Lost in [French] Translation

In his classic study on Algernon Sidney and the Restoration crisis, Jonathan Scott argued that Sidney ‘reminds us of the complexity of the past, of how difficult it is to understand, and of the mental gulf that stands between our world and his’. ¹ What is undoubtedly true of the past when seen from the vantage point of the present is no less true when the mental gulf is not between past and present, but between two countries whose cultural habits and mores, although close to a large extent, are nevertheless sufficiently distinct to create a gap between them. Perhaps the passing of time makes this kind of gap even greater, but it is there originally, even when we are dealing with cultural artefacts which initially were contemporary. The point of this chapter is not so much to look at the reception of Sidney’s thought in eighteenth-century France (or the French-speaking world) as to look at the kind of linguistic and cultural presuppositions or prejudices which made this reception difficult. I do not propose to go into the whole detail of this complex history (this would require a much longer paper); what I shall do instead is focus on three different moments or stages in this history, each connected with a particular account of Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government in significant ‘French’ ² periodicals: Nouvelles de la République des Lettres ³ and Histoire des Ouvrages des Sçavans, ⁴ both from the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the much later Décade philosophique, littéraire et politique, par une société de républicains, ⁵ which was founded in 1794, at a time when the Terror was still in full swing.