Charles de Bonstetten’s L’Homme du nord, l’homme du midi in Madame de Stael’s Corinne ou l'Italie

Clorinda Donato
Romance, German, Russian Languages and Literatures, CSU Long

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     Last modified: February 28, 2008

Abstract
Three members of the “Groupe de Coppet,” Germaine de Staël ( 1766-1817), Charles-Victor de Bonstetten (1745-1832), and Jean-Charles-Leonard Simonde de Sismondi (1773-1842) regularly debated the physical, psychological, and political traits of the various nations of Europe from the perspective of cultural anthropology that expanded Montesquieu’s ideas about climate and government as expressed in the Lettres persanes and L’Esprit des loix to encompass their cultural and aesthetic dimensions. Among the nations whose temperment, government, and literature received the most attention in these discussions was Italy. A perusal of Charles-Victor de Bonstetten’s L’Homme du Midi et l’homme du Nord ou l’influence du climat (The Man of the South and the Man of the North, or on the Influence of Climate), 1824 reveals a number of intertextualites about Italy that belie a shared vision with that of Madame de Staël’s loosly autobiographical novel Corinne, ou l’Italie, (Corinne or Italy) 1807, as well as with Jean-Charles-Leonard Simonde de Sismondi’s Tableau de l'agriculture toscane (Portrait of Tuscan Agriculture) 1801, De la littérature du midi de l’Europe (Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe) 1813 and Histoire des Republiques Italiennes du moyen age (History of the Italian Republics of the Middle Ages), 1817. This paper will discuss Staël's utilization of this material in her novel to determine how novelistic representations and performances of culture compare to the descriptions offered in the more “scientific” genres adopted by Bonstetten and Sismondi.