Ironic Dialogue of a Lady of the Past with a Young Man of the Future: Hegel Seen by Madame de Gasparin
Abstract
The Hegelian, a short story written in 1849 by Valérie de Gasparin, probably represents the very first French fictional text reacting to the philosophy of G. W.
F. Hegel.
The main part of the text consists of an incredible dialogue which pits a beautiful Swiss aristocrat in her forties against a very young and gallant German fanatic who has a head full of socialist ideals. This masterpiece of irony and tolerance is a kind of personal response, very feminine, to the social revolutions that shook Europe in the 1840s.
The analysis of the story will allow us to restore the intellectual context of the time, to demonstrate the paradoxes of the Hegelian reception in French-speaking countries and to address various questions relating to the dialogue between the past and the future: is Europe now safe from young fanatics who, wanting our good to at all costs, risk assassinating us all? Far beyond the communist peril, Madame de Gasparin seems to have illustrated in her short story a human type that is not in danger of disappearing in European (post)modernity.