In Paris

In June 1805, at the age of twenty, Manzoni made his first trip to Paris and, apart from a couple of trips to Milan in connection with his father’s death and his marriage to Henriette, stayed there until 1810. In March that year, the much-admired Count Imbonati had died, after living with Manzoni’s mother Giulia Beccaria for many years. Both to comfort her after Imbonati’s death and to defend her against the Milanese critics of her unconventional relationship with Imbonati, Manzoni dedicated his Carme for Imbonati to his mother. Among the close friends of Giulia and Imbonati was another unconventional couple: Claude Fauriel and Sophie de Condorcet, who lived in Meulan, on the outskirts of Paris, in a villa they called the maisonnette. A former lover of Madame de Staël, Fauriel was a philologist, literary figure and historian, while Sophie was the widow of the Marquis of Condorcet, a philosopher and mathematician who had committed suicide during the Revolution in order to avoid the guillotine. In the maisonnette at Meulan, and at her own nearby residence at Auteuil, Giulia had the opportunity to meet the group of intellectuals (Fauriel, Destutt de Tracy, Cabanis, Garat, Degérando, Volney, Constant, Sismondi) known as the Idéologues (“Ideology” was the object of study in their philosophy, of which Tracy was the main theoretical exponent). They belonged to the generation after the philosophes (D’Alembert and Condillac), developing and surpassing their thinking at a time of far-reaching historical transformations compared with that of the early Enlightenment thinkers. The Idéologues expressed their cultural opposition to the Napoleonic regime in their publication, the Décade philosophique, which was forced to close in 1807. In this atmosphere of intense intellectual enthusiasm, the young Manzoni was welcomed with benevolence and honour as the grandson of Cesare Beccaria, and during his stay in Paris was in the habit of adding his famous grandfather’s surname to his own.