempts at “building politics out of intimacy”—as Desan believes after reviewing republican idealizations of marriage, motherhood and love—we have recovered a nineteenth-century attempt at so doing, only now with an emphatically anti-Revolutionary purpose.Footnote ⁵⁷ Domesticity, as shown in the stories of Jules and Caroline, offered a wellspring of pure values to remedy the spiritual deficit of a public realm eerily devoid of interpersonal bonds.

When he imagined a stable social order, François Guizot thought that “the spirit of family, the empire of domestic sentiments and morals, will play a principal role here. The family is, now more than ever, the first element and the last defense of society.” The mobility, egoism, and atomism of modern France would plunge it into disjunctive chaos “unless the domestic life which is distributed throughout the territory—its calm activity, its permanent interests, its immutable ties—puts up solid barriers against this peril.” The domestic family offered a “tutelary asylum” wherein “private morality, the base of public morality, maintains itself most surely. It is also there, and today almost uniquely there, where that affective part of our nature . . . develops itself.” “Affections” engendered herein could “diffuse themselves elsewhere, to the honor and the profit of society.”Footnote ⁵⁸ These sentiments originate in a separate sphere that can be projected into public life as the affective basis of a post-Revolutionary social settlement. Indeed, the perceived distance of its domestic origin from politics gives sentiment a political utility as something more primarily and elementally human. Since pure feeling definitively excluded political calculation, its sincere expression ruled out contentiousness. Caroline and her tears of uncomprehending innocence ultimately reconcile her liberal father with his erstwhile foe the reactionary priest, surmounting the traumatic revolutionary experience.

Behind all these stories, with all their earnest morals, lurked a baleful specter of revolution. François and Pauline Guizot both lost their fathers in the Revolution. His was guillotined. Hers, stripped of his office and fortune, died of illness and despair. Neither of their mothers remarried. The fact of their loss was forever present before them. Their experience of the Revolution, more than anything else, mandated their creation of a spiritual form of power that would never provoke resistance. Their friend Charles de Rémusat said of Pauline that “what she hated about the Revolution was force.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Force meant the Terror and resistance meant the Revolution. Her children's tales teach these lessons to young people who lack political consciousness but understand simple personal relationships. More profoundly, they use these personal relationships to suggest the political implications of everyday life.

Sometimes she spelled out these implications. One tale has M de Bonnel reasoning with his son Auguste. Auguste is bullying Georget, son of the servant Antoine, and Bonnel knows he must put a stop to such a great abuse. Auguste—unmoved by paternal exhortations to make nice—feels he has only exercised his rightful prerogatives to treat Georget as he likes, since Georget is destined to be his servant someday. His father advises otherwise. Masters can expect to have their orders followed, but not to mistreat their servants with impunity. He warns his son, “If you wish to constrain him by force to do something that he doesn't want to do, then he will lose respect, he will resist you so far as he is able, and he will have the right.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Auguste objects. Even then masters can force servants to obey by virtue of membership in a master class. Masters can, for instance, throw servants out onto the street without any certificate of recommendation and thereby make it impossible for them to get another job. No servant would risk this fate. His father admits that this may be true. However, following his son's move to what is effectively a social-class level of analysis, Bonnel tries again. If all masters did as Auguste advises, all servants would revolt. Then no one would give anyone any orders anymore. Auguste meets the challenge, cleverly positing the statistical unlikelihood of all masters being nasty simultaneously. One unjust master would hardly disrupt the commanding position of all masters as a grand fraternity. Confronted by this precocious formulation of the free-rider problem, his father tries another tack. The course Auguste wants to pursue would violate a social compact:

Why should Auguste be good? The continuance of the status quo depends upon it. Again and again in the contes, problems spiral up and up through successive domains of social life. Here we start with a spat between two children, which impinges upon the peace of the household, which in turn would threaten a class war, which leads us to consider the most fundamental agreements which bind society. These tales impart a sense that the deepest potentials and problems of human society are present within everyday life.

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

Children's literature as a genre supplied a perhaps surprisingly apt vehicle for certain kinds of intellectual work in the early nineteenth century. François Guizot's biographer Douglas Johnson distinguishes between treating education as a philosophical problem and as an administrative one. In fact, he goes on to say, this is also the difference between Guizot during the Restoration and Guizot during the July Monarchy.Footnote ⁶² It may seem odd to those who know him best for the Guizot law on elementary schooling to see how very skeptical and guarded he felt during the Restoration about what role the state should play in social reform. Social progress seemed foreclosed through political channels. In this context, education took on heavy conceptual and emotional freight because in practice a stable national order seemed so difficult to establish. Education offered commentators a virtual “theatre of society” (as the governess–authoress Félicité de Genlis put it) wherein they could play out issues of authority, human relations and social order.Footnote ⁶³ Their writings could summon up and suggest a renovated and revitalized society by tapping into the sentimental interpersonal bonds and the natural forces coursing through vital human bodies. In doing so, they placed an uncertain venture in a context both wholesome and familiar (i.e. domesticity and childhood).

Stories offer special resources for people who want to convince, but never to confront. Narratives, says Priscilla Murolo, “whatever the aims of their writers, suggest answers to questions concerning human agency: How can people affect the world around them? What can they expect to achieve? Why do they succeed or fail?”Footnote ⁶⁴ Literature shapes opinion in a way suitable for people wary of overtly imposing agendas upon others. Moretti opines that, since literature presents itself as imaginary, it can “act unobserved, eluding the conscious control of its user”—inculcating principles and opinions without actively engaging the critical faculties as an avowedly factual argument would.Footnote ⁶⁵ Thinking back to the story of Jules, we can see that its main character and his author both worked this way. Pauline Guizot envisions how power should operate and perhaps she is all the more persuasive because she does not set forth her views as an argument—instead couching them in a narrative that seems to replicate the structure of real life but to have no authorial agenda to push.

In this literature, the text was supposed to approximate nature because sentiment guided its production. At the same time, sentiment looked natural because it was elaborated in an aesthetic medium given to persuasively simulating reality, “entwining itself with the stuff of spontaneous experience and the roots of language and gesture. Precisely on this account, it is able to naturalise itself, to proffer itself as ideologically innocent.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Literature could create an environment of pervasive suggestion wherein a certain vision of human nature was modeled for, and recommended to, the young (and their parents). It could suggest all the more compellingly because it did not call attention to the fact that any suggestion was meant. To use Pierre Bourdieu's terminology, this educational literature will inculcate a habitus rather than exhort readers to comply with a law-like code of conduct. Instead, these works insinuate something more like

The long readings of stories in this essay mean to show a process of reflection concretized in them, to relate that process to a wider sociopolitical context in post-Revolutionary France, and to reflect on how these works might interact with that context.

Why would Pauline and Elisa Guizot favor fiction, which François avoided?Footnote ⁶⁸ Without stooping to reductionism, gender probably played a part. Fiction opened a welcome avenue to woman intellectuals barred from the higher education requisite for the academy or liberal professions. If they wrote stories, rather than treatises, no one would quibble over their scanty credentials. Furthermore, writing a conventional argument might expose women to misogynistic ridicule or paternalistic condescension. Genlis said in 1811 that fiction allowed women “that practiced subtlety of making understood what they dare not explain . . . without making statements that one could cite as a positive avowal.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Writing about social problems in a story for children made such reflection acceptable in a woman by assimilating intellection to motherhood.

In his posthumous appreciation of Pauline Guizot, Charles de Rémusat praised her for exemplifying how motherhood defined womanhood. Her career reconfirmed the fact that

Everything she wrote communicated her motherly role and womanly being. It was organic to the conte's aesthetic that its readers could discern edifying traces of both in its pages; authorship by “Madame Guizot” was constitutive of its meaning. She knew this—disclaiming all pretentions to analysis, by reason of her unsystematic feminine education, and instead vaunting her personal insight into lived experience. While composing her first tales for children, she told her future husband, “I might be good for nothing to compose a moral treatise; but when it comes to habitual practice, I'm sure that I am never mistaken . . . I have acquired principles founded on experience and on a meticulous observation of myself, the thing which I know best in the world, perhaps the only one which I know well.”Footnote ⁷¹ We need not consider her contes a poor substitute for something else that she felt herself constrained from writing. It is only that her exposition relies upon modeling reality rather than elucidating it, using concrete instantiation rather than abstract extrapolation.

She obliquely defended this approach. Every issue of Annales de l'éducation carried an entry from a fictional journal in which a mother recorded the education of her two daughters so that her absent husband could track their progress. She tells him that, while she studies pedagogical manuals, “when I leave my book to return to my daughters, the first thing I do, without wanting to, is to put aside all the ideas that had just been occupying me, to take up others that have no relation to them.” Books cannot apply to her situation, for “these are two absolutely different worlds, both real, but whose relationship we have yet to determine . . . it is impossible for me to apply what is prescribed to me in the one to what happens in the other.”Footnote ⁷² Pauline Guizot delivers this speech through a mouthpiece, but it seems almost like a brief in favor of mimesis—a practice which lets us reconcile “two absolutely different worlds” by having the one incarnate the other.

In this passage, Guizot deftly engages an ambiguity within culture itself. Culture, as Clifford Geertz famously proposed, doubles as “a model of ‘reality’” and “a model for ‘reality.’”Footnote ⁷³ A story like Jules portrays the nature of post-Revolutionary France (a model of reality) through a plot which offers a template for how to act effectively there (a model for reality). The story expresses the logic of a social context in a way that supplies a script for mastering it, a dual relationship heightened by its expressly pedagogical ambitions. Yet, surmises Sewell, a “disjunction” inevitably separates the two sides of this equation:

Guizot illustrated this “disjunction” when she had her alter ego remark on how she found herself “between two worlds” when she tried to enact the template offered by a pedagogical manual. Insofar as she intended the conte to make these two worlds coincide, she aims to resolve a dilemma bedeviling all social action. Here we must remark upon the crucial role which sentiment plays as an immanent force which could ensure the successful transposition of a template from one domain to another. It remains consubstantial through every context from the family, to fiction, to government, and to Pauline Guizot herself.

As the portal of transmission from one world to another, her persona as Madame Guizot would bridge the gap between prescription and description. Sainte-Beuve loved her work for just these reasons. She was an exemplary moralist because her lessons came directly from her lived experience. The literary tastemaker acclaimed her work as the only statement about education to matter since Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile in 1761. Her oeuvre stood in relation to Emile as Tocqueville's Democracy in America did to Rousseau's Social Contract. He declared her excellence to proceed directly from her experience as a wife and mother. Mlle Meulan's style entirely changed when she became Mme Guizot. Once “lively,” “paradoxical” and “insouciant,” now “sentiment” guided everything. This sentiment came from her family life. “She had become a mother,” he says in so many words. Her son François, all the more precious because she bore him late in life, was everything to her. She wrote out of “maternal devotion,” as “an act of love.”Footnote ⁷⁵

The critic elided certain facts. The shift in Pauline de Meulan's literary interests significantly pre-dated the birth of her son. Furthermore, early in the boy's life she wrote almost nothing. When she did resume her career in 1820, it was partly for financial reasons after her husband lost his posts. Her literary persona as Madame Guizot did not eventuate from concrete alterations in her bioethical constitution. Nor was it entirely synonymous with her person, even though that persona implicitly dramatized it. Indeed, under certain conditions it might be transferrable. Although Caroline was published as the work of “Madame Guizot,” her niece Elisa wrote it. No one reading it would realize the difference. Elisa practiced the same genre of the pedagogically attuned children's tale doubling as social commentary. Furthermore, as published, Caroline shares space with Pauline's Aglaé, ou les Tracasseries. The title page credits both to a unitary “Mme Guizot,” assimilating both women to a single authorial entity.

This authorial entity deserves attention. Noting a pronounced turn to fiction among post-Revolutionary women intellectuals, Carla Hesse situates it as a response to the gendering of public life. It became harder for women to speak on their own account outside the family. Fiction helped them evade straitening “biological essentialism” since this mode “made it possible to represent the self as constructed rather than given. It gave them the cultural means to produce a public, second self—one existing in an indeterminate relation to their biological being—that they could control.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Pauline de Meulan, though, used popular perceptions of genre to create “a public, second self,” Madame Guizot, which, far from flouting “biological essentialism,” seemed to express it. She—and her niece after her—became an intellectual not by escaping maternal essentialism, but in the manner whereby she transposed it onto herself. As such, she takes her place alongside a whole cohort of Enlightenment women who, says Anthony La Vopa, “negotiated their way through gender binaries, or blurred them in ways that opened new possibilities for female agency, or manipulated them in the very process of seeming to honor gendered constraints.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Commentators lauded her authorial persona for its perfect identity with her “biological being,” so that she never overstepped the bounds of womanhood. Yet it nonetheless did exist in an “indeterminate relation” to that biological substratum, pre- and postdating its alleged antecedents and proving to be a guise which another woman could assume. Sainte-Beuve has overstressed biology at the expense of self-invention. On the other hand, that self-invention was always tied to the occupation of a specific position and the espousal of a particular credo.

Despite his misstatements, Sainte-Beuve intuited how Pauline Guizot meant to make authorship an expression of maternity as “an act of love.” By replicating the forms that foster the precious sentiments of love, she conjures them forth. In 1822, François Guizot wrote her that love is the best thing about humanity. Love permits the soul to reconcile the subjective with the objective, for “in love alone do obligation and liberty merge; it is not, like virtue, an act of choice; once it exists, it believes, it affirms, that it cannot not be. Even so, every fatalistic idea, every sentiment of servitude, is foreign to it.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Here is the foundation of real power. It can dispense with anything mechanical, or coercive, or violent. All of the important relationships in the stories we have read are regulated by this force, which the stories themselves are meant to summon up. They seem to announce a project to renovate French society on its basis. Proceeding from “slow and general causes,” this new kind of power would slowly coalesce into a post-Revolutionary order that would rest not on ordinances, acts, and circulars but on a “moral ascendancy” which shapes the will without commanding it. Exiting the vicious circle of force provoking the resistance that leads to its own downfall, this true gouvernement des esprits would establish the easy and peaceable dominion of an “unseen empire.”