| In Le voyageur sentimental en France, sous Robespierre (An VII), Francois Vernes de Geneve suggests, "[R]end[ons] quelque force a...la legislation du sentiment." He addresses a central contradiction of the French Revolution---that France's enlightenment-era democracy imposed tyrannical bans on its vibrant cultural milieu. This dissertation draws on newspapers, memoirs, journals, and novels to show how emigres from France took their literary assets---prized authors, literary newspapers, salons, and printing presses---abroad, causing a schism that pitted the First Republic of France against an "exiled Republic of Letters." In the first section, it reconstructs the publishing and printing venues of the major works of the emigration. It then builds on this cultural history to show how the emigration's representation in works by Isabelle de Charriere, Felicite de Genlis, Senac de Meilhan, and Isabelle de Souza replaces the Parisian center of the enlightenment with its geographic margins. It concludes with an examination of the extent to which Germaine de Stael's geopolitical maneuvers under Napoleon borrow from her contemporaries' writings about their earlier wave of emigration. This dissertation shows that from 1789-1815, in response to the disjuncture between political logic and literary reality, emigre writers practiced the republican ideals of free speech and open debate across an extraterritorial French-language network. Emigres' textual communities and sentimental topographies challenged France's paranoid geography with a transnational literary map. The fictions and cultural history of the French emigration allow for greater understanding of the ever-shifting concept of "nation" and its relation to culture. |
