ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the reception of James Harrington’s ideas in French in the eighteenth century. Contrary to the works of other thinkers of the first English Revolution, such as Algernon Sidney’s Discourses concerning Government (1698), published in French in The Hague in 1702, Harrington’s political works were not translated immediately. They only became available in French in year III of the Revolution (1794–95), when two distinct editions of his texts came out. Yet his ideas were known earlier, as shown in two key passages of Montesquieu’s De L’Esprit des Lois (1748). How could the French public be acquainted with his main proposals and his model republic, the Commonwealth of Oceana? This chapter will show that Harrington’s ideas entered the French intellectual debate even before his works were actually published in the language and that the Huguenots played a significant role in transmitting them: complex paraphrasing and selective adaptation constituted a form of translation before the full translations.
