Sismondi

Use in the book

Guérin’s response to the first volume begins with a personified historical drama. Liberty emerges from the Roman Empire’s ruins with a cross in her hand and moves among maritime cities, driven from the south by kings and finding a northern home. His criticism then concerns the distribution of dramatic importance. In his view, Sismondi has misunderstood the principal character, the Pope, and reduced the leading actors to supporting parts. The historian’s representation of pontiffs as ordinary ambitious and quarrelsome powers consequently leaves what Guérin calls a vast gap. Countess Mathilde is also judged insufficiently rewarded for devotion to the papal cause, which Guérin here equates with Italian liberty. These are the reader’s emphatic political and religious judgements, not findings that this lexicon independently establishes about medieval history. Their value within the journal is to show that liberty is already a serious interest in 1833 and can initially be imagined under papal protection. The later declaration of devotion to liberty broadens the personal urgency of that concern without retrospectively rewriting this earlier position.

Places to read

1. 20 March 1833 · ¶2The completed first volume prompts a sustained critique of narrative hierarchy and the papacy’s historical role.
2. 16 July 1834 · ¶2A later commitment to liberty as human happiness and progress provides a comparison, not a correction silently inserted into the earlier reading.

Translation in this edition

The French gives the author’s name as M. Sismonde Sismondi. Its assertion that papal devotion serves Italian liberty is Guérin’s judgement in this dated entry.