«Au bonheur de tous»: Sophie Mereau on Human Rights and (Gender) Politics in the French Revolution and American Republic KATHARINA VON HAMMERSTEIN U NIVERSITY OF C ONNECTICUT In Sophie Mereau’s (1770-1806) novel Das Blütenalter der Empfindung (1794), the heroine «verlangt[] gleiche Rechte mit dem Manne, den sie lieben w[ill]» (42, my emphasis). This politically charged sentence, alluding to egalité in neighboring France at a time when Germany’s ruling class takes an explicitly antirevolutionary stance, is buried in the young author’s politically quite inconspicuous romantic love story. Contemporary reviewers like Friedrich Nicolai read the novel as harmless «Äußerungen des reinen Gefühls» (75) and ignored its setting in revolutionary France and its highly political content revolving around the topics, among others, of social and individual freedom, including religious tolerance and women’s rights. In the following, I will pursue a contextualized analysis of political thought in Mereau’s novel and related works. Historian Lynn Hunt observes in the introduction to her collection of documents The French Revolution and Human Rights that «[i]n many ways the political theory of the Western world since the early eighteenth century has been dominated by the issue of rights. […] From its origins about rights of propertied men and religious minorities, it has slowly but almost inevitably grown to include women, nonwhites, and every other kind of minority» (3). By 1945, the preamble of the United Nations Charter reaffirms «faith in fundamental human rights,» including «the equal rights of men and women,» and promotes «social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom» (my emphasis). The same sentiment is reflected three years later in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Thus, in theory, in today’s «global society, individuals are right-bearing not only in virtue of their citizenship with states but in the first place in virtue of their humanity» (Benhabib 13). 1 There has been a long and rough road from Enlightenment thought about universal human rights and their initial and quite incomplete translation into political practice in the French Revolution to their affirmation in the UN Charter and Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the mid-twentieth century and continued efforts to secure them since then. At the beginning of this road, specifically when it comes to advocating «equal rights of men and CG_42_2_s097-192End.indd 97 CG_42_2_s097-192End.indd 97 23.12.11 22: 06 23.12.11 22: 06 98 Katharina von Hammerstein women,» stood thinkers and activists such as Olympe Marie de Gouges with the Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne [Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Female Citizen] (1791) in France, Mary Wollstonecraft with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) in England, and - as early as 1776 - Abigail Adams with her famous «Remember the Ladies» letter in the United States of America. Early European proponents of women’s civil and political rights 2 furthermore included French mathematician, philosopher, and politician Nicolas Marquis de Condorcet who called for women’s education and suffrage in his 1790 treatise «Sur l’admission des femmes au droit de cité» [«On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship»] and Dutch activist Etta Palm d’Aelders who addressed the French National Assembly with «Sur l´injustice des loix en faveur des hommes, au dépens des femmes» [«Discourse on the Injustice of the Laws in Favour of Men, at the Expense of Women»] in the same year. In Germany the actual manifesto on women’s rights was written by a man: Theodor von Hippel, bachelor, aristocrat, friend of Immanuel Kant, and mayor of the Prussian city of Königsberg. His 1792 treatise Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Weiber enthusiastically promotes far-reaching gender egalitarianism in all parts of private, public, and professional life (see Strauss 227-51). With respect to the contributions of German women to the public and political debate about rights and gender, Helga Meise states that none of Germany’s women of letters of the 1790s became openly involved in politics - including gender politics (68-69). While her study ignores the nonfictional political - in the broadest sense - writings of earlier authors such as poet and librettist Christiane Mariane von Ziegler, medical doctor Dorothea Erxleben Leporin, and Hamburg writer and salonnière Elise Reimarus, it is true, that the actual German word «Politik» is rarely to be found in eighteenth-century German women’s fictional or nonfictional, published or private writings. Yet, as Todd Kontje points out, «given the proscription against women in the public sphere, novels by German women […] reflect on politics to a surprising degree» (Woman/ Nation 10). My article investigates early calls for women’s rights within the larger picture of human rights as reflected in selected works by Sophie Mereau. She did not take part in public political debates and she did not write treatises or submit petitions on behalf of women, slaves, or the poor. Yet, her works demonstrate that she uses the terms «Menschheit» and «Humanität» in a radically gender-inclusive, if not completely universal sense. Her hero in Das Blütenalter der Empfindung emphatically welcomes the newly gained freedom of humankind in revolutionary France of the early 1790s (20). And Mereau’s other novel and novellas also present self-willed women who, like the heroine CG_42_2_s097-192End.indd 98 CG_42_2_s097-192End.indd 98 23.12.11 22: 06 23.12.11 22: 06 «Au bonheur de tous» 99 of Blütenalter, dare to «claim» and «want» at a time when women in Germany and most of Europe were not supposed to have a voice, let alone claims of their own. Thus, a number of somewhat concealed passages in Mereau’s overall fictional work, particularly those in Das Blütenalter der Empfindung examined in this article, clearly allude to political and legal issues of «equal rights» of women. We have no documentation confirming that Sophie Mereau actually read any of the gender-political writings by Adams, Condorcet, Hippel, Wollstonecraft, or Gouges, or that she was familiar with the actual wording of the American Declaration of Independence (1776) or the French Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen [Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen] (1789). Yet, the ideological and discursive evidence found in Mereau’s texts puts what I want to call her «underground politics» squarely in the middle of the late eighteenth-century European as well as American political debate about women’s rights that grew out of the supposedly «universal» human rights discourse of the European Enlightenment. In Germany, Mereau was undoubtedly one of the first woman authors and certainly the first Romantic to link men’s and women’s personal desire for self-determination with broader social and political questions. While Ute Brandes, Todd Kontje, Harold von Hofe, and I have acknowledged traces of political discourse in some of Mereau’s writings, an intertextual approach connecting them to contemporary German law as well as to writings by like-minded contemporary thinkers outside of Germany has not yet been undertaken. With a particular focus on the years 1790 through 1794 when Mereau’s most political literary works as well as the respective nonfictional texts by Condorcet, Hippel, Wollstonecraft and Gouges and the Allgemeine Landrecht für die Preußischen Staaten (1794) were published, I will investigate how Mereau’s somewhat covert, implicit rather than explicit, fictional representations of (gender) political conditions in Europe and North America connect with selected contemporary legal, philosophical, political, and literary discourses in Germany, France, England, and the United States. This contextualization positions Mereau’s «underground politics» within the international debate on women’s civil and political rights in the early 1790s. It also sheds light on this author’s creative strategies of instrumentalizing the aesthetic realm for political purposes. With respect to what is meant by «political» my investigation will draw from discursive and interactive rather than institutional and structural political concepts. That means, I consider textual political commentary about political orders, institutions, and movements a political activity. Finnish political scientist Kari Palonen points out correctly that «there is just one noun corre- CG_42_2_s097-192End.indd 99 CG_42_2_s097-192End.indd 99 23.12.11 22: 06 23.12.11 22: 06 100 Katharina von Hammerstein sponding to the adjective ‹political› in French, German, Swedish, Finnish and so on, while the English language has three: polity, policy, and politics» (no page numbers). Political science in Germany has absorbed this differentiation: polity refers to form, structure and institutional aspects of the political, such as the constitutional frame and legal system; policy/ policies to the content dimension, e.g., goals, challenges, and altogether the conceptual direction of political activities; and politics refers to the processes by which groups and individuals negotiate their interests and arrive at collective political decisions. Politics revolve around the question of who can participate in political processes and whose interests will be realized. The dispersed and hidden political commentary in Sophie Mereau’s writings connects to all three aspects of the English political vocabulary: to polity in so far as Mereau alludes to the legal systems and political structures of several countries; to policies in terms of her conceptualization of gender relations within a larger social and political framework; and to politics through the traces of women’s participation in public political debate that we find at two levels - first at the level of Mereau’s fictional characters and their political views and activities; and second, at the level of the author’s own political activity, namely her public communication with readers about politics and gender politics. We may call this latter activity politicization, which I define as the social activity of creating a space, in Mereau’s case a literary space, for making a certain social realm, in this case gender politics, be viewed as political in the sense of being relevant to the polis (body of citizens). Sophie, née Schubart, divorced Mereau and married Brentano, was born in 1770 and turned nineteen in the fateful year of 1789. She established herself as one of the first German women to write professionally, meaning, she could support herself through publishing. Her successful career of only fifteen years was cut short when she died at age thirty-six giving birth to her fifth child. She ranked among the very well-received authors of the German Classical-Romantic circles in the so-called scholars’ republic of Weimar and Jena around 1800. Mereau’s literary mentor was Friedrich Schiller, initially a supporter of the new French Republic and, thanks to his play Die Räuber (1781), familiar to many French revolutionaries. In 1794, Mereau furthermore attended private lectures by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who, in 1793, anonymously published two articles defending the French Revolution: «Zurückforderung der Denkfreiheit von den Fürsten Europas, die sie bisher unterdrückten» and «Beitrag zur Berichtigung der Urtheile des Publikums über die französische Revolution.» And she became friends with Friedrich Schlegel who, in his 1796 «Versuch über den Begriff des Republikanismus,» advocated direct democracy with full political rights for women (7: 17). CG_42_2_s097-192End.indd 100 CG_42_2_s097-192End.indd 100 23.12.11 22: 06 23.12.11 22: 06 «Au bonheur de tous» 101 Given her personal environment in the 1790s, so charged with philosophical and political discussion, we can assume that Mereau was quite familiar with the events in France and with the heated debate about the pros and cons of the French Revolution. In fact, her letters indicate her desire to move to France in the hope of finding social conditions that allow for men’s and women’s freedom (Mereau to Heinrich Kipp, April 1796; Dechant 407), and her diary reveals a certain interest in America (June 4, 1796; Mereau-Brentano, Tagebuch 12). The repressive political climate in Germany in the years following the French Revolution inclined an increasing number of Mereau’s German fellow authors to develop «aesthetic approaches that channeled revolutionary energy away form the political into the aesthetic and moral realms to produce, in Herder’s words, a Revolution der Denkungsart» (Zantop 312, my emphasis). In 1792, «the upper reaches of the Prussian government were so thoroughly infused with the conviction that intellectuals foment unwanted social and political change that almost all political discourse was prohibited» through harsh censorship (Wilson 154). Based on what Daniel Wilson calls the «conspiracy theory» published mostly in the journal Eudaemonia, vicious attacks were launched on Jena’s intellectuals discrediting them as Illuminati (Freemasons) and Jacobins. By 1794, this persecution led to an «atmosphere of fear» in the circles around the University of Jena resulting in «a turn from political raisonnement to Romantic poetics» by around 1796 (149-51). 3 For the woman writer Mereau, however, the protected realm of aesthetics was all along the only avenue to enter the discourse on politics and gender politics. Publishing her first poem in 1791, anonymously as Demoiselle ***, Mereau already transcended the «feminine,» namely domestic, sphere. Knowingly or not, she applied Article 11 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man - «Every citizen may therefore speak, write, and print freely» (79) 4 - to herself by intruding on two domains considered male: public life in general and politics in particular. Her poem is programmatically entitled «Bey Frankreichs Feier. Den 14ten Julius 1790» (Gedichte 9-10). This obvious reference to the Paris Fête de la Fédération at the first anniversary of the Storming of the Bastille is indicative of the author’s political sympathy. Mereau’s rather nonchalant approach to the restrictions of women’s role differs from other politically minded German contemporaries like fellow Romantic Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling, who in 1793 ardently supported the Mainz Republic aided by French troops, but was anxious to understate her role in public and political events. Similarly, Therese Forster-Huber, later a competent editor of Das Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände and in 1793 separated wife of world traveler and activist in the Mainz Republic Georg CG_42_2_s097-192End.indd 101 CG_42_2_s097-192End.indd 101 23.12.11 22: 06 23.12.11 22: 06 102 Katharina von Hammerstein Forster, published Die Familie Seldorf. Eine Geschichte aus der Französischen Revolution (1795/ 96), a novel set in revolutionary Paris and the New World; but she stated later: «Ich war ja Jakobinerin, Demokratin und Revolutionär, aber ich wußte stets, das Weib solle schweigen, wenn Männer sprächen, und nie außer dem innersten Zirkel von Politik sprechen» (Geiger 227). This rare mention of the term «Politik» in the writing of a contemporary German woman author symptomatically refers to politics as a realm not to be accessed by women. By contrast, Sophie Mereau’s poem «Bey Frankreichs Feier,» published in Schiller’s reputable Thalia, is openly political, even radical. It enthusiastically praises the «Genius der Freiheit» for having inspired the pitifully repressed masses to shrug off the yoke of tyranny and claim their natural right to liberty and equality. Reflected in the poem is the legitimacy of people’s right to resist despotism that was established when the revolutionary American colonies threw off British King George’s rule in 1776 and publicly justified their disobedience in the Declaration of Independence as an act to ensure the «safety and happiness» of the American people. Mereau’s use of revolutionary terminology furthermore underscores her political partisanship. Throughout the poem we find a vocabulary representative of the antimonarchic discourse of the day: criticism of «Tyrannen,» «Knechtschaft,» and «Willkür» is coupled with the celebration of the «Geist der Freiheit» and the call for «Gerechtigkeit» and respect of «Menschenwürde.» Mereau’s lyrical subject explicitly expresses solidarity with liberated nations around the world, using the terms «Nationen» and «jedes Volk[ ],» both in a plural sense, thus referring not only to the French nation, but to a vision of liberation worldwide: Unbekümmert ob die Sein’, der Ganges, ob der Nil durch seine Länder fließt, nehm ich Theil an jedes Volkes Freude, das der Freiheit goldnes Glück genießt. (Gedichte 10, my emphasis) In addition to explicitly stating her personal political leaning, the lyrical subject refers to the rivers Seine, Ganges, and Nile and thus to an international framework: France/ Europe, India/ Asia, and Egypt/ Africa. Before investigating this cosmopolitan element in Mereau’s political comments, I will elaborate on the usage of the terms «Volk» and «Nation» in the late eighteenth century and on Mereau’s specific comments on gender politics. Historians agree that the concept of nation «in its modern and basically political sense» had just been developed around this time (Hobsbawm 18, 3) and has undergone a metamorphosis since. They also agree that the terms «nation, nationality, nationalism - all have proved notoriously difficult to de- CG_42_2_s097-192End.indd 102 CG_42_2_s097-192End.indd 102 23.12.11 22: 06 23.12.11 22: 06 «Au bonheur de tous» 103 fine» (Anderson 3). Eric Hobsbawm treats «any sufficiently large body of people whose members regard themselves as members of a ‹nation›» as such (8). And Benedict Anderson has coined the term «imagined political community […]. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, […] yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion» (6). It remains to be discussed whether the concept of «imagined communities» can be applied to Mereau’s imagined new social order. Through much of the eighteenth century, for example in Zedler’s Großes vollständiges Universal-Lexicon aller Wissenschaften und Künste of 1740, the term «Nation» was used in the same sense as «society» or «Volck.» Hobsbawm states that by the 1790s, when Mereau began to publish, «[t]he primary meaning of ‹nation› and the most frequently ventilated in the literature, was political. It equated ‹the people› and the state in the manner of the American and French Revolutions. […] The ‹nation› so considered, was a body of citizens whose collective sovereignty constituted them a state which was their political expression»; however, «[t]he equation nation=state=people, and especially sovereign people, […] said little about what constituted a ‹people›» (18-19). Women, slaves, and paupers were not necessarily considered part of it. Notably, Mereau’s early poem does not yet point out a special need for securing women’s place and voice in the polity, policies, and politics of the new French «nation.» The author may simply have assumed that women’s democratic rights were automatically subsumed under the generic concept of «droits de l’homme.» The German term «Menschenrechte» does not specify the sex and thus suggests inclusiveness. In England, Mary Wollstonecraft famously complained in her 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, dedicated to Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, member of the French National Assembly, about his failure to include equal education of girls in his 1791 Rapport sur l’instruction publique [Report on Public Education]. Indignant, she writes, «The rights of humanity have thus been confined to the male line from Adam downwards» (191-92). Sophie Mereau comes to use the terms «Nation» and «Wohl des Ganzen» as well as «Menschenvolk,» «Menschengeschlecht,» «Menschheit,» «Volk,» and «Staat» (Blütenalter 12, 36, 58) in a decidedly more gender-inclusive way in subsequent years. Her early poem, however, does not indicate gender consciousness nor does it actually sketch the people’s paradise of freedom and equality beyond the vague notion of «der Freiheit goldne[m] Glück» (Gedichte 10) situated in no particular geographical location. In Das Blütenalter der Empfindung, three years later, Mereau’s stance towards the revolution becomes more critical with regard to women’s rights CG_42_2_s097-192End.indd 103 CG_42_2_s097-192End.indd 103 23.12.11 22: 06 23.12.11 22: 06 104 Katharina von Hammerstein and more precise with regard to political geography. The novel tells the love story of Swiss Calvinist Albert and Italian Catholic Nanette, who meet in Italy while he is on his Bildungsreise. Nanette mysteriously disappears. They meet and lose each other again in revolutionary Paris and eventually come together in the Swiss Alps where Nanette, removed from society, hides from the contemporary patriarchal legal order that denies women their natural rights. Persecuted by her older brother, who is Nanette’s legal guardian and greedily tries to persuade her to become a nun in order for him to keep control of her inheritance, the lovers eventually decide to escape Europe for the New World. In a parallel story, Albert’s and Nanette’s strength and eventually happy fate is contrasted to that of her kind younger brother Lorenzo; he falls victim to religious intolerance in eighteenth-century Europe and is driven to commit suicide. The novel thus touches on the topics of political revolution and individual rights in general and religious tolerance and women’s civil rights in particular. It is the first novel in Germany to combine enlightened philosophical discourse about the natural human right to freedom and equality with a sentimental love story that is set in locations of political significance. It moves from repressive Italy to revolutionary France and republican Switzerland and concludes with the protagonists opting for emigration to postrevolutionary, independent North America. As Kontje points out, the mention of Mereau’s own country, Germany, is «notably absent […] for what may well be political reasons: it was presumably acceptable to locate evil in the machinations of an Italian seductress and the Catholic Church, but not to mount a direct assault on aristocratic and clerical abuses of power in Germany» («Mereau» 103). The novel’s geopolitical settings thus carry a political message that, surprisingly enough, escaped contemporary reviewers. Yet, the male narrator raises highly political issues such as: «Warum fanden so wenig Nationen das Geheimnis, das Glück des Einzelnen im Wohl des Ganzen zu begründen? » (Blütenalter 13). 5 This rhetorical question calls for political structures and social conditions which allow for personal fulfillment. It thus echoes the contemporary, transnational discourse on humans’ inalienable rights, among them «Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,» as stated in the American Declaration of Independence and, as «bonheur des tous» («happiness of all» or «general welfare»), in both the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Gouges’ Declaration of the Rights of Woman. Simultaneously, Mereau’s text exhibits an awareness of the discrepancy between an imagined ideal society and the harsh reality of the social and political status quo in Europe (Blütenalter 13). While both Mereau’s hero and heroine enthusiastically welcome the ideals of the French Revolution, the text - along with the respective writings CG_42_2_s097-192End.indd 104 CG_42_2_s097-192End.indd 104 23.12.11 22: 06 23.12.11 22: 06 «Au bonheur de tous» 105 by Hippel, Wollstonecraft and numerous egalitarians in France - takes issue with the fact that even the proclamation of the allegedly universal liberté and egalité did not improve legal conditions for women. Throughout the novel, Mereau’s heroine continues to be manipulated by her older brother and avaricious custodian of her inheritance. His accomplices follow her from Italy to France and Switzerland in order to prevent, under the pretense of religious considerations, her marriage to Albert. In terms of legal obligation, this marriage would require the guardian to transfer his ward’s inherited property, from which he benefitted so far, to her husband. Striking here is Mereau’s explicit criticism of the patriarchal structure of family law. And indeed, the brand new Allgemeine Landrecht für die Preußischen Staaten that became law in the same year Mereau’s novel was published continues the long tradition of men’s legal power over women: husbands and fathers, as heads of households, were given the last word in all domestic affairs, represented their wives vis-à-vis third parties and in public, and controlled their property; adult daughters, unlike sons, needed their fathers’ written permission to be released from dependency, even if they were of age (Weber-Will 199, 213-18). New in this particular set of German laws, but not an improvement for women and not reflected in Mereau’s criticism of deplorable legal conditions in her fictional Italy (Blütenalter 38, 39, 43), was that legal guardians now had to be appointed by the official authorities (Weber-Will 252-53) rather than by the parents as is the case with Mereau’s Italian Nanette. However, the legal status quo remained: adult female wards had no civil rights of their own. In Mereau’s novel, it is, in fact, the heroine’s continued need to flee from country to country in order to escape from social persecution and inequality before the law - even in supposedly liberated France - that shatters the narrator’s initially euphoric perception of the new French Republic as the «göttliche Bild eines freigewordnen glücklichen Volks» (Blütenalter 22). Referring to geographical locations as well as social and political conditions, Albert complains, Wo haben wohl Weiber das Recht, sich unmittelbar des Schutzes der Gesetze freuen zu dürfen? - Sind sie nicht fast allenthalben mehr der Willkür des Mannes unterworfen? Wie wenig wird noch jetzt auf ihre natürlichen Rechte, auf ungestörten Genuß ihrer Freiheit und ihrer Kräfte Rücksicht genommen! Werden sie nicht vielmehr bloß geduldet als beschützt. (Blütenalter 43, my emphasis) Using her male narrator as her mouthpiece, Mereau’s wording «even now» expresses disappointment with postrevolutionary reality in France which her hero explicitly identifies as legally institutionalized «Ungerechtigkeit» (Blütenalter 57). The novel’s political criticism is thus extended to the realms of both polity and policies. CG_42_2_s097-192End.indd 105 CG_42_2_s097-192End.indd 105 23.12.11 22: 06 23.12.11 22: 06 106 Katharina von Hammerstein Like most of Mereau’s political commentary, this passage is buried in the body of her seemingly unpolitical love story. Yet, the fundamental contradiction between enlightened ideals of human liberty and equality and gender inequality in practice are clearly highlighted. The facts are that in 1791 France Talleyrand insists on the exclusion of women from politics on grounds of the «general plan of nature» (177, my transl.). In the spring of 1793, when Mereau was writing her novel, the French National Convention officially rejected gender equality by confirming that «children, the insane, minors, women, and … [prisoners] until their rehabilitation, will not be citizens.» 6 Later in the same year, the Convention approved the suppression of all women’s political clubs (see Hunt 28-29, 138). In 1795, women were excluded even from participating in political assemblies and thus banished from the public sphere altogether. By then, Gouges had been executed and Condorcet had committed suicide after having been arrested. In England, Mary Wollstonecraft warned of civil and political injustice between the sexes early on and stressed the same democratic rights for women as Thomas Paine had claimed in Rights of Man (1791) in the name of all humanity. In Germany, however, Theodor von Hippel’s feminist manifesto that proposed applying the principles of equality and freedom to men and women alike and went so far as to advocate women’s active citizenship, equal education, and admission to every profession was basically ignored. Even though Hippel was a member of the Commission that drafted the Allgemeine Landrecht, his recommendations for legalized gender equality were not adopted. On the contrary, the Allgemeine Landrecht confirmed women’s absolute private and public, civil and political dependency on men, an approach that received the blessing of some contemporary philosophers. Immanuel Kant’s condescending stance on women is well documented. 7 And Fichte, who was otherwise known to be an ardent supporter of the French Revolution, states in his Wissenschaftslehre of 1797 that the married woman finds «satisfaction» in her voluntary and complete physical and mental «submission» to her husband and necessarily gives up her status as legal person, property holder, and citizen to him (1,4: 100-103, 113-15). Sophie Mereau’s own use of the term «Willkür des Mannes» (Blütenalter 43), in the sense of man’s arbitrary use of power, applies the revolutionary rhetoric directed at oppressive social and political orders such as the English monarchy or French ancien régime to the phenomenon of women’s repression by the men in their private lives. This parallel language clearly reflects a politicization of the gender issue. The term «Willkür» connoting an abuse of power corresponds to the vocabulary of «tyranny,» «despotism,» and «usurpation» used in the American Declaration of Independence to justify CG_42_2_s097-192End.indd 106 CG_42_2_s097-192End.indd 106 23.12.11 22: 06 23.12.11 22: 06 «Au bonheur de tous» 107 the overthrow of absolute British rule in the American colonies, and to the language used by Adams, Condorcet, Gouges, and others to criticize the absolute power the law gave to men over women. Abigail Adams, for example, repeatedly reminds her husband John Adams, later second President of the United States, when debating the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, «Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. […] That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute»; she recommends «protection» for women by laws that put «it out of the power of the vicious and the Lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity» (Abigail to John Adams, March 13, 1776; Rossi 10-11, my emphasis; see also May 7, 1776, Rossi 13). In a letter to a friend, she speaks even more pointedly of man’s power as being «Arbitrary and tyranick» (Abigail Adams to Merci Otis Warren, April 17, 1776; Rossi 12, my emphasis). While Adams refers, like Mereau two decades later, to civil rights, Condorcet considers women’s exclusion from political rights of citizenship «an act of tyranny» (120, my emphasis). Wollstonecraft, too, states that «if women are to be excluded […] from a participation of the natural rights of mankind, […] this flaw in your NEW CONSTITUTION will ever shew that man must, in some shape, act like a tyrant, and tyranny […] will ever undermine morality» (23, my emphasis). Gouges refers to both civil and political rights in Article 4 of her Declaration: «the exercise of the natural rights of woman has no other limits than those that the perpetual tyranny of man opposes to them»; like Adams, Gouges recommends that «these limits […] be reformed according to the laws of nature and reason» (125, my emphasis). Finally, Pierre Guyomar maintains on April 29, 1793 in the National Convention, «The law of the strongest maintains tyranny; that of justice, reason, and humanity brings us back effortlessly to equality and liberty, the bases of a democratic republic. […] At the birth of equality, would one also proclaim the enslavement of half of humankind, whose happiness we have made our project? » (Hunt 134, my emphasis). 8 Mereau’s parallel terminology thus inscribes her as a contributor to and participant in an international web of contesting discourses about law and gender in the early 1790s. In Das Blütenalter der Empfindung the question of woman’s rights is transformed from an individual issue to a matter of importance at the national, in fact, international level. Thus, within the realm of imagination, namely in the medium of fiction, Mereau pursues the very same feminist goals as Olympe Marie de Gouges did with her famous 1791 submission to the French National Assembly. Gouges claimed, «Woman is born free and remains equal to man in rights» (125), and thus complemented the first article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, CG_42_2_s097-192End.indd 107 CG_42_2_s097-192End.indd 107 23.12.11 22: 06 23.12.11 22: 06 108 Katharina von Hammerstein which merely reads, «Men are born free and remain free and equal in rights» (Hunt 78). Like Gouges, who drafted a «Social Contract between Man and Woman» (128-29), and in contrast to actual juridical conditions in Europe, or America for that matter, Mereau also suggests that natural law be applied to women and men alike and that women be considered responsible and independent legal persons capable of entering legal contracts, particularly when marrying. Her protagonists request to be permitted to join in a union of love as «two free human beings» requiring the blessing of neither Church nor state (Blütenalter 43, 44). Mereau thus insists on the equality of women and men in both the private and the public realms. Furthermore, three years after Olympe de Gouges claimed women’s equal rights, including the freedom of speech and political representation in real life, and only months after she was guillotined on November 3, 1793 for her unwelcome political involvement, Sophie Mereau confronts her German audience with a fictional heroine who is «von Freiheitssinn und Enthusiasmus verklärt» (Blütenalter 22) and joins the public celebration of the Fête de la Fédération on July 14 amidst revolutionary masses in Paris. Unlike Condorcet and Gouges in France, Mereau’s characters, although supporting women’s civil rights, do not explicitly call for full political rights for women. The readers simply find Nanette at a public demonstration in support of the revolution where she meets like-minded Albert. Like the author Mereau, who actively endorses the revolution by participating in revolutionary discourse, her heroine Nanette actively shows her political sympathy by participating in revolutionary events. Distancing her heroine from a variety of contemporary images of woman’s role in the French Revolution, Mereau presents to her readers a female protagonist who does not fit the ideal of the virtuous, domestic, and uneducated mother, wife and daughter who stays out of public affairs; nor does she match the image of the revolutionary activist often distorted as tempestuous, licentious, and bloodthirsty whose irrational violence would turn her into a male, would make her unfit as a wife and mother, and would thus pose a threat to public and private welfare. Discursively, Mereau sides with a small camp of gender egalitarians such as Condorcet and Wollstonecraft who held the view «that, far from being natural, the ‹inferiority› of woman was a product of bad laws and miseducation» (Strauss 104; see Condorcet 120-21). Mereau’s heroine is presented to the readers as a kind and loving, yet unusually strong-willed and rational young woman who legitimately protests against woman’s legal dependency, champions religious tolerance, and experiences the effects of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s «natural» methods of education for girls. The design of her character and activities clearly oversteps the boundaries of contemporary gender norms, but not at all as the personifica- CG_42_2_s097-192End.indd 108 CG_42_2_s097-192End.indd 108 23.12.11 22: 06 23.12.11 22: 06 «Au bonheur de tous» 109 tion of social chaos. Rather, Nanette represents a new model of a versatile femininity, combining feelings and reason, acting as an equal and companionate partner, and demonstrating passion for the French Revolution’s ideals as much as legitimate rational criticism of its deficient reality in still withholding women’s rights. In distinct opposition to the conventional notion of woman’s place in the home, Nanette exchanges household duties with travels across national borders. Her and Albert’s movements from country to country introduce to the novel the element of cosmopolitanism mentioned earlier. As we know, the term derived from the Greek kosmos (universe) and polités (citizen) and was originally applied to those not tied to any particular polis, but instead considered the universe their home. Albert’s declaration of love, «Ich finde meinen Himmel, wo Nanette lebt» (Blütenalter 58), can be interpreted to mean «I find my place in the universe wherever Nanette lives.» Traveling and living in Italy, Switzerland, and France and then planning to move to America, Mereau’s protagonists practice cosmopolitanism in the contemporary sense of Weltbürgertum coined by Immanuel Kant in his 1795 essay «Zum ewigen Frieden,» still quoted today in human rights debates about refugees: «It is […] with Kant that the meaning of cosmopolitanism is transformed from a lack of citizenship to ‹citizenship of the world›» (Benhabib, ms. 5-6). Kant’s concept aims at bringing about conditions that would allow «distant parts of the world [… to] enter peaceably into relations with one another» (Kant, «Peace» 328-29) - a goal that Mereau may well have shared as she familiarizes her readers with images and discourses from «distant parts of the world» and thus contributes to transnational communication. Elaborating on «universal hospitality,» Kant differentiates between on one hand «the right to be a guest» which would require «a special beneficent pact» and on the other the «right to visit; this right, to present oneself for society, belongs to all human beings by virtue of the right of possession in common of the earth’s surface» (Kant, «Peace» 329). In Mereau’s novel, both protagonists embrace the world and move physically and mentally beyond the confines of their respective home countries and intellectual horizons. Their cosmopolitanism manifests itself in both travels and attitude. Unlike Nanette’s corrupt older brother, who is described as «der selbstsüchtige, abgestumpfte Weltmann» (Blütenalter 41), Albert and Nanette are characterized as possessing universal compassion - «Humanität» and «Menschenliebe» (Blütenalter 36, 28, 29) - for people near and far and for humanitarian issues of injustice such as gender inequality and religious intolerance. 9 However, unlike Kant’s cosmopolitan travelers seeking the «right to visit,» Mereau’s protagonists expect to settle and live in America and accept CG_42_2_s097-192End.indd 109 CG_42_2_s097-192End.indd 109 23.12.11 22: 06 23.12.11 22: 06 110 Katharina von Hammerstein that country’s hospitality permanently. In today’s terms, we would refer to them as aspiring to political refugee status. As there seems to be no place for Nanette’s safety from persecution and no space for women’s general self-determination within the European context, as Mereau perceives it, the only viable solution for the novel’s loving couple is emigrating to the United States of America, considered in the late 1700s as the epitome of a free and independent nation that guaranteed universal human rights. Mereau has Albert exclaim enthusiastically, «In Amerika […] wohnt ein freies Volk, dort freut der Genius der Menschheit sich wieder seiner Rechte, dort lassen die neuen glücklichen Verhältnisse eines jugendlichen Staates noch lange keine widrigen Reformen befürchten. Laß uns dahin! » (Blütenalter 57-58). Naiveté and pathos aside, we can identify in this statement the keywords of the then newborn American legend from a European, namely German, perspective: freedom, human rights, happiness and a «young» form of government that departed from the old European polity, policies and politics. Mereau’s Blütenalter der Empfindung is the first German novel to project the ideals of freedom and equality onto the New World 10 and to present the United States in a vision of institutionalized freedom for women and men alike. As Harold von Hofe asserts, «German writers had, to be sure, told of emigration to the New World before, but it was for reasons of economic betterment, for reasons connected with the Revolutionary War, or because of the lure of the wholesome wilderness. In Sophie Mereau’s work emigration is an end in itself because of the sociopolitical attractiveness of the new Republic» (428). Thinking too wishfully, Mereau fails, however, to notice the colonialist, racist, and sexist pitfalls of even a revolutionary declaration like «All men are created equal.» While Thomas Jefferson’s «original Rough draught» of the Declaration of Independence contained a condemnation of slavery as incompatible with «human nature itself,» 11 the concern for universal human rights was omitted from the version approved by Congressional delegates. Thus, the famous statement was, in its final form, not meant to refer to the human race as a whole but, in fact, excluded 65% of the adult U.S. population: native Americans, Africans imported as slaves, propertyless white men, and all women. Property, civil rights, and power quite intentionally remained in the hands of white males, as painfully noted by Abigail Adams. When the founding fathers of the American Republic were debating the Declaration of Independence, she famously implored her husband who was one of the signers, «Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and more favourable to them than your ancestors. […] If perticular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves CG_42_2_s097-192End.indd 110 CG_42_2_s097-192End.indd 110 23.12.11 22: 06 23.12.11 22: 06 «Au bonheur de tous» 111 bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation» (Abigail to John Adams, March 31, 1776; Rossi 10-11). Amused by such a radical proposal, John Adams patronizingly assured his wife that rather than having men submit to the «Despotism of the Peticoat […] General Washington, and all our brave Heroes would [hopefully] fight,» if necessary, to defend man’s - that is white, propertied man’s - privileged position in society (John to Abigail Adams, April 14, 1776; Rossi 11). 12 Needless to say, «[n]one of the new [North American] state constitutions granted women the right to vote, except New Jersey, and that state rescinded the right in 1807. New York’s constitution specifically disfranchised women by using the word ‹male›» (Zinn 109). So, Sophie Mereau’s poetic vision of unrestricted freedom in «America» is far from referring to realistic conditions in the United States as an existing polity, but figures as an imaginary model for humankind across the nations rejoicing «in all its rights.» In the original meaning of the Greek word ou topos - meaning utopia, no place, nowhere -, Mereau’s quite literally «imagined community» named «‹Amerika› stands for what is not to be found in Europe: personal freedom, women’s equality, and religious tolerance» (Brandes 164- 65). Utilizing fiction as a - sometimes didactic - means to transcend an unsatisfying social or political reality constitutes part of Mereau’s aesthetics and self-definition as a writer (see von Hammerstein, «Poetologie»). In her 1796 poem «Erinnerung und Phantasie» she welcomes the opportunity to design «im Reich der Möglichkeiten ein Glück, das keine Wirklichkeit umspannt» (Gedichte 27). This transgression of the here and now allows her to experiment with counter-realities in the social as well as individual realms such as alternative life styles and codes of behavior, not least for women. Providing in Das Blütenalter der Empfindung the perspective of a geographically realistic environment, the «New World» of America, Mereau plays on her readers’ familiarity with the stage she utilizes to activate their sense of discrepancy between an ideal social order and their own, perhaps deficient political and social reality in Germany and Europe. She proposes her utopian scheme as a model for social change. Sophie Mereau was one of the first German woman writers to spell out how enlightened ideals of liberty and equality conflicted with gender inequality as it was supported by contemporary political, legal and philosophical discourses reflected in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Allgemeines Landrecht and, among others, Rousseau’s, Kant’s and Fichte’s takes on the nature of men and women. Mereau’s critique «calls into question the supposedly natural social and legal restrictions for women around 1800» (Brandes 171). As stated above, we do not know if Mereau was familiar with CG_42_2_s097-192End.indd 111 CG_42_2_s097-192End.indd 111 23.12.11 22: 06 23.12.11 22: 06 112 Katharina von Hammerstein the documents referenced in my intertextual trans-European and trans-Atlantic analysis, but we can clearly conclude that some of the political perspectives represented in her works, particularly the views on women’s civil rights, are aligned with those of international advocates of universal gender equality like Abigail Adams, Nicolas de Condorcet, Mary Wollstonecraft, Theodor von Hippel, and Olympe Marie de Gouges. It is, therefore, not really true that German women writers of the 1790s did not participate in the political discourse on revolution in general and women’s rights in particular. Not with political pamphlets, manifestos or treatises, but by way of poetry and fictional prose and thus unnoticed by reviewers and safe from censorship, Sophie Mereau carved out a space to participate in this American-European political debate. This space allowed her to respond to women’s restrictions across European borders, introduce her readers to international locations and transnational political discourses, and provide models of political awareness and traces of activism. Mereau thus covers substantial political ground, which must be read as a courageous undertaking, especially in light of the wide-spread conspiracy theory mentioned above. Like many of her Romantic colleagues in Weimar/ Jena and Berlin who withdrew their support for the French Revolution in disgust at the Terror of 1793 or, by 1796, in fear of being vilified as Illuminati or Jacobins conspiring to bring French revolutionary thought and activity to Germany, Mereau, too, became less outspoken about her claims to freedom and equality. While she did not turn to visions of a harmonious people’s monarchy or a merely poetic golden state as fellow Romantic Novalis, she limited her experimentation with concepts of equality to the realms of a spiritualized love and deified nature. She increasingly cut herself off from any overt political discourse favoring either democracy or aristocracy (see Betrachtung no. 26, Tagebuch 109). In her novella «Elise» of 1800, Mereau still has her title figure enthusiastically move to Philadelphia, then capital of the United States, but she merely hints at the social and political implications by mentioning Elise’s husband’s success story as a self-made man. In her second novel, Amanda and Eduard, started in 1795, published in fragments in 1797, and finished in 1803, Mereau initially planned to have her hero travel to France, but then refrained from providing an actual geopolitical setting. The protagonists find happiness in love and, for a model of equality, look to the harmonious coexistence of all beings in nature referred to as a well-organized «Bäumerepublik» that provides equal opportunity for the growth of all things (Amanda 105; see von Hammerstein, «Nachwort/ Romane» 279). By developing imaginary models of intimate love partnerships in which both sexes practice the freedom and equality that were only seemingly promised as universal rights by the American and French CG_42_2_s097-192End.indd 112 CG_42_2_s097-192End.indd 112 23.12.11 22: 06 23.12.11 22: 06 «Au bonheur de tous» 113 Revolutions, Mereau remains true to her endorsement of those revolutionary ideals. While Sophie Mereau does not actually spell out structural details of social change (polity), her works both represent and advocate a politicization of gender issues in several geopolitical settings (policies) that give her readers ample opportunity to reflect upon. This makes the author an indirect participant in politics understood as a forum where differing interests in society are voiced and negotiated. By providing utopias of political freedom affecting people in various countries and on various continents - Asia and Africa in «Bey Frankreichs Feier» and Europe and America in Das Blütenalter der Empfindung - Mereau’s «underground politics» declares patriarchal society as she knows it due for and capable of change. Her reflections on human rights and gender politics in the late 1700s transmit a sense of hope, which in its essence is political: the hope that the Enlightenment’s promise of «le bonheur de tous» («happiness of all» or «general welfare») and men’s and women’s inalienable rights to «Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness» be realized and that «fundamental human rights» worldwide, «equal rights of men and women» and «social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom» as affirmed in the United Nations Charter and Universal Declaration of Human Rights 150 years later, may, in the long run, not remain a utopian vision. Notes 1 With kind permission of the author on October 20, 2010. 2 «In the eighteenth century, many writers distinguished between political and civil rights: Political rights guaranteed equal participation in voting, office holding, and other aspects of political participation; civil rights guaranteed equal treatment before the law in matters concerning marriage, property, and inheritance, that is, nonpolitical matters» (Hunt 1). 3 According to Daniel Wilson, «It is only a slight exaggeration to speak here of the birth of [German] Romanticism from the spirit of censorship» (151). 4 Freedom of speech is also listed as Article 11 in Olympe de Gouges’ «Declaration of the Rights of Woman, September 1791» (126). 5 This quote is a variation on a passage from Charles de Montesquieu’s portrait of the harmonious community of the Troglodites in his satirical representation of European and French conditions in Lettres Persanes (1721/ 1754), a work that Mereau translated as «Persische Briefe» into German and later published in her journal Kalathiskos in 1801 and 1802: part 1, 1: 41-93, part 2, 2: 34-92. See 1: 67 [letter 10]. 6 «Discussion of Citizenship under the Proposed New Constitution, April 29, 1793» (Hunt 132). 7 See Kant’s comments on learned women in, among others, «Observations on the Feeling of Beauty and the Sublime (1764)» 41. Kant later groups women with apprentices, CG_42_2_s097-192End.indd 113 CG_42_2_s097-192End.indd 113 23.12.11 22: 06 23.12.11 22: 06 114 Katharina von Hammerstein servants and minors as «mere underlings of the commonwealth because they have to be under the direction or protection of other individuals, and so do not possess civil independence» («Metaphysics of Morals» 458 [article 46]). For an analysis of Kant’s gender politics, see Ursula Pia Jauch and Robin May Schott. 8 This echoes Hippel’s 1992 critique of the French Constitution for excluding «half the nation» from the benefits of liberté and égalité (121, my transl.). 9 Class does not explicitly figure in Mereau’s works and race not at all. 10 Mereau’s Das Blütenalter der Empfindung precedes such other German fiction referring to America in a political context as Ludwig Tieck’s William Lovell (1795-96), Therese Huber’s Die Familie Seldorf (1795-96), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-96), and Sophie von La Roche’s «Erscheinungen am See Oneida» (1798). 11 Jefferson writes in his «original Rough draught»: «he [King George III] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s [sic] most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transport thither» (Boyd 1: 426). 12 It should be noted that John Adams thought carefully about Abigail’s request as his contemplative letter below of May 26, 1776 to James Sullivan attests, yet he arrived at the conclusion that property was the decisive factor for citizenship: «It is certain, in theory, that the only moral foundation of government is, the consent of the people. But to what an extent shall we carry this principle? Shall we say that every individual of the community, old and young, male and female, as well as rich and poor, must consent, expressly, to every act of legislation? No, you will say, this is impossible. […] But why exclude women? You will say, because their delicacy renders them unfit for practice and experience in the great business of life, and the hardy enterprises of war, as well as the arduous cares of state. Besides their attention is so much engaged with the necessary nurture of their children, that nature has made them fittest for domestic cares. And children have not judgment or will of their own. True. But will not these reasons apply to others? Is it not equally true, that men in general, in every society, who are wholly destitute of property, are also too little acquainted with public affairs to form a right judgment, and too dependent upon other men to have a will of their own? 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