Romantic Aesthetics and Abolitionist Activism: African Beauty in Germaine de Staël's Mirza ou Lettre d’un voyageur
In 1786, long before the definitive end of slavery in France, a young Germaine de Stael penned Mirza ou Lettre d’un voyageur, an African tale of love and the slave trade recounted by a European narrator. In this novella, Stael boldly challenges neoclassical ideals of beauty through the story of two black Senegambians, Mirza and Ximeo, from warring ethnicities in the Kingdom of Cayor. Through these characters, Stael presents to the European reader a new concept of beauty, a contagious beauty, that she hopes will move her or him to pity and recognition of the basic humanity of slaves. In addition, via this new beauty, Stael hopes to dispose the reader to arguments in favor of abolition, both of the slave trade and slavery. Mirza ou Lettre d’un voyageur, a work heretofore largely ignored, can thus be read as the presentation of Romantic beauty as central to Stael's political views and especially to her abolitionist agenda.