ABSTRACT
When on September 30, 1832, during Lamartine’s voyage en Orient, Lady Stanhope asked the poet-diplomat and politician whether he was an aristocrat,1 the latter replied that he was neither an aristocrat nor a democrat:
I am neither on the side of the lower class nor on the side of the upper class, but am simply for the whole of humanity. I think that the virtue of perfecting humanity is exclusive neither to the aristocratic institutions nor to the democratic ones. This virtue lies simply in a divine morality, fruit of a perfect religion.2
