A Latin American Casanova? Sex, Gender, Enlightenment and Revolution in the Life and Writings of Francisco de Miranda (1750–1816)

This paper looks from a gender perspective at the elusive figure, complex personality and myth of Francisco de Miranda, enlightened traveller and Precursor of Latin American independence. By analysing Miranda's personal archive as his own carefully crafted creation, it pursues three closely connected issues insufficiently interpreted in historical perspective: the forms of masculinity he embodied and those from which he distanced himself, his connections with women and the role that gender played in his assessments of the countries he visited and wrote about. Miranda's trajectory and self‐image trace an evolution (from mondain seducer and enlightened reader and thinker, to revolutionary sympathiser with women's intelligence and even women's rights, to his embracing more traditional domestic arrangements), not exempt from contradictions that shed new light on the complex dynamics of gender in the Enlightenment and the Atlantic revolutions. The ambivalences of his life and writings tell us much about the different and at times conflicting ways of being a man and relating to women in both the Hispanic world and the broader European and American context of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

A Latin American Casanova? 23 Francisco de Miranda (1750Miranda ( −1816 has long been primarily known as a national hero and martyr to the cause in one of the nation states born of his land of origin, the Capitanía General de Venezuela. An admirer of liberal theories, he witnessed the success of the American Revolution, fought in the French Revolution and tried to emancipate South America from the Spanish Empire, before dying in prison in Spain. While he was originally portrayed as a man of action, a more nuanced view of him began to emerge after the discovery in 1922-26 of his personal archive and later of the auction catalogues of his library. These papers revealed Miranda to have been a bibliophile whose diaries denote his passion for reading; a man of sophisticated artistic tastes; a polyglot who, as well as his native Spanish, spoke French, English and Italian and read Latin and Greek; and a traveller on four continents, who met and had dealings with many of the most important political and literary men and women of his day. The image of Miranda as independence hero was therefore further enriched by a sense that he embodied the Enlightenment ideal of cosmopolitanism, which led historians to describe him as the most universal of eighteenth-century criollos (Latin Americanborn, legally white Spaniards), a 'world citizen' -in Joseph Thorning's words -who symbolised the qualities of knowledge and politeness shared by Enlightened men and women across Europe and the Americas. 1 Miranda's personal archive also disclosed details of his sexual and romantic affairs, about which there were extensive rumours during his lifetime -something he seems to have viewed with a certain degree of satisfaction. Yet another stereotypical profile was therefore added to his myth: that of a Casanova. Miranda was thus identified with the legendary Venetian adventurer in a reductive sense, as a womaniser, while the wider dimensions of their respective personalities and lives were disregarded -areas in which comparison between them would in fact be illuminating: as self-made men, enlightened readers, travellers and memoirists, even if the former became a revolutionary and the latter remained attached to the Ancien Régime and abhorred the Revolution. This licentious aspect of Miranda's character was viewed with implicit disapproval by his more moralising early biographers and magnified by those for whom his gift for seduction, both sexual and ideological, added an extra halo of virility to his portrait as Father of the nation. 2 Such an image is based on a historiographical commonplace which tends, in examining the lives of 'great men', to separate the public-political aspectsconsidered the subject of history proper -from the private, by implication the remit of an anecdotal, less important history. Although Miranda's personality has been considered within the context of the political and intellectual processes in which he played a key role (the Enlightenment and the Atlantic revolutions and independence movements), when it comes to evaluating his interactions with women, ahistorical clichés of unrestrained male sexuality and, specifically, Latin machismo have often prevailed. Karen Racine's finely researched biography identified the national and ethnic cultural stereotypes at play in labelling him 'a Latin lover, a Don Juan' and noted that there were more complex angles to his connections with women. 3 This paper builds on her work and takes a gender perspective in order to examine in their historical context three distinct but closely connected issues in Miranda's life and writings which have not yet been sufficiently researched or integrated into an interpretation of his life and character: the forms of masculinity he embodied throughout his life, his connections to and interactions with women and the role that gender played in his assessments of manners and politics in the countries he visited and wrote about. In the process, it aims to shed new light on the Enlightenment and the Atlantic revolutions as an age of heated debate about gender difference and all its consequences (moral, legal, educational, political or emotional), even between men and women who shared reading experiences, intellectual and political affinities and personal bonds.
My main source will be Miranda's immense archive, known as Colombeia, which he carried with him throughout his life and which he himself organised and had bound into sixty-three volumes -with a detailed index in his own handwriting -divided into three sections ('Travels', 'French Revolution' and 'Negotiations'). 4 This archive, which includes extensive travel journals, copious correspondence and all sorts of printed and manuscript material (family papers, leaflets, visiting cards, engravings, maps, drawings), should therefore very much be seen as a carefully crafted creation, rather than just as a transparent reflection of his life and character. The voice of the man that emerges from it intersects with the pictures created of him by his correspondents, in a game of mirrors involving both social and personal expectations. Although he had no plan to publish his diaries, it would be naïve to assume that he wrote them with complete spontaneity because autobiographical writings, even when not directed at a named recipient, are usually constructed as a dialogue with some kind of implied audience, which Miranda seems to have imagined as being fundamentally male and complicit. 5 Towards the end of his life at least, he saw his diaries, letters and other papers (perhaps purged of some of their most intimate contents) as his posthumous gift to the Venezuelan nation, and it may well be that the thought crossed his mind as he was writing that parts of them at least would eventually be made public. Keen that his reputation should be preserved for posterity, he specified in his will that his archive and library should be prevented from falling into Spanish hands and sent to Latin America instead. Although his family offered the entire library to the Colombian government, they failed to reach agreement and ultimately, in the face of serious financial necessity, had no choice but to sell it off in sections in 1828 and 1833, thus dispersing its contents; only the Greek and Latin books, respecting Miranda's wishes, were given to the University of Caracas. Meanwhile, his archive, after travelling with him on his last expedition, fell into the hands of the British Secretary of War and Colonies, Lord Bathurst, lay neglected for years, and was only acquired by Venezuela in 1926, a century after Miranda's death. Preserved today at the Academia Nacional de la Historia in Caracas, it was published in 1929-50 with Miranda's original organisation of its materials largely respected; a later edition, initiated in 1978, remains incomplete. 6 Drawing on these sources, my analysis will take into account both Miranda's narratives of his life, connections and self-image, and his reflections on women's condition and capacities, weaving together how he recorded what he did and thought, how he was seen by his contemporaries and how he has been interpreted by scholars. In the first two sections, I shall reassess Miranda's journals as a place in which he constructed his identity, looking in particular at his erotic experiences and his interactions with women from different backgrounds; in sections three and four, I shall examine his views on the role of (elite) women in sociability and culture and his discussion of how revolutionary politics should redefine women's rights; finally, I shall turn to the gendered construction, later in his life, of a domestic circle that nurtured his political commitment. Adopting a biographical perspective will unravel the dynamic ways in which 25 different models of masculinity were combined and evolved in the course of a life that span across continents and political cultures, thus using individual experiences, choices and eventual contradictions to probe some of the deepest ambivalences of the age. An age in which new forms of female social, political and intellectual participation and of relationship between men and women opened up inedit possibilities both at the collective and the personal level, but also met in Enlightened and revolutionary circles complex mixtures of support and -sometimes unconscious -resistance.

Making a masculine self
Miranda was born in Caracas on 28 March 1750, the eldest son of a Spanish immigrant from the Canary Islands and a Creole woman. In 1771, he joined the Spanish army, going on to serve on the Iberian Peninsula, in North Africa and, later, in the American Revolution. In 1783, he broke his allegiance to the Spanish flag and fled from Cuba to the United States. In early 1785, he arrived in Britain and from there embarked on a four-year journey around Europe, taking in the United Provinces of the Netherlands, the Southern Netherlands, the German territories, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Russia, Poland and Scandinavia. After a brief return to Britain, he travelled to France, where he served as a general in the revolutionary armies under the Girondin government before being tried and imprisoned when the Jacobins came to power. He stood up to the National Convention, and flew in the face of public opinion by publishing in French his own account of the evils of the terror and circulating it in English translation in America. In 1798, he returned to Britain, where his home became a hub for European and Creole revolutionaries, and where he tried unsuccessfully to obtain the support of William Pitt's government for Spanish American emancipation. By 1806, he was back in the United States, from where he launched a failed expedition to liberate Nueva Granada. Four years later, he was again involved in pro-independence movements, and when the States of Venezuela declared independence on 5 July 1811, Miranda was named Plenipotentiary Dictator and Supreme Leader. Before long, however, he was forced to capitulate to the royalist troops, for which he was accused of treachery and arrested by the Venezuelan patriots. Taken prisoner by the Spanish, he died in jail in Cádiz on 14 July 1816: the exact anniversary of the storming of the Bastille in 1789, and a few days after the 40th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America.
Miranda's extensive writings, his diaries in particular, were an important device in his construction of his own identity and personality. The travel journal is an essentially male genre, a 'technology of the self' that aristocratic and bourgeois young men were advised to write as a record of their Grand Tour experiences. 7 Miranda devoted himself to this documentary task with considerable zeal, often noting the effort it was costing him to write. He occasionally explores his feelings, demonstrating his ability to experience a range of emotions, from gratitude and tenderness in the context of close friendship to the joy of communing with nature or a sense of humanitarian compassion (horrified by the harsh conditions in Danish prisons, he pleaded, successfully, for the liberation of a female inmate). 8 However, he more frequently depicts himself in ironic or playful tone: he cuts a self-assured dash, adopting a variety of different faces -the philosopher, the gallant gentleman, the adventurer, the revolutionary, the cultivated traveller and connoisseur, dutifully immersing himself in visits to galleries and ancient ruins ('we had a bellyful of ancient erudition'). 9 In his will, Miranda justified his travels 'in America, Europe, Asia and Africa' as if they had been guided by a single goal, that of 'observing the best form and plan of a government to establish a wise and judicious liberty in the colonies of Spanish America'; years earlier, in 1789, he had emphatically declared to his friend Susan Livingston that his experiences had proved to him that the system of the young US Republic was the best of all. 10 In truth, however, his travels and record thereof had other, more personal meanings for him than simply pursuing that noble patriotic and revolutionary aim. In a letter to his mentor Juan Manuel de Cagigal, Governor of Havana, in 1783, he elaborated on 'the experience and knowledge that a man obtains by visiting and examining in person and with a well-ordered mind the great book of the universe' as a discipline to shape 'a sound and useful person', and his reading notes include suggestions on what to see and how to reflect on one's own travels. 11 Miranda's first journey to the other side of the Spanish Empire allowed him to leave behind a past in which his family had been belittled by the local elite (mantuanos) associated with the Royal Guipuzcoan Company of Caracas and to embrace a military career, a means for a young man from a bourgeois Creole background to climb the social ladder. It also led him to start writing the travel journals which cover extensive periods of his life.
Miranda's biographers note how keen he was to reinvent himself, in an age of changing political conditions when adopting multiple personae was often a necessity for travellers, adventurers and revolutionaries, from Casanova to former slave and memoirist Olaudah Equiano. When he began his conspiratorial activities, he used false names and seemed to take pleasure in casting doubts on his true status and identity: at different points in his life, he was known as Mr George Martin, General Martin of Maryland, Monsieur de Meran and 'citoyen Le Sage': the latter, literally meaning 'citizen wise man', might also have been a playful allusion to Alain-René Lesage or Le Sage (1668−1747), the French author of works based on the Spanish picaresque tradition, such as Le diable boîteux (1707) and Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (1715−35). Miranda may have harboured the fantasy of coming from noble stock, a dream that in a way came true when he was made a count by the Russian empress Catherine the Great; in Lucca, he claimed to be a nobile, and in general he was sensitive about being recognised and treated as a gentleman, and quick to take offence when this did not happen. 12 Above all, however, he stressed his cultural status as a man of learning and taste (hombre de modo), endowed with education, aesthetic refinement and fine manners, and therefore able to hold his head high and be acknowledged by his equals anywhere as a true 'citizen of the world' -a term he used for some of his acquaintances and might have identified with himself. 13 That cosmopolitan archetype was particularly associated with the independent male traveller, although some women adopted -and adapted -this identity, including some of those Miranda met during his journeys (he makes special note of having encountered in Charlestown in 1783 a certain 'Miss Magot', 'one of the three famous lady travellers who journeyed around France, Italy, etc., without any male companionship whatsoever'). 14 His opposition to the Spanish authorities later added to his charms, allowing him to cultivate the glamorous image of the exile: according to his diaries, ladies and gentlemen from Philadelphia to Constantinople questioned him about his experience as a victim of Bourbon despotism and inquisitorial fanaticism, leading him to make strategic use of the widespread mythical tales of the horrors of the Santo Oficio. 15 In other words, he had just the right dose of exoticism required from foreign adventurers, who had to combine an ability to abide by the codes of politeness that were, with some variations, common to educated elites across Europe and America with the otherness that made them attractive as guests and conversationalists.

Eroticism and the double standard
Miranda's journals follow eighteenth-century conventions for (male) travel writing by recording his social encounters, observations on manners and politics, books and plays, landscapes and artistic attractions, and also descriptions of women's physical appearance and mores. Here his writings often reflect received ideas about, for example, the beauty of Turkish women, the modesty of their Swiss sisters, or the Italian cicisbei, gentlemen acting as social companions of married aristocratic women. 16 He catches glimpses, half-picturesque, half-erotic, of country girls bathing in streams and he appreciates the sensuality of Russian women performing a dance that he describes as more suggestive than the fandango, then seen as the embodiment of Spanish passion. 17 His journals also functioned as a catalogue of his sex life. He records his passing encounters with prostitutes wherever he goes and shows an interest in the public regulation of brothels: in the great Mediterranean harbour of Livorno, he admires the fact that their activity is circumscribed to clearly delineated areas of the city and that the women are subject to regular medical inspection, while deploring the hardship they experience. 18 He also notes down, in matter-of-fact and sometimes crude language, his sexual dealings with servant girls and other working-class women, usually young and procured by his own servants, as part of their duties in satisfying their master's daily needs; he systematically writes down the price of the service in different currencies, clearly delighted when he gets a good deal, but occasionally disappointed ('how difficult it is to avail oneself of a girl here', he complains in Constantinople on 11 July 1786). 19 About these anonymous and almost interchangeable women he says barely a word: he sometimes mentions their age and, in a few exceptional cases, their name: for example, Comfort and Constance, the teenage daughters of a tavernkeeper in North Carolina, with one of whom -he does not specify which -he went to bed. 20 There is the occasional brief, earthy note about their appearance or the extra spice added by the fact of a conquest's married status, like the woman who stays overnight with him in Athens because a Greek woman venturing into the streets after dark was at risk from attack from a Turk, a situation he interprets as the city's Ottoman occupiers inflicting deliberate humiliation for reasons of both gender and ethnicity. 21 He writes rather more about his own state of mind and sexual prowess: the pleasure he takes, the number of times he performs per night, the fact that he reads afterwards. 22 Never does he mention his partner's satisfaction or lack thereof: his journal is only concerned with his own level of erotic experience. 23 In this respect, his annotations are reminiscent of other contemporary intimate diaries kept by men, unpublished in their authors' lifetime but written with some imagined audience in mind, be it contemporary readers, posterity or their own conscience, in which details about sexual encounters are relatively common. Spanish playwright Leandro Fernández de Moratín's diary, a continuation of his father Nicolás's own journal after the latter's death in 1780, is a collection of short, fragmentary and almost cryptic annotations, with some key sexual terms in Latin. 24 Giacomo Casanova's Histoire de ma vie, completed during the last ten years of his life (1788−97) and first published in 1822−28, is a luminous reminiscence of the splendours of youth and love seen from the perspective of old age, in which darker undertones -the ghost of melancholy, a veiled but constant presence of sexual violence, both real and imagined -have been uncovered by recent scholarship. 25 In his lengthy Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de ma vie, Milanese nobleman Giuseppe Gorani (1740−1819) recorded intimate sexual details of his amorous adventures during his political and military career at various European courts. Although Miranda admired Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions (posthumously published in 1782 and discovered by him in 1788: 'Why did I not read this book before?') as a work that 'reveals the interior of a human heart' and, through the character of Mme de Warens (Rousseau's spiritual guide, patroness and lover), teaches the reader how to 'know women', he did not imitate its confessional tone. 26 He may not have read any of the other, unpublished diaries with which his own bear more resemblance, but in the cosmopolitan circles in which he travelled (French salons, Italian conversazioni, academies, courts), he would no doubt have heard about Casanova's legendary status as a lover and adventurer, his rich intellectual background and his dealings with the Inquisition. Like his fellow diarists Miranda, with unspoken pride, meticulously enumerates his conquests, and his brief sexual anecdotes, in common with Casanova's longer erotic narratives, resort to certain male fantasies rooted in clichés based on national character or anti-clerical tradition -the reclusive virgin, the frustrated married woman, the devout but sensual Catholic. For example, he says of a Russian seamstress that she 'was as fiery as an Andalusian girl', and describes how an Italian prostitute had a statue of the Madonna at the foot of her bed, 'both a monument to her piety and chief witness to her sins … how is such a contradiction to be reconciled?' -any such sins and contradictions were, of course, nothing to do with him. 27 In these casual and promiscuous sexual encounters, Miranda embodies a type of masculinity based on the assumption that male desire, especially in single young men, had to be channelled through sexual dealings with women who were seen as having no honour to lose. This concept of unrestrainable virility had deep roots in Renaissance medical, moral and literary discourse and would be justified by many Enlightenment thinkers as a complementary notion to the innateness, convenience and social utility of female sexual virtue. 28 In the nineteenth century, the sexual double standard gained further ground with the emergence of scientific arguments that advised young men to rid themselves of excess vitality through sexual activity before getting married and assuming a respectable position in society. Indeed, it was taken for granted that there was a profound difference in men's and women's nature, something that shaped social expectations and individual feelings and desires, at both a conscious and an unconscious level. Miranda does not employ the stereotypical libertine's aggressive tone, full of military imagery and praising violence as a means of satisfying his desires, but he does share with other male authors of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century firstperson narratives an unspoken, carefree celebration of virile sexual freedom. 29 Miranda's diaries are much more discreet when it comes to his affairs with respectable ladies. A general tone of gallantry is always present -even when erotic rewards are not expected or intended -as part of a self-presentation swathed in the codes of politeness, which required a gentleman to display both wit and personal charm. His correspondence, comprising hundreds of letters sent by women from different locations in Europe and North and South America, makes up for the discretion in his diaries; the fact that he kept those letters in his archive, together with others of more practical potential usefulness, implies that his affairs and friendships with women may have been more important than his biographers have often assumed in terms of constructing his personal and social identity. There are exchanges of gifts (a handkerchief, a lock of hair, a heart-shaped marble box); expressions of tender feelings of love or close friendship; and in some cases, an unexpectedly frank and joyful affirmation of female desire. 30 Miranda's correspondents frequently reproach him for not writing back, suggesting that he was less concerned about sustaining their mutual attachment than they were. Historians have tended to interpret this asymmetry literally, reinforcing the myth of the adventurer leaving broken hearts in his wake, without clarifying that most of the letters Miranda sent have not survived. When his lovers lament his indifference or declare their own everlasting love or friendship ('the tender and eternal feeling that I have sworn to you for life', writes Delphine Custine in 1798), their avowals, far from being spontaneous outbursts of emotion, are in line with the conventions of epistolary correspondence and with a sentimental education based on the idea that women were more constant in their affections and that emotional detachment was natural in men. 31 Like others of his enlightened contemporaries, Miranda took not only an erotic, but also an intellectual interest in sex. He read and appreciated Restif de la Bretonne's Le Pornographe (1769), a defence of the regulation of prostitution. 32 His library included titles ranging from Pietro Aretino's Renaissance classic La puttana errante to an eighteenth-century guide to prostitutes in London popular among both locals and foreign visitors, Harris's list of Covent Garden ladies. 33 He also had Diderot's Les bijoux indiscrets (1748), a philosophical essay disguised as a gallant narrative, Tissot's Onanisme (1769) and Bienvilles's La nymphomanie ou traité de la fureur uterine (1771), works that explored sexuality from a scientific perspective but also offered an intellectual front for a fascination with the erotic. 34 Miranda's archive contains copies of John Wilkes's Essay on Woman (1763) -an obscene parody of Alexander Pope's famous philosophical poem On Man -and Private medical advice to Married Ladies and Gentlemen (1784) by James Graham, whose experimental work on electromagnetic therapies, most notably his notorious 'celestial bed', earned him the nickname of 'Doctor Sex'. 35 In short, Miranda appears in his diaries as a man with an active sex life, unaffected by scruples or remorse: assertive with common women, gallant with ladies, proud of his sexual prowess, but maintaining that touch of ironic detachment also discernible in the way he presents other facets of his personality. 36 He shares the morality of those select social or intellectual circles which, in contrast to the rigid principles of the Church, took a hedonistic view of the body and its pleasures. However, his embracement of certain sexual liberties cannot be considered just a consequence of his commitment to freedom of thought, as the former at least was, quite obviously, both elitist and strongly gendered. 37 His pride on 'acting with liberality in matters of love and particularly as far as sex is concerned' is rooted in aristocratic ethics with Enlightened undertones, meaning that he deems it discourteous to quarrel with another man over the services of prostitutes. 38 This chimes with his efforts to be seen as a gentleman, his insensitive dealings with servants, and the fact that he held back from promoting democracy in his political campaigning.
It is well known that sexual liberties, even in more permissive social circles, were profoundly unequal and could have dramatic consequences on women's reputations. Those were set out by numerous female Enlightenment writers, from Louise d'Épinay to Émilie de Châtelet -who suffered their effects herself as her affair with Saint-Lambert ended in scandal, pregnancy and death -and by some of their male counterparts, including Choderlos de Laclos (Les liaisons dangereuses), Diderot (Le rêve de D'Alembert, Supplément au voyâge de Bougainville) and Voltaire (Essais philosophiques). Although Miranda seems to have accepted the imbalance between male and female sexual freedom as the natural state of affairs, his diaries do register occasional criticisms of the double standard which severely penalised the mother of an illegitimate child while absolving the father of all responsibility. In 1783, after meeting in Georgetown 'Miss N.,' a rich, 'amiable' and talented lady, he disapproves of her having been deprived of her rightful social position because she is an unmarried mother, and admires her courage in openly bringing up her child despite the 'unfair shame' this has brought on her. 39 Similarly, when visiting a prison in Lausanne in 1788, he feels sorry for women serving long sentences for having committed infanticide in an attempt to escape the 'ignominy that barbarity has imposed' on them. 40 However, his mild indignation at the life-changing consequences that sex outside marriage could have for women did not prevent him from noting, with implicit pride and no trace of criticism, that an eighteen-year-old woman of good family with whom he slept in Rome to his great erotic satisfaction ('she is very enjoyable'), had been previously dishonoured by bearing the King of Sweden's illegitimate child. 41

Sociability and the 'sweet company' of women
Miranda agreed with the enlightened principles that a civilised society should ensure that women were properly educated and encourage men and women to socialise together, standard notions in works with whom he was familiar, including those of David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, John Millar and William Robertson. 42 Accordingly, when taking notes from travel narratives and natural histories that contradicted widely held European theories about the inferiority of the New World, he included some that praised the natural vivacity and gentility of South American women, such as Juan Ignacio Molina's Saggio sulla storia naturale del Chili and Antonio Ulloa's A Voyage to South America. 43 He makes a point of observing the degree to which mixed social interaction exists in the different communities he visits in Europe and North America. 'The lack of society is unbearable here …; the women receive no one, and the men are almost as bad', he writes disparagingly of the half-Catholic, half-Calvinist Swiss canton of Grisons. 44 He admires the new republic of the United States as a place in which economic growth and the increase in commerce and consumption have not damaged the morality of social relations. Rejecting the European image of the former colony as a wild frontier territory whose dearth of sophisticated social gatherings, particularly those involving both sexes, proved its general lack of civilisation, he instead sets great store by the virtues and peculiarities of what he calls the 'American system'. He is however perplexed by the less than convivial and refined manners he observes in both sexes in Boston and by the isolated lives of married women in New Bern, North Carolina, although he notes that unmarried women enjoy a higher degree of freedom there than in Europe (as the later travellers Jacques Pierre Brissot and François Barbé-Marbois, whom he met in France, would also notice): 'The women (especially those who are married) maintain a monastic seclusion, and are submissive to their husbands in a way I have never seen before; they dress modestly and devote themselves entirely to domestic affairs'. 45 He hopes that as the republic develops, it will bring greater progress in this respect, underlining the positive consequences of social interaction for both the individual and the collective character: Outsiders complain that the people here are unsociable and not very hospitable, but I have merely observed a certain reserve and shyness on first meeting (especially among the women) which is characteristic of the American System; it is perhaps due to the fact that they are not introduced from a very young age into general dealings with people, nor do they later attend public gatherings, where the contrast and variety of manners and customs encountered broaden one's outlook and enable one to develop an open, liberal and generous character. 46 Miranda's conflicting opinions reflect an unresolved paradox of Enlightenment thought: whether (and if so to what extent) civilisation and the growing influence of women on mixed society were a sign and agent of material and moral sophistication or an ominous indicator of corruption and 'feminisation', as so stridently claimed by Rousseau, and as feared by even those who most enthusiastically supported such changes. 47 Montesquieu, a writer with whom Miranda was very familiar, had noted in De l'esprit des lois (1748) that monarchical systems with a powerful court and dominant aristocracy were more likely than were republics to stimulate the development of mixed sociability, politesse and gallantry, and in the process, women's influence on cultural and political life. 48 As a critic of absolute monarchy and admirer of the North American republic, not to mention a hedonist and lover of mixed company, Miranda faced this dilemma in his own life, again without satisfactory resolution.
That said, the influential idea, particularly developed by Scottish and French philosophers, that women fulfilled a civilising and nurturing role largely resonated with Miranda's personal experience and feelings on the subject. His sense of himself as a modern, cultured, cosmopolitan man was based to a great extent on his enjoyment of the company of others. He pours scorn on those who deliberately shun society for an isolated domestic existence, such as a certain General Sullivan in Portsmouth, New Hampshire who, to Miranda's puzzlement, 'keeps his wife and a number of children completely segregated from society and gives them no formal education … Judge for yourself the strange ways in which men behave!' 49 In common with many of his contemporaries, he felt that a life of seclusion went against the very nature of humanity, since social interaction was not only one of the main pleasures in life but enabled both individuals and communities to flourish. The kind of rapturous accounts of family life that became common in late eighteenth-century literature would not have been for him: 'those who lock themselves indoors with their wives and enjoy so-called domestic pleasures: well, that's their look-out!'. 50 Miranda's journals subtly distinguish between different types of 'society'. These include 'instructive', 'savante' or 'literary society', often equated with all-male circles (academies, patriotic societies) or conversations with men of letters, scientists and virtuosi -such as his meeting in Lausanne with the physiognomist Johann Kaspar Lavater ('We philosophised a little together', September 1788), interrupted by tourists who called on him as if he were a cultural attraction -, but also more mundane meetings, variously described as 'sweet and agreeable', 'festive', 'enjoyable' or 'entertaining', and usually frequented by women as well as men. 51 Some of the letters he received from his female correspondents confirm his appreciation for the company of women: in 1784, for example, having heard news of him since his departure from New York, Livingston teases him about the fact that he is apparently now spending more time with erudite male friends than with the 'female society' for which he had shown such a liking while in the city. 52 We know that he enjoyed conversations with all kinds of interesting women all over Europe, from knowledgeable nuns (in Coria, for example, during his youthful trip to Spain) to the wives of diplomats and bureaucrats as well as noblewomen -ladies such as Mrs Schimmelman, wife of a Danish minister, or the three elderly aunts of the wife of the Marquis of Giovio in Como (to whom he humorously refers as 'three vestals'), who show him around the library and art collections in the family home, or Countess Rumantzov, whom he met in Russia and with whom he shares a piquant exchange over an erotic engraving that he contrasts with the prudish manners he has encountered in North America. 53 He is delighted by the opportunity of indulging in not only polite but literary and even political conversation with women. After a particularly interesting discussion in Russia with his hostess, Mrs Raikes, and 'two refined young English ladies', he writes approvingly: 'It is such a pleasure today to hear people of their sex speak of literary matters, when for so long not even men took an interest in such things'. 54 He records with understandable pride but also pleasure his exchanges with Catherine the Great, who favoured him during his year at her court in 1787. He admired her not only as a powerful empress and benevolent matron but as an intelligent conversationalist, and was flattered by her almost motherly affection for him and by her interest in his opinions on the Spanish empire, the Inquisition and other political issues. 55 Miranda appreciated women such as these for their talent, education and refinement, rather than just for their ability to hold up an admiring mirror to his own wit and wisdom (although he welcomed that too). His writings include various comments on the impression made on him by well-known women past and present, from 'the famous Olimpia Morata', an Italian Renaissance writer and convert to Lutheranism whose epitaph he read in Heidelberg, to 'the famous living Angelica Koffman' [sic: Kauffman], whose art he saw and admired in Russia. 56 It was common for travellers to record meetings with artists and scholars, and females of the species were generally viewed with particular wonder, but Miranda writes about some of these women in a somewhat different tone, seeing their achievements simply as proof of equality of ability. In Philadelphia in 1783, he was struck by the talents of the poet and former slave Phyllis Wheatley, leading him to declare that 'the rational being is the same in any form or aspect', regardless of gender and race. 57 He also met and admired the British republican historian Catharine Macaulay, described by Livingston as a 'female philosopher', corresponded with and visited British memorialist Helen Maria 33 Williams in Paris, and proudly noted in his diary that the Dutch-Swiss writer Isabelle de Charrière, who offered a female perspective on the French Revolution and strongly defended gender intellectual equality, had presented him with a copy of her works. 58 In Vienna, he expressed appreciation for the scientific interests and knowledge of three women from contrasting social backgrounds: two noblewomen who possessed natural history collections, and Mlle Koller, daughter of the head gardener of the Botanical Garden, who explained its plant specimens in detail to him. 59 The letters he received from female members of the educated elites in Spain, North America, France and Sweden (women such as Livingston, Theodosia Burr, Catherine Hall, Custine, Mme Pétion and Mme Tor) include frequent exchanges of books and opinions. Miranda, with the advantage of his formal education and his impressive library (more than 6,000 volumes in 1805), is usually the one recommending and lending books, and some of his female correspondents acknowledge his mentorship and praise him as a 'nouveau Socrate', bravely facing unfair persecution, an image he himself cultivated. 60 It would be too simplistic, though, to see these exchanges as nothing but a game of seduction, an excuse for erotic visits and letters or shameless flattery. With some of these women he enjoyed playing the role of mentor, one he shared with male contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic, but he also seems to have paid attention to their opinions and taken pleasure in the intellectual exchange of their amicable or sentimental correspondence.

A conversation with 'Miss Wollstonecraft'? Women's rights in the age of revolutions
For some of Miranda's contemporaries, a perfect society required more than just mixed social interaction or even improved female education. He must have been aware of the claims for women's rights as they took shape in some enlightened and revolutionary circles, particularly in Britain and France. In fact, he had connections with some of the authors whose egalitarian stances positioned them as a robust minority within late eighteenth-century British radicalism, generally inspired by a strongly masculinist republican tradition. 61 Alexander Jardine -a former British envoy in Spain and close friend of William Godwin -called in his Letters from Barbary, Spain, France and Portugal (1788) for 'approximate equality of the sexes' and suggested that women should be consulted about laws that had particular implications for their lives. 62 Miranda had a copy of the Letters, probably given to him by their author; he maintained a regular correspondence with Jardine and his wife Juana, mourned the deaths of their children, and exchanged books with them (in a Parisian prison in 1792, an unidentified 'English lady' gave him on Jardine's behalf a clandestine pamphlet, The Book of Peace (for Mr Fox to read), which he read and annotated). 63 He corresponded with Catholic reformer Alexander Geddes, who was very critical of biblical justifications for the subordination of women, and collaborated and exchanged books with Jeremy Bentham, who sympathised with Latin American independence and expressed his feminist views in several works, among them his unpublished 'Observations on article 6' highlighting women's exclusion from the Déclaration des droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen. 64 Something that has, surprisingly, gone unnoticed by his biographers, is that during the French Revolution Miranda probably made the acquaintanceship of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759−1797). Having entered the heated field of political and moral discussion with A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1789) and A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), Wollstonecraft arrived in Paris in December 1792. There she associated with French and British revolutionaries and both followed and commented on political and social developments. She fell in love with American adventurer Gilbert Imlay, with whom she had her first daughter, Fanny, in May 1794; in April 1795, after travelling to Scandinavia and coming to terms with the end of her relationship with Imlay, she returned to London. Wollstonecraft's surviving correspondence expresses her disillusionment with life in Paris in 1793, the year of Louis XVI's execution, but also her determination to remain in the city. 65 Her letters reveal that she was writing 'a plan of education for the Committee appointed to consider that subject', possibly on the invitation of either Thomas Paine or Antoine Caritat de Condorcet; the latter had written persuasively about equal education for women. 66 In April 1793, John Christie wrote to Miranda that he and 'Miss Wollstonecraft' wanted to visit him, as she was very interested in discussing with him some issues: 'Will it be quite convenient to you that Miss Wollstonecraft & I should come out & dine with you on Thursday next at 4 o'clock? … Inclosed are the subjects she wishes to converse with you about'. 67 Unfortunately, the list attached to the letter is not preserved, and neither Miranda's archive nor Wollstonecraft's correspondence clarifies whether the meeting actually took place. Therefore, we shall never know what questions the feminist and democrat British writer raised for discussion with the Latin American revolutionary (who did not own any of her works, but might have learned about them through mutual friends such as Jardine and Williams), or on what matters they might have agreed or disagreed.
Miranda's friendships with Jardine and Bentham, his possible communications with Wollstonecraft and his political proximity to Condorcet and to notable female Girondists such as Mme Roland (Jeanne-Marie Roland de la Platière, the preface to whose works he had in his archive) may have helped inspire his ideas on the subject of women's rights in notes now lost but which, according to him, recorded his conversations with American and European law-makers. In a surviving letter written to his Girondin friend Jérôme Pétion, mayor of Paris, in 1792, he supported the idea that in post-Revolutionary France women should be granted some form of political representation, or at the very least should be consulted on the laws affecting the matters that most concerned them, including marriage, divorce and female education: To my way of thinking, I recommend just one thing, wise legislator: the women … Why is it that in a democratic government, fully half of the individuals, the women, are neither directly, nor indirectly represented although they are subjected to the same severity of the law? Why can they not be consulted at least in the laws that concern them more (marriage, divorce, girls' education etc.)? I must confess that all these things seem to me to be strange oversights and worthy of consideration on the part of our wise legislators. 68 Miranda's argument rests on the theories of representation that intellectuals of the Thirteen Colonies, drawing broadly on the thinking of John Locke, had used as a basis for their demands for independence from Britain. The same argument, adapted to the civil and political situation of the female population, was invoked by women closely involved in the independence process, the Revolutionary War, and the construction of the new nation. In their writings and through their actions, they negotiated the limited public role granted them by revolutionary and patriotic discourse and practice, making clear in many cases their awareness of gender inequalities both in political participation and in domestic life. 69 The most celebrated example of this is, of course, that of Abigail Adams' letters to John Adams, notably that in which she invites the legislators to revise marriage laws in order to limit the power of husbands and hints at the injustice of excluding women from political representation ('If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation', 31 March 1776). 70 Countless other American women shared her intense commitment to revolutionary politics and expressed their patriotic hopes and, sometimes, their frustration in their diaries, correspondence with male and female relatives and friends, commonplace books, and also in petitions, political pamphlets, broadsides, contributions to the periodical press and works of fiction.
In France, women's dissatisfaction with their subjugation both domestically and in revolutionary politics surfaced in multiple ways, from cahiers de doléances and active participation in political clubs before this was banned in 1793, to explicit feminist writings based on the idea of the universal rights of man and their necessary extension to women. In her Déclaration des droits de la femme et citoyenne (1792), Olympe de Gouges exposed the exclusion of women from the definition of citizenship as the entitlement to civil and political rights, theoretically based on the idea of universal equality, but in reality restricted to men. Condorcet upheld gender equality in Lettres d'un bourgeois de New Haven (1787) and Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain (1795) and spoke in favour of women's citizenship at the Assemblée Nationale in 1790, highlighting, among other arguments, the contradiction of expecting women to obey the law and pay their taxes yet denying them political representation (while André Amar, Pierre-Gaspar Chaumette and Louis-Marie Prudhomme, among others, exhorted women to renounce political activity and devote themselves to domestic life, understood as a civil obligation). 71 Miranda's endorsement of that idea and his suggestion that women should, if nothing else, be allowed a say in the civil laws most directly applicable to them may have been less radical, but by criticising legislators for failing to remedy this injustice, he was positioning himself with the men and women who not only denounced gender inequality but were actively fighting against it. That said, the fact that he did not elaborate on women's rights in his projects for Latin American independence or in any other of his writings (although in 1810 in Caracas, he did promote a Patriotic Society which admitted women) is very revealing and suggests that, in line with most other male revolutionaries, he did not see it as a political priority, and that perhaps it was not even as deeply felt a conviction as it was for some of the radical and feminist thinkers with whom he shared discussions. 72

A projection of domestic bliss: The private life of a revolutionary
When Miranda looked for the domestic stability and social respectability endowed by marriage, he did not seek out a woman of intellect as his contemporaries and democratic comrades Godwin and Aaron Burr had done when choosing their respective partners, Wollstonecraft and Theodosia Bartow Prevost (although after the former's death, Godwin went on to marry the much more conventional Mary Jane Clairmont). In 1802, when he was already over fifty, the man who had once derided those who settled for 'domestic pleasures' finally abandoned his bachelor existence and entered into marriage in London with the much younger Sarah Andrews (1774−1847), who came from a Yorkshire family of Scottish origins. 73 It seems marriage did not prevent Miranda from continuing to conduct affairs with distinguished and publicly active women, such as Leonora Sansay in New York and possibly, as has been inconclusively suggested, Lady Hester Stanhope in Britain. 74 Little is known about Sarah Andrews. In the two wills he signed in London, on 1 August 1805 and 2 October 1810, respectively (before embarking on his hazardous Latin American expeditions), Miranda calls her, revealingly, 'my loyal housekeeper'. 75 He perhaps chose this denomination (never used in his personal correspondence, where it might have taken on a teasing, affectionate meaning) in order to veil her married status, therefore protecting her and the possessions he bequeathed to her. However, it has led to speculation that they never married, despite having had two sons together, Leander (1803−1886) and Francisco (1806−1831) -an implicit comparison of their relationship with that of Rousseau and Thérèse Levasseur, the woman who bore him five children but never played the social role of a wife. This was definitely not the case: Miranda and his acquaintances always refer to Andrews in their letters as his legal spouse, and she was buried as a widow. 76 Scholars over the years have often portrayed Andrews as an uneducated servant or country girl who, as a devoted wife, took great pains to build a domestic haven in which her revolutionary husband could rest, be visited by Latin American and British activists and philosophers (from Simón Bolívar, Andrés Bello and Luis López Méndez to James Mill and Bentham, among others) and hatch his plots. 77 This strongly gendered vision mirrors the widespread and deeply internalised image of the domestic in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Britain as the preserve of women, but also as a symbolic space from which men are often absent and to which they long to return. 78 It is also far more reminiscent of the ideal embodied by figures in the younger generation, such as the Spanish Liberal General Baldomero Espartero (1793-1870) and his wife María Jacinta, than it is of that represented by Latin American independence leaders such as Bolívar (1783-1830), an educated, refined and gallant criollo like Miranda but, unlike him, a widower who never remarried and whose charismatic masculinity was based on both his military and his erotic prowess. 79 Even today, the idealised image of the revolutionary hero nurtured by his politically ignorant but caring, self-sacrificing wife has a strong appeal on the imagination, outweighing more nuanced readings of the relationship between Miranda and his wife.
Sources relating to their marriage are limited to a few letters, most of them written during Miranda's expeditions to South America. It is therefore difficult to know the extent to which Andrews shared or contributed to her husband's political opinions and actions. Despite her everyday upbringing, she clearly had a good command of written English -her letters are eloquent, as well as full of common sense. She comes across as a loving and dutiful wife, burdened by financial problems, active in attending to her husband's affairs (particularly his debts and his books) and eager to provide him with touching details about life at home. However, she also shows her support of the cause ('your noble and Glorious projects'; 'your views are good and God will bless them'). 80 For his part, Miranda trusts in her 'prudence and zeal', shares with 'my good Sally' his hopes for the success of his campaign, advises her about family issues and asks her to look after her own health 'for the sake of us all'. 81 His imprisonment and death put an end to what appears to have been, on both sides, an affectionate, if somewhat unequal, marriage.

Conclusion
Francisco de Miranda's life and writings tell us much about the different and at times conflicting ways of being a man and relating to women during the Enlightenment and the Atlantic revolutions. Having left his native Venezuela in his youth to return only forty years later (something to which many historians attribute the failure of his liberation projects), the experience and self-image of this man who travelled much, read widely in different languages and lived in Spain, France and, most of all, in Britain cannot be considered representative of a national culture but, rather, of a personal combination of codes and concerns that were widely shared throughout Europe and America. His writings reflect a biographical trajectory similar to that of many men of his generation and background. The cosmopolitan bachelor, gallant with ladies and regular purchaser of commercial sex, gradually turns into the politicised criollo and revolutionary conspirator ready to take risks for the cause, later adding on to that public dimension the private guise of the respectable husband, not always faithful, but assuming responsibility for his family and showing concern for its wellbeing.
In his personal writings, he explicitly or implicitly distanced himself from two negative stereotypes of masculinity against which he seems to have measured himself. On the one hand, he appeared as a man whose patriotic endeavour and classical education and tastes set him far above the Frenchified ways of the affected, effeminate petit maître that he, like many of his republican comrades, despised as a symbol of both aristocratic corruption and deficient masculinity. Thus, he derided Pope Pius VI (born Count Giovanni Angelo Braschi) for being 'powdered like a Parisian petit maître' and, despite having read and admired his work, labelled Edward Gibbon a 'coxcomb', on account of his manners. 82 On the other hand, he seems not to have identified with the austere virtues of the male citizen-soldier that lay at the heart of civic republicanism, rooted in the political culture of eighteenth-century Britain, and which powerfully influenced the new republic of the United States. 83 Although a republican himself and a military man during significant parts of his life (under the Spanish, French and Colombian flags), Miranda was too much a lover of pleasure and mondaine society to let himself be impressed by that ideal of ascetic, 'entrenched masculinity'. 84 He is, for example, slightly disparaging about Washington, the national hero who exemplifies these austere martial virtues (calling him 'circumspect, taciturn and a little aloof') and suspicious of the intense devotion he inspires (comparing the crowds who throng to meet him in Philadelphia with those who welcomed Christ into Jerusalem, and the worship he receives with the sun's rays falling on a burning-glass to create a single flame -language that instantly evokes memories of the Sun King). 85 At the same time, while Miranda represents himself as capable of shedding tears of gratitude and friendship and reveals a hint of sentimentalism in his approach to philanthropy or his aesthetic appreciation of the picturesque, the model of masculinity he embodied was not that of the 'man of feeling' which had become so prominent an archetype by the end of the eighteenth century in British, French, Spanish and American literature. He neither lived long enough, nor had it in his background to become the type of romantic hero epitomised by Lord Byron, with whom he has sometimes been compared. 86 Throughout the distinct phases of his life, Miranda's attitudes towards women, tightly interwoven with his self-representations, were partially shaped by the gender and class expectations widely shared in his time by the type of polite gentlemen with whom he aspired to be identified, from the objectification of lower-class women to his taste for the company of well-bred ladies. However, while Miranda read and admired both Rousseau's sentimental and pedagogical novels (Émile, La Nouvelle Héloïse) and his political writings, he did not endorse his absolute rejection of mixed sociability in favour of a notion of women's education as strictly limited to caring for men's domestic, sentimental and sexual needs, an idea Wollstonecraft denounced as outrageous. 87 Unlike Rousseau and those revolutionaries who embraced his gender politics, Miranda valued women's intellectual conversation and showed for their intelligence a genuine, if at times paternalistic, appreciation. Furthermore, certain aspects of his writings suggest that he was not entirely comfortable with contemporary received wisdom about the subordination and specific moral obligations of women, although he did not fully renounce such beliefs in his personal life. On the one hand, his occasional sympathetic insights calling the sexual double standard into question, to some extent at least, might be related not only to his readings of materialistic philosophes but also to the fact that he befriended, loved or made the acquaintance of women whose reputations were damaged beyond repair by sexual scandal, whether during their lifetimes or posthumously -a danger unknown to men of the age -Sansay and Wollstonecraft among them. On the other, Miranda's sparse but adamant words of support for greater civil and even political equality between men and women suggest that Enlightenment and revolutionary feminism had some influence on his thinking; it is, however, highly significant that he did not engage with this issue when he had the opportunity to lay the constitutional foundations for an imagined new republic in his -rather vague -plans for a future great and independent Colombia.
All in all, his life and writings do not escape the profound ambivalences with which the Age of Enlightenment and revolutions was fraught: between acknowledgement of women's civilising role and a lingering condescension towards their intellect; between equality as an ideal and a reluctance to pose it in gender terms; between ideas of sexual liberty and specific notions of female propriety. His envisioning, however tentative, of more equal forms of female political participation than those that became dominant in post-revolutionary societies shows how a life lived at the crossroads of different geographical, political and cultural worlds and intellectual traditions could inspire insights that diverged from the Rousseauian imprint characteristic of most of radical and Jacobin gender politics. At the same time, the fact that he -with the occasional protest -took for granted and benefited from the gendered sexual morals that prevailed even in Enlightenment and revolutionary circles confirms that these were, as Wollstonecraft lucidly perceived and dramatically learned from painful personal experience, the deepest sources of inequality and the most challenging limits for imagining new relationships and new forms of masculinity and femininity.