This chapter is devoted to the Romantic women philosophers, and it groups their reflections on subjectivity. This chapter aims to identify a common thread that unites these women thinkers and contributes to the understanding of the Romantic Self. Despite the diversity of their perspectives, they shared a common understanding of the self as shaped by relationships with others and nature, and as incapable of imposing herself on them, a view that echoes arguments presented by the men philosophers of Romanticism. However, these women thinkers tend to focus on a particular point: the possibility for the self to create a space for her own voice and, on occasion, her actions. After the explanation of Sophie Mereau’s notion of agency, and the differences between her and Caroline Schlegel-Schelling’s political thought, the chapter focuses on Mereau’s and de Staël’s interpretations of Fichte's philosophy and their idea of autonomy. The role of memory and love in Sophie Tieck's and Dorothea Veit’s conception of the self is then analysed. The chapter closes with Günderrode’s and Bettina von Arnim’s notion of subjectivity, and its relationship with nature and society.

Classic studies of English fiction and social life often depict romantic marriage and marriage novels as rising in tandem, with each propelling the other all the way to the moment of Jane Austen or even to the early twentieth-century era of modernist experiment and legal divorce. Capitalizing on this collection’s attention to micro-chronologies, this chapter, however, engages with a set of domestic fictions, by William Godwin, Amelia Opie, Maria Edgeworth, and others, that for a brief interval consciously dispensed with the premise that marriage was crucial for narrative completion. Widening the collection’s geographic focus, I consider this set of English works alongside the novels of the Swiss-French Germaine de Staël, an inclusion that helps underscore how some of the challenges posed in the 1800s to the narrative grammar of the novel originated with the French Revolution and with revolutionary jurists’ liberalization of the laws regarding marriage and its dissolution.

Avowing that love awakens one’s attention to the material world and to one another, Corinne provides a theory for establishing human–nonhuman connection, the energizing and curative praxis of belonging with. The heroine’s thing therapy positively associates women with materiality and, while exercising her right to connect with things, she sustains her élan vital. This chapter argues that she harnesses her feminist thing theory to teach her lover to respect the female body’s integrity and rights and to challenge his repressive politics: If Oswald could belong with materiality by sensuously responding to things, he could remedy his commitment to abstraction and his nationalistic gender proscriptions. Diagnosing Oswald’s melancholy as also emerging from his identification with “modern” (post Renaissance) art, associated with Napoleon’s tyranny and a self-absorptive grief that paralyzes creative potential, Corinne offers a remedy: companionship with classical art. Her thing theory has political ramifications, for it provides a workshop for practicing an embodied cosmopolitanism that itself ameliorates nationalism’s intolerances.

Chapter 5 explores the context and reason for the publication of the Letters on Sympathy in 1798 as an accompaniment to her translation of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. For Grouchy, the Terror and the fall of Robespierre were personally traumatic and led to her decision to divorce Condorcet shortly before his death. However, these events did not introduce any major changes to her philosophy. Deprived of her key intellectual partner, she attempted (more or less unsuccessfully) to recreate the partnership she had shared with Condorcet with her lover, Maillia Garat, and her brother, Emmanuel de Grouchy. Moreover, the publication of the Letters was intended to be a reminder of the ideals of the early revolution, in the face of the increasingly elitist politics of the Directory regime and her allies in the republican centre. Nevertheless, the uncertain political atmosphere of 1795–8, in which a fear of left-wing plots combined with an increasing suspicion of female political outspokenness, led her to package her message together with the less controversial Theory of Moral Sentiments. This allowed her ideas to be dismissed by some, at least publically, as purely dealing with moral, as opposed to political matters.

This chapter looks at the impact of the French Revolution on this German discussion of the meaning of Protestantism, as well as at the internationalization of its themes through Charles Villers’ Essay on the Spirit and Influence of Luther’s Reformation (1804). A French exile in Germany, Villers synthesized a German historical discourse about the Reformation and progress and repackaged and publicized it to a European audience in response to a prize essay competition by the Institut de France. Accompanied by a brief discussion of Johann Gottfried Herder’s historical theories, the chapter also shows how Villers’ intervention (and its reception) signaled a return of the themes of nation and religion as forces of historical discourse.

One of the great legacies of the French Revolution was that it made parliamentarism the preeminent constitutional ideal of European liberalism. This chapter begins by examining the early constitutional debates of the Revolution when the English practices examined in previous chapter were rejected across the French political spectrum. I then examine Germaine de Staël and Jacques Necker, two of the most influential champions of these practices in 1790s France. Finally, I return to Britain, consider key advocates of parliamentarism there who were writing during this period and highlight the parallels between their arguments and those of de Staël and Necker. In both France and Britain, advocates of parliamentarism claimed that it was the only political framework that could enable a nation to be safely and durably governed by a representative assembly. But in both contexts, authors continued to grapple with the dilemmas of parliamentarism–above all, the dilemma of corruption.