Les mémoires d'une inconnue, publiés sur le manuscrit original, 1780-1816 ..

About this book

A valuable, multi-faceted memoir of a tumultuous period, by a member of an influential liberal French-Swiss family in Paris, publishers of a liberal newspaper (Journal de Paris), closely allied with the philosophes (especially Diderot and Rousseau), married to a radical Jacobin, and mother of two key figures of French history in the 1830s and 1840s, Godefroy and Louis-Eugene Cavaignac. Her own story testifies to the influence of Rousseau's Emile on modern women and to the choice of many women of liberal secular upbringing to embrace Catholicism in their maturity.