Despotism

This entry interrogates despotism as the exercise of absolute power and traces its literary course across a period of revolutionary transformation through the writing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles de Montesquieu, Denis Diderot, Joséphine de Monbart, and Germaine de Staël. By exploring fictional representations of a range of mute, despotic spaces such as the seraglio, convent, island, and prison, it foregrounds the political force of silence in both law and literature. The entry demonstrates how the marginalized figures who denounce oppression within these settings co-opt this silence in a transgressive manner to achieve autonomy within their spirit, and in the struggle against despotism.