Chapter 2 discusses the adaptations that Grouchy made to her initial draft of the Letters on Symapthy between 1786 and 1789. It explores her interest, during this period, in the affair of the trois roués, a court case that had captured the attention of her uncle Dupaty and Condorcet. This constituted her first sustained exposure to the political injustices of ancien régime. By engaging with the work of these two men, and the ideas of other eighteenth-century natural rights thinkers, Grouchy developed her own ideas as to how injustice could be combatted. This resulted in various additions to the Letters. Building on her original ideas about sympathy-based morality, she elaborated her own definition of natural rights. She went on to argue that these rights, and justice as a whole, could only exist in society when a minimal degree of social and economic equality was guaranteed by the state. This Chapter argues that this was the period when the Letters changed from a moral treatise to a text concerned with political theory.

Chapter 5 explores the context and reason for the publication of the Letters on Sympathy in 1798 as an accompaniment to her translation of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. For Grouchy, the Terror and the fall of Robespierre were personally traumatic and led to her decision to divorce Condorcet shortly before his death. However, these events did not introduce any major changes to her philosophy. Deprived of her key intellectual partner, she attempted (more or less unsuccessfully) to recreate the partnership she had shared with Condorcet with her lover, Maillia Garat, and her brother, Emmanuel de Grouchy. Moreover, the publication of the Letters was intended to be a reminder of the ideals of the early revolution, in the face of the increasingly elitist politics of the Directory regime and her allies in the republican centre. Nevertheless, the uncertain political atmosphere of 1795–8, in which a fear of left-wing plots combined with an increasing suspicion of female political outspokenness, led her to package her message together with the less controversial Theory of Moral Sentiments. This allowed her ideas to be dismissed by some, at least publically, as purely dealing with moral, as opposed to political matters.

Chapter 1 focuses on the first draft of Grouchy’s Lettres on Sympathy, the only text to be published under her name in her lifetime. In contrast to commonly received historical wisdom, it argues that Grouchy did not, in fact, begin writing this treatise between 1791 and 1793. Rather, it suggests that it was first composed around 1786, in response to an Académie française competition to produce the best elementary moral treatise on the duties of the man and the citizen. It goes on to reconstruct the contents of the original text. Her aim, in this first draft, was non-political: she wanted to demonstrate how individuals, rather than regurgitating a catechism, could learn to discern moral truths for themselves through a reasoned reflection on the sentiment of sympathy. She predominantly engaged with the ideas found in the moral, pedagogical, and epistemological works of Rousseau, Smith, and Locke. Despite the circumstances of its eventual publication as an accompaniment to her translation of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, it is argued that Grouchy demonstrated significant disagreements with Smith, and instead hewed closely to the ideas of Rousseau.