SISMONDI, JEAN-CHARLES SIMONDE also. — Historian and economist, born in Geneva on 9 May 1773, died there on 25 June 1842. A philosopher in the Enlightenment sense, both for the breadth of his interests and for his idyllic humanitarianism.
Son of independent Geneva, “Protestant and republican,” he nevertheless made the language and culture of three peoples his own—English, French, and Italian—eventually becoming almost Tuscan by adoption. Initially occupied with economic studies and interests, he did not attend regular courses (in an unpublished Abstract of the English Constitution, dated London 1793, he is described as a student of law). The revolutionary storm first drove his family to England and then to Tuscany, to Valchiusa near Pescia. There he began studies of the “constitutions of free peoples” between 1798 and 1799, reacting against the uniformity and the extrinsic character of the institutions imposed by revolutionary conquest, but accepting the principle of popular sovereignty and still often drawing inspiration from Rousseau’s thought. Moreover, by contrasting the many national traditions and the indigenous, spontaneous “liberties” with Jacobin despotism, he began to resolve, through a series of historical investigations, the doctrinal problem of 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 M.me de Staël, B. Constant, and others gave S. a livelier sense of the value of national individualities, while contact with the emerging German and Swiss Romantic taste influenced his conception of history, which was more literary than scientific and always moralizing, and in this respect still closely connected with the ideals of Rousseau, of a G. Müller, and of pre-Romanticism in general (E. Fueter). More original was his patriotism, medieval only in appearance, through its cult of the “small state” (W. Kaegi) and of federated states, of free cities developing through fruitful civic emulation, as in the age of the Communes in Italy. He therefore exerted a great influence on the early Italian Romantics and liberal patriots, from Di Breme to the other contributors to the Conciliatore and the Florentine writers of the Antologia. He nevertheless provoked Manzoni’s reaction (Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica), because of the Protestant and Socinian aspect of his liberalism; and Mazzini’s, because of the aristocratic and legalistic character of his political ideals, which rejected the more straightforward democratism and the rebellious impetus of Mazzinian patriotism.
In 1815 S., like B. Constant, briefly drew closer to Napoleon, preferring a liberal version of Napoleonism to the restoration of the legitimists. He then resumed his role as a free mediator among the various national cultures, further deepening certain economic and social problems in the Nouveaux principes d'économie politique (Paris 1819), and subsequently in the Etudes sur les sciences sociales (ibid. 1836), which also collect 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.” His polemic against the followers of the classical liberal school was equally important; it developed from 1819, under the impression of the distress of the English industrial proletariat, through 1837 (Etudes d'économie politique, 2 vols., Paris 1837–38).
BIBLI: no complete collection of his writings exists: Hist. des Républiques italiennes au moyen âge, already cited, should be consulted in the complete 2nd ed., 16 vols., Paris 1818; for the rest
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R. De Salis, S. (1773-1842). La vie et l'œuvre d'un cosmopolite philosophe, ibid. 1932. For his critical activity, C. Pellegrini, Il S.and the history of the literatures of southern Europe, Geneva 1926; Pellegrini also prefaced a fine introduction to S.’s Epistolario, edited by him, 3 vols., Florence 1933–36, in progress. On the economist, see A. Amon, S. de S. als Nationalökonom, 2 vols., Bern 1945–49; also L. Einaudi, S., economista appassionato, in Riv. di stor. econ., 6 (1941), p. 127 ff.; E. Passerin, Un inedito saggio sui problemi dell'econom. toscana, etc., in Rass. stor. del Risorg., 38 (1951), pp. 547–62. For various aspects, the collection of Studi in G. C. L. S., Rome–Bellinzona 1945. On the liberalism of the Coppet group, besides De Salis, V. P. Kohler, M.me de Staël et la Suisse, Paris 1916; C. Pellegrini, Il gruppo di Coppet, etc., in Ann. Scuola Norm. Pisa, 2nd series, 3 (1934), pp. 29–74; R. Ramat, S. e il mito di Ginevra, Florence 1936. Ettore Passerin