Chapter 3 offers a materially focused consideration of the practical minutiae of memory work among nineteenth-century women’s right advocates. It considers the collaboration between English Quaker Anne Knight (1786–1862) and Parisian socialist Jeanne Deroin (1805–1894), which began in the aftermath of the events in Paris in 1848. The chapter argues that following the February Revolution and abolition of slavery, Knight and Deroin, both ardent women’s rights advocates, promoted memories of antislavery to inform the usable past of a transnational women’s rights community. Through their transatlantic networking, their circle compiled and made available an archive of memories and materials of Garrisonian abolitionism, reprinting, for instance, William Lloyd Garrison’s declaration of principles for the National Anti-Slavery Convention from 1833. By circulating these materials, they promoted a cosmopolitan outlook on abolition and women’s emancipation which contrasted both with the national orientation of Parisian women’s rights colleagues and with that of prominent Republicans, who sought to commemorate abolition as a victory of French Republicanism.

Chapter 2 uses three works of fiction, George Sand’s Indiana (1832), Luise Mühlbach’s Aphra Behn (1849), and Flora Tristan’s Pérégrinations d’une paria (1838), to explore how, in the 1830s and 1840s, Continental women’s rights advocates were working out a potent contradiction between the sentimental theme of women’s supposed moral influence and their practical powerlessness – the contradiction between their ‘sisterhood’ with either bourgeois reformers or with the enslaved. This theme has been previously identified as a productive paradox in American and British women’s rights argumentations of the period and this chapter shows that, building on the cultural influence of antislavery, women’s rights advocates in German and French communities were engrossed by it as well. The prominence of this theme in the work of three prominent figures in the literary and social reformist circles of their day is evidence of a broader cultural preoccupation, which the cases discussed in the later chapters build on. The chapter identifies different motifs and memories of antislavery, including the late eighteenth-century sugar boycott by British women.

Though not often highlighted in literature on music aesthetics, the Saint-Simonians, a group of French Romantic socialists, exerted widespread influence on politics, philosophy and the arts after 1830. Their conception of music as a political-affective tool in the hands of an artistic avant-garde impacted the aesthetics and practice of musique populaire, a category embracing ‘popular’ and ‘folk’ music. Pierre-Jean de Béranger, the most popular writer of chansons in this period, declared his sympathy for the cause of radical social change in song, while his friend the working-class socialist philosopher Pierre Leroux influenced music aesthetics through his alliance with the novelist George Sand (Aurore Dupin). Drawing on Leroux’s writings for its philosophy of history, Sand’s major ‘music novel’, Consuelo, advocated for musique populaire, as its operatic singer heroine finally abandons the stage and becomes a travelling folk musician.