Étienne Dumont & Enlightenment Geneva
Voltaire
Situated at the south-west end of Lake Leman, Europe’s largest fresh-water lake, and between France, Savoy and Switzerland, eighteenth-century Geneva was a walled city state of ‘about three miles compass’, with territories beyond the city stretching less than six miles. Geneva remained amongst the largest, richest and most populous cities in Switzerland, with a stable population of approximately 25,000 inhabitants. This was inflated by up to a third at the beginning of the century with the influx of protestant refugees, as the city became a haven for those fleeing France and other states in the aftermath of Louis XIV’s wars and abolition of Reformed Religion by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Geneva continued to be referred to as a Rome for Protestants, and became a necessary destination on every grand tour.
Rousseau
The city was, however, divided. Advocates of differing ideas about the means of maintaining the independence of the state, its prosperity and its domestic stability clashed together, and the eighteenth century was described as a period of near-constant civil war. Defenders of an oligarchic constitution of small executive councils, increasingly dominated by members of particular families, faced citizens who accused the ruling magistrates of abandoning popular sovereignty and of being corrupted by francophone libertinism. The représentant or reformist movement sought to reform the laws of the city (‘représentant’ signified someone who brought their concerns about violations of law to the General Council of all bourgeois and citizens). The représentants considered the morals of the citizenry to be in jeopardy, and in consequence were concerned about the possibility of economic collapse and the loss of national independence.
Dumont
© National Portrait Gallery
Étienne Dumont was a Calvinist pastor who embraced the représentant cause when young, choose to leave Geneva to serve a congregation in St. Petersburg, joined the household of William Petty, the former prime minister and 2nd Earl Shelburne, and became Jeremy Bentham’s leading editor, being responsible for five editions of Bentham’s writings. In consequence, Dumont was in large part responsible for defining Benthamism. Between 1793 and 1801 he laboured to turn several of Bentham’s incomplete manuscripts into a publishable book, which appeared as Traités de législation civile et pénale in 1802, the work which brought Bentham international renown. In addition to his work for Bentham, Dumont was the author of numerous writings concerned with the future of Europe, with politics and religion. He had a wide circle of friends across Europe, including luminaries such as Madame de Staël and Maria Edgeworth, and corresponded with them between the 1770s and his death in 1829. This site is devoted to the transcription of Dumont’s manuscripts and correspondence, and related works concerned with enlightenment Geneva.
