Chapter 4 explores Grouchy’s first elaboration of a specifically republican political philosophy during the French Revolution. It describes how, together with Condorcet, Paine, Brissot and others, she founded the first explicitly republican journal of the Revolution in 1791: Le Républicain. It explores the context for her declaration of republicanism: the flight of Louis XVI from Paris in June 1791. It demonstrates how, in the articles she contributed to this journal and other anonymously published pieces, Grouchy elaborated on the theory she had been developing between 1786 and 1791. She added an unambiguously anti-royal element to her thought, arguing that a king can never feel sympathy with his people, and can therefore never be a just ruler. This Chapter explores how she drew, in particular, on the ideas of Paine, but also describes a major intellectual and political fissure that developed between Grouchy and her ‘Brissotin’ allies during this period. While they advocated an offensive European war after 1791, she argued against one. Due to her reliance on mutual sentiment between ruler and ruled as the basis of political society, she opposed, on philosophical grounds, the sending of ‘armed missionaries’.

This chapter addresses Wollstonecraft’s Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794), the work in which she engages most explicitly with contemporary political economic thought. Noting that she gives particular prominence to the liberation of the grain trade in the early years of the Revolution, it explores how Wollstonecraft uses the issue to yoke commercial with political forms of liberty. The free circulation of grain was a totemic issue in Adam Smith’s new political economy of ‘natural liberty’, but it also pitted the market against traditional notions of ‘moral economy’. The chapter also explores Wollstonecraft’s links with Girondin politicians, including Jacques Pierre Brissot, and theirs with the Shelburne circle of the 1780s, and discusses the involvement of Americans Joel Barlow and Gilbert Imlay in provisioning the French Republic in the mid-1790s: activity which informed the hostility to commerce of Wollstonecraft’s later works.