Mirabeau: French Revolutionary and Cosmopolitan Translator

Count Mirabeau is remembered in particular as a charismatic leader during the early period of the French Revolution and as such, in popular imagination, emblematic of Frenchness. In reality, by the time the revolution broke out, Mirabeau already had an international reputation, and his political and cultural reference points were strikingly cosmopolitan. Intervening in a number of international debates, he used translation, in particular, as a means promoting the causes that were dear to him, in particular through a collaboration with a young English lawyer, Samuel Romilly. This paper will explore Mirabeau’s work as a translator and propose a figure who was exemplary of the cosmopolitan environment of late eighteenth-century radicalism.