Chapter 7 explores the final years of Grouchy’s intellectual life, under Napoleon’s Empire. It shows how, growing increasingly distrustful of the ability of the state to foster the faculties of sympathy and reason, Grouchy grew interested in the power of the written word, rather than state-sponsored education, to imbue morality in the population. She turned first to the possibility that the model of an enlightened philosophe, martyred for justice, could inspire proper political sentiments. This provided a rationale for her publication, together with Cabanis, of the first Oeuvres de Condorcet in 1804. She then, together with Fauriel, and inspired by the aesthetic philosophy of Schiller, began to explore the importance of poetry, and particularly the idyllic image of humankind in harmony with nature, to replace the state as educator of human emotions. At the same time, she used the moving of her salon to her countryside Maisonnette, and the shifting mode of sociability that this entailed, to model the idea of a civil sphere, protected from the state, where moral and political sentiments could be fostered. Despite this new interest in poetry and civil society, her aims, the Chapter concludes, ultimately remained political.

The chapter explores what it calls the ‘Romanist’ or ‘contractual’ liberal current that was to dominate nineteenth-century Greek jurisprudence from the mid-1840s onwards. After exploring the intellectual sources (the historical school of jurisprudence, the French Doctrinaires, as well as the Idéologues) upon which the civil jurists (the ‘Romanists’ as the chapter calls them) drew, and their massive impact on legal thought and civil law, it discusses what the jurists tried to achieve and why they turned to Romanist jurisprudence. As the chapter shows, property reforms had central importance in this current and were strongly related to the transition from a pluralistic legal order (which centuries of Ottoman rule had imposed) to that of a modern and ‘civilised’ state. The chapter also shows that the emphasis on property makes sense only if the issue of the ‘national lands’ (i.e. former Turkish property that had been transformed into Greek state domain) is taken into consideration. It then discusses how, for reasons both economic and cultural/political, the Romanists subscribed to a subversive legislative agenda, conceptualised in the theory of the Rechtsstaat that had significant differences with that envisioned by the monarchical authorities.