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“Sympathy,” sympathie, emerges in French from medical discourse during the early modern period. While the word participates as widely in the discourses of the “new affectivity” as its cognate “compassion,” it retains the freight of its original context, suggesting physiological rootedness. In the article “Sympathie” of the Encyclopédie, Jean Le Rond d’Alembert’s primary definition is medical: “the aptitude of certain bodies to unite or incorporate one another”; even the secondary definition by Louis de Jaucourt roots the emotional (“the lively understanding [intelligence] between hearts”) in the physiological (“the communication that parts of the body have with one another”).1 It thus shares the semantic ambiguity of “sentiment,” “sensibility,” and “feeling”: emotions grounded in corporeal experience. In eighteenth-century French writings, sympathy lives at the crossroads of medical, psychological, and moral discourses.2 Many commentators have examined the sea change in the late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century understanding of personal identity, affectivity, and interpersonal relations.3 What William Reddy dubbed the “sentimental revolution” manifested itself in a wide range of social and discursive practices, among them salon conversation, letter writing, and the reading and writing of novels, to name only some of the most prominent. In France, one of the most striking loci for the new affectivity was the theater, both in the stage action and in the behavior of the spectators.
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