Pellegrino Rossi (1787–1848) lived in the tormented eighteenth-century intellectual and political sphere of Europe. He was alternatively and simultaneously an Italian citizen, a professor and an administrator, a Swiss law professor a politician and a constitution drafter, a French law professor and an economist, a member of the Chambre des pairs and an ambassador, and a minister of the Pope. During what is known as his ‘second life’, before he became the first professor of constitutional law in France under the July Monarchy, he lived in Geneva. As one of his biographers notes, ‘The intellectual Geneva was the Geneva of Etienne Dumont, Bentham’s translator, who did so much for the diffusion of the latter’s ideas and so admirably defended them. Indeed Rossi became Dumont’s friend. Hence it is not fortuitous that he once wrote, in the inaugural article to the Annales de legislation et de jurisprudence journal he founded with Bellot, Dumont and Sismondi : [First paragraph]