SISMONDI, JEAN-CHARLES SIMONDE de. — Historian and economist, born in Geneva on 9 May 1773, died there on 25 June 1842. A philosopher in the Enlightenment sense, as well as for the breadth of his interests and his idyllic humanitarianism.
A son of independent Geneva, “Protestant and republican,” he nevertheless made the language and culture of three peoples his own—English, French, and Italian—finally becoming almost a Tuscan by adoption. Initially occupied with economic studies and interests, he did not pursue regular courses of study (he is referred to as a “student of law” in an unpublished Abstract of the English Constitution, dated London 1793). The revolutionary storm drove his family first to England, then to Tuscany, to Valchiusa near Pescia. There he began studies on “the constitutions of free peoples” between 1798 and 1799, reacting against the uniformity and extrinsic character of institutions imposed by revolutionary conquest, while accepting the principle of popular sovereignty and still often drawing inspiration from Rousseau’s thought. By contrasting the manifold national traditions and the “liberties” indigenous and spontaneous with Jacobin despotism, he began to resolve a series of historical inquiries and doctrinal problems into a new political science: thus was born the Histoire des Républiques italiennes au moyen âge, conceived in contact with the Coppet group, which he frequented in the early years of the nineteenth century (placed on the Index by decree of 22 December 1817).
The friendship of Mme de Staël, B. Constant, and others bore fruit in a more vivid sense of the value of national individualities for S., and contact with the nascent German and Swiss Romantic taste influenced his conception of history, which was rather literary than scientific, always moralizing, and still closely bound to the ideals of Rousseau, of a J. Müller, and of pre-Romanticism in general (E. Fueter). More novel was his patriotism, medieval only in appearance, through his cult of the “small state” (W. Kaegi) and of federated states, of free cities developing in fruitful civic emulation, as in the age of the communes in Italy. Hence his great influence on the first Italian Romantics and liberal patriots, from Di Breme to the other contributors to Il Conciliatore and the Florentines of L'Antologia. He nevertheless provoked the reaction of Manzoni (Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica) for the Protestant and Socinian aspect of his liberalism; and that of Mazzini, for the aristocratic and legalistic character of his political ideals, which rejected the purest democracy and the “anthropism” of Manzian patriotism.
In 1815 S. momentarily drew close, like B. Constant, to Napoleon, preferring a liberal version of Bonapartism to the restoration of the legitimists. He then returned to acting as a free mediator among different national cultures, further deepening certain economic and social problems in the Nouveaux principes d'économie politique (Paris 1819), and later in the Études sur les sciences sociales (ibid. 1836), which also collects political essays such as Des prétentions de la démocratie à la souveraineté, et du suffrage universel, in which he notes the “retrograde spirit of the masses.” Important too was his polemic against the followers of the classical free-trade school, developed from 1819, under the impression of the distress of the English industrial proletariat, to 1837 (Études d'économie politique, 2 vols., Paris 1837–38).