Sismondi

Sismondi, JEAN CHARLES LEONARD SIMOND DE, was born in 1773. Part of his youth was spent in England and in Italy; but he returned to Geneva in 1800, entered the Representative Chamber, and resisted ultra-dernocratic movements. His first volume, A Picture of Tuscan Architecture, appeared in 1801, and was followed by a treatise on Commercial Wealth, based chiefly on Adam Smith. From 1807 to 1818 he was engaged on his great work, The of the Italian Republics of the Middle Ages, but found time for various other publications on economical and moral science, and for beginning his History of the Literature of Southern Europe and History of the French, the last of which he did not live to complete. He visited France in 1813, and his relations with two such opposite characters as Napoleon and Mme. de Stael were somewhat remarkable, and did not tend to make him popular at home. He died in 1842.