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Madame de Staël: The Inveterate Idealist
There are only two powers in the world÷the sword and the spirit . . . In the long run,
the sword is always beaten by the spirit.
÷Napoleon to Fontanes
There are only two distinct classes of men on earth: those who feel enthusiasm and
those who scorn it; all other differences are the work of society.
÷Mme. de Staël, Corinne
In pre-Revolutionary France, a certain amount of intelligence, or, more precisely,
intellectualism was not only tolerated in women, but even prized. Brilliant women
were, after all, necessary to the proper ornamentation or direction of the most
eminent salons. Women were expected to shine÷just not in public. Madame de
Staël, the most brilliant woman of her time, took this license to be intelligent to an
extreme, as she did virtually every other area of her life. Germaine de Staël,
passionate, idealistic, generous, impetuous, and highly-strung, knew what was in
store for women who dared to intrude into the political or literary limelight. Yet she
could not help herself and paid dearly for this impudence. She was not conventionally
beautiful. Although her eyes were magnificent, her voice seductive, and she herself
extremely charismatic, the press and her enemies were immune to her charms. So
they indulged in blistering ad feminam attacks. "It’s not your fault you are ugly,"
proclaimed the pro-Jacobin Journal des Hommes Libres, "but it is your fault you are
an intriguer." The royalists, too, fulminated in editorials: "Miserable hermaphrodite
that you are, your sole ambition in uniting the two sexes in your person is to dishonor
them both at once." Whether the critics’ ostensible subject was her political
writings,
her fiction, or her literary criticism, they inevitably reproached Madame de Staël for
her looks, her assertive femininity, and her various liaisons. Even those who
recognized her charms and benefitted from her generosity could not resist such an
easy target. The libertine abbé de Talleyrand, Madame de Staël’s first lover and a
master of self-disguise, quipped about her novel, Delphine, "I understand that
Madame de Staël has disguised us both as women in her novel." In fact, the
astonishing thing about Madame de Staël was that she disguised herself so little.
She is readily recognizable in her fictional heroines. Corinne and Delphine are
exceptionally gifted women with the courage to defy social conventions in their loves
and their art, and they suffer deeply for it. What distortions one finds in these
fictionalized self-portraits and in Madame de Staël’s memoirs arise most often from
her inveterate idealism and enthusiasm rather than calculation. Enthusiasm was a
term of derogation among her contemporaries. Reason was king in the rigid, highly
formalized world of eighteenth-century French classicism, and Madame de Staël’s
passions were a thorn in the establishment’s side. Undaunted, she cultivated
enthusiasm into a religion of noble sentiments that united art, poetry, politics, and
love into one. She wielded it as a weapon against the evils of the age: political
fanaticism, the tyranny of reason, and the deadening myth of French cultural
superiority. In the concluding chapters of On Germany, the treatise with which she
ushered in the Romantic era of French literature, she elaborates and exalts her
concept of enthusiasm, the key, mutatis mutandis, to all of her writing. "Enthusiasm
is tolerant, not out of indifference, but because it leads us to recognize the value
and
beauty of all things." Tolerance was a rarity in Revolutionary France, and Napoleon
could not afford to let it spread in his empire. Madame de Staël was a passionate
moderate and a tireless defender of reasonable but, at the time, hopeless causes. A
staunch libertarian, she refused to condone the sacrifice of a single individual to the
good of the many. When it became clear that the Revolutionary ideals were
irredeemably betrayed by the Jacobins, she tirelessly advocated a constitutional
monarchy. She defended the rights of women, and, to her peril, cosmopolitanism and
intellectual freedom. Even in her personal life, she pursued moderate goals with the
most extravagant efforts. Her ideal of love was the quiet contentment of a marriage
based on affection and respect, but because of the emotional rapaciousness with
which she pursued the various men in her life, this domestic bliss eluded her until the
last year of her life. Her constant preaching of tolerance, whether in the realm of
politics, social institutions, or culture, enraged Napoleon. After hearing that she had
called him an "idéophobe," he declared in a fit of rage, "I shall break her, I shall
crush
her. Let her keep quiet, it’s the wisest course she can take." Heroic in her
uncompromising idealism and lack of self- consciousness, Madame de Staël
occasionally made herself ridiculous. Many commentators, even the well-intentioned,
have proven unable to resist playing up the oddities in her character at the expense
of her courage and very real accomplishments. J. Christopher Herold’s 1958
biography, Mistress to an Age, is authoritative and fascinating, but he struggles to
control his urge to condescend. Even now, when her influence has largely been
eclipsed, her vices rather than her virtues continue to provoke strong reactions.
Anthony West’s account of her in his 1973 "behavioral study," Mortal Wounds, is
unremittingly hostile. In fairness, he spreads his venom equally between her and the
other subjects of his book, George Sand and Madame de Charrière. Most recently,
Dan Hofstadter presents Madame de Staël through the narrow prism of her "frantic"
love life in his The Love Affair as a Work of Art (1996), and reduces her resistance to
Napoleon to a pique of vanity at "the idea of playing unicorn to Bonaparte’s lion."
Her
clash with Napoleon was no diversion. The battle between the Emperor of Matter and
the Empress of Mind, as Sainte-Beuve called them, lasted for fourteen years. And
although it is not clear that her resistance was effective in practical terms, it
served
as a powerful inspiration. While Madame de Staël was for Napoleon a minor but
persistent annoyance, he was a whetstone for her genius. By exiling her, he opened
her mind to the rest of Europe and concentrated her political focus on liberalism. All
of her books written after 1800 bear the mark, implicitly or explicitly, of her
defiance
of him. Her most direct accounts of this clash appear in her posthumously published
manifesto, Considerations on the French Revolution, and in her unfinished memoir
Ten Years of Exile.1 The first of these presents the post-Revolutionary excesses, the
Terror and Napoleon’s despotism, as necessary evils in the fulfillment of the
Revolution’s underlying ideals, a novel historical view at that time. The latter is an
account of her years in exile at her family estate Coppet outside of Geneva and of
her desperate attempt to reach the safety of England via Vienna, Kiev, Moscow, St.
Petersburg, and Sweden, skirting Napoleon’s empire, always just a few weeks ahead
of the Grande Armée. Unpolished as it is, Ten Years of Exile provides the best entry
into Madame de Staël’s thought and life. The new edition is invaluable. The noted de
Staël scholar Simone Balayé has restored the passages cut by Auguste de Staël
from the first edition for fear of compromising those still living or his mother’s
memory. Avriel Goldberger’s translation is fluid and does justice to Madame de
Staël’s alternately breathless and concise style. The energy of the writing in this
memoir, its characteristic blend of history, travelogue, psychological insight,
cultural
analysis, and the heightened sense that, from her vantage point, politics was indeed
"a matter of proper names," all combine to give the sense of a mind as a force of
nature÷"a whirlwind in petticoats," as Heine said. Ten Years of Exile also contains a
telling anecdote. For many years Joseph Bonaparte managed the delicate balancing
act of remaining both Madame de Staël’s friend and loyal to his brother. In the early
days of the Consulate he relayed to her a conversation he had had with Napoleon.
"My brother is complaining about you . . . " Joseph told her. "Why," Napoleon had
asked him, "why does Madame de Staël not go along with my government? What
does she want? . . ." "Good Lord," she answered, "the question is not what I want,
but what I think." And Madame de Staël was constitutionally incapable of not saying
what she thought. Germaine de Staël was destined to have strong opinions and to
voice them, not simply through her gifts, but also through rigorous training. She was
born Anne-Louise Germaine Necker in 1766 to Swiss Protestant parents. Her father,
Jacques Necker, made his fortune in banking before serving as Louis XVI’s reformist
finance minister. Despite an uneven political career, he was for a time immensely
popular, not least for having floated the insolvent government during a crisis with a
loan of two million francs, one half of his personal wealth. His wife, Suzanne, a
pastor’s daughter and former governess, managed to establish the leading salon of
Enlightenment Paris with the Encyclopedists and philosophes, scientists, and
diplomats in regular attendance. Seated on a stool next to her mother every Friday,
Germaine was expected to join in the conversation. By the time she was eleven, she
was on familiar terms with Diderot, d’Alembert, Gibbon, Helvétius, the abbé Galiani,
and Mme. du Deffand. Suzanne Necker had decided to raise her daughter by the
educational precepts (for boys, of course) in Rousseau’s Emile. Germaine was
taught to think for herself and trust her own conscience. Along with instruction in
English and Latin, she was given a demanding reading list in those languages and in
French. She was also required to write a report for her mother of every sermon she
heard and play she attended. These were corrected and returned. But her mother
could not be satisfied. At thirteen, the intellectual strain became too great and
Germaine suffered a breakdown. A playmate was found for her, and she soon
recovered, but her mother did not. Years later, when complimented on her
daughter’s accomplishments, Madame Necker replied, "It is nothing, absolutely
nothing beside what I had hoped to make of her." In 1786, the twenty-year-old
Germaine married the Swedish ambassador, Baron de Staël-Holstein. It was a
marriage of convenience. He was able to pay his gambling debts and further his
political career. She acquired a title and, later in her life, some measure of
protection
through her status as wife of a foreign diplomat. They had one daughter, who
survived only eighteen months. Madame de Staël’s four other children were fathered
by her lovers. Albert and Auguste were Louis de Narbonne’s sons. (The Marquis de
Narbonne was, himself, the illegitimate son of÷most likely÷Louis XV.) Albertine was
Benjamin Constant’s daughter. And Alphonse was the Lieutenant Rocca’s son.
Society was outraged, not by their illegitimacy, for that was not so unusual, but by
Madame de Staël’s openness about their origins. She and the Baron de Staël were
soon estranged, although they intermittently maintained social proprieties. By the
age of twenty-two she had firmly established herself on the literary scene with her
Letters on J. J. Rousseau (1788). But she was soon caught up in the turbulence of
the day, as the age of politicians had arrived. Madame de Staël welcomed them into
her salon, which soon eclipsed her mother’s. Her efforts to establish a constitutional
monarchy, as well as her title as baroness, made it impossible for her to remain in
France after 1792. She helped many aristocratic friends escape and emigrated for
several months to England. Her outspokenness, rather than any effective political
actions, brought on the hostility of each of France’s successive governments.
Madame de Staël’s ability to influence the opinions of those who attended her salon,
regardless of their political convictions, was so feared that she was never able to
remain in Paris for long. The Committee for Public Safety under the Terror banished
her from the capital in 1795, as did the Directory a year later. In 1794, she met
Benjamin Constant. The two became political collaborators serving the elusive ideals
of 1789. Madame de Staël helped get him named to the Tribune and wielded an
indirect and, admittedly, unreliable influence through him. Although she initially
found
Constant physically unappealing÷he was apparently as "appetizing as a freshly dug-
up carrot"÷she succumbed to his intellectual charms and they eventually became
lovers. For the next fourteen years, they were alternately in each other’s arms and at
each other’s throat. On his triumphant return from Italy in 1797, Napoleon was
embraced, not least by Madame de Staël and Constant, as the savior of the republic.
She was instrumental in orchestrating the events leading up to the coup of 18
Fructidor and, hoping to increase her influence, had her former lover Talleyrand
named Minister of Foreign Affairs. Madame de Staël zealously praised and courted
Napoleon until he became First Consul in 1800. In her subsequent disillusion and
growing hatred, she would later downplay her role in his rise and the enthusiasm she
had felt for him. Madame de Staël wrote prodigiously throughout the years of
political turmoil, and none of her works, even those she tried to rid of overt
political
content, endeared her to the authorities of the moment. Her study, On Literature
Considered in Its Relationship to Social Institutions (1800), in which she relates the
literatures of France, Italy, and Germany to their particular religions, customs,
governments, and even climates put her on shaky ground. Just as she believed man
to be continuously perfectible, so too could republics become increasingly
enlightened until they achieved her ideal of national freedom enhanced by intellectual
cosmopolitanism. This article of faith recurs in various degrees in all of her many
books. Napoleon, who relied on nationalist fervor for his political goals, always
believed such implicit messages to be part of Madame de Staël’s plot to undermine
him. Her epistolary novel Delphine (1802), for example, irritated Napoleon, for more
than her dedication of the book to "the France of silence and enlightenment." He had
just signed the Concordat with the Pope, and here was a novel arguing for divorce
and praising Protestantism and the constitutional monarchy of his archenemy
England. Her years of exile and sustained harassment began a year after the novel
appeared. In 1803 Napoleon exiled her to twenty leagues, roughly fifty miles, from
Paris. At any time, Madame de Staël might have eased her sentence by remaining
silent, but she could and would not. In fact, she consistently tried Napoleon’s
patience with secret forays into Paris, of which his spies kept him well-informed, or
by inching ever closer, accepting the hospitality of friends who lived at twelve, ten,
and finally a mere two leagues from the city. Seven months after his initial decree,
the First Consul for Life increased the ban to forty leagues. The spymaster Savary,
Duke of Rovigo, was forced to remind Madame de Staël that even at thirty-eight
leagues, she would be their "lawful prize." She responded by returning from Blois to
Coppet through Orléans÷twenty-five leagues from Paris. She was a reluctant
traveler, but, in despair at the prospect of Switzerland’s cultural barrenness, she
embarked on a "miserable gypsy life" in search of intellectual and conversational
stimulations similar to those of Paris. Her travels to Italy gave rise to her second
and
immensely popular novel, Corinne, or Italy (1807). It is equal parts guidebook and
love story, well-padded with literary criticism, art history, social and political
commentary, and, again, numerous implicit jabs at Napoleon. The hero, Lord
Oswald, is Scottish, and England is constantly praised. The sole French character is
frivolous and overrefined. The Italians are praised effusively. Their past is a
glorious
one, Corinne explains in one of her many disquisitions, and while they may achieve
glory again, "in their present condition," that is, subject to Napoleon, "artistic
glory is
the only kind they are permitted." Edition after edition sold out, yet Corinne’s
greatest
influence was to be on the next two or three generations of women writers. Corinne
is the first fictional heroine who, as a woman of genius, is unapologetic about living
for her art. Her example was enormously liberating. The novel’s direct influence can
be traced through works of George Sand, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
Charlotte Brontë, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Willa Cather. Yet, Corinne is little read
today. Awkwardly plotted, meandering, and effusive, it is, in fact, almost unreadable
without some ulterior academic or historical motivation. Madame de Staël’s
defenders make a brave case for this novel, but without an understanding of its
historical context and its author, it is difficult to understand the excitement it
generated for almost a century. Madame de Staël’s next book was almost equally
influential. During her stays in Weimar, Frankfurt, Berlin, Munich, and Vienna, she
met nearly all of the prominent thinkers, writers, and artists of the German-speaking
lands. From her contacts with them, she compiled her monumental study of German
culture, On Germany. This work does contain many superficial or misguided
passages, yet by forcing new perspectives and new influences÷not to mention an
enormous amount of new information÷on the insular and stagnant French world of
letters, it transformed their cultural landscape. Napoleon had initially consented to
its
publication, provided she eliminate a reference to the Duke of Brunswick and "three
quarters of the passages in which she exalts England." But, exasperated by endless
petitions on her behalf, he had the entire edition destroyed along with the plates,
bankrupting the publisher and throwing Madame de Staël into despair. She managed
to rescue one copy of the manuscript, which she published to great acclaim three
years later in England in 1813. Coppet reached the height of its glory in the years
between 1807 and 1810 when the Coppet Group of writers and thinkers were at their
most productive. The best known of the Group, Benjamin Constant, the literary and
economic theorist Léonard Sismondi, and the translator and critic August Wilhelm
Schlegel were all in love with Madame de Staël÷Constant disastrously, Schlegel and
Sismondi hopelessly and unrequitedly. Not only did Madame de Staël provide a
home for the Coppet Group, she also welcomed the itinerant intellectuals and
aristocrats of Europe, regardless of their persuasions. She regularly hosted as many
as twenty guests overnight and forty for dinner. Surrounded by the "Estates General
of European thought," as Stendhal called the gathering at Coppet, Madame de Staël
met her final love. The twenty-three-year-old Genevan hussar lieutenant John Rocca
was struck by a coup de foudre at first sight of the forty-five-year-old writer. He was
handsome, unlettered, and an excellent horseman. Despite her failing health,
increasing opium addiction, and less than exclusive love, Rocca courted her
relentlessly. Six months after meeting her, he convinced her to marry him. Because
Madame de Staël did not want to jeopardize Albertine’s marriage prospects or the
government’s return of her father’s two-million-franc loan, they did not marry until
1816. Even then, the ceremony was kept secret until the release of her will a year
later. Yet Rocca guarded her devotedly and jealously for the five final years of her
life. By 1812, Napoleon had tightened the vise around Madame de Staël and her
situation was precarious. She was not permitted to travel more than two leagues (five
miles) from Coppet and began to receive word that orders for her arrest were
pending. She could not leave, however, because she was pregnant with Rocca’s
child and, at forty-six, was too old to risk traveling before the birth. She bore her
son
Alphonse in secret and kept him with her for several days before sending him to the
care of a pastor in a neighboring town. Still, only a handful of people knew of the
child’s existence. A few weeks later, she set out in her carriage for what appeared to
be an afternoon drive. Her son Auguste had managed to get passports under an
alias. Her escape was so well planned that the Prefect of Geneva did not realize she
had eluded his grasp for almost two weeks. She would not return to France or to
Coppet until Napoleon’s first abdication in 1814. Napoleon’s authoritarianism seems
positively benevolent compared with the variants of totalitarianism visited upon the
twentieth century, but its demoralizing effect on one raised by the principles of the
Enlightenment and habituated to the freedom of speech tolerated by the ancien
régime was devastating. Only too late did he realize his miscalculation in trying to
silence Madame de Staël with exile and relentless harassment. "I made a mistake,"
he admitted to his brother Lucien in a rare concession. "Madame de Staël raised
more enemies against me in exile than she would have in France." What emerges
most clearly from Ten Years of Exile is how much subtler and more incisive her
understanding of Napoleon’s character was than his of hers. The successive French
governments did not learn how best to manage this gadfly until the Bourbon
Restoration. When Louis XVIII heard of Madame de Staël’s intrigues and schemes to
safeguard Joachim Murat’s position as sovereign of Naples after Napoleon’s first
abdication, he informed her that "We attach so little importance to anything you do,
say, or write that the government wants to know nothing about it; nor does it wish to
give you any fear on this account, or even allow anyone to hinder you in any way in
your projects and mysteries." While Louis XVIII’s missive may have somewhat
defused Madame de Staël’s contrarian energy by dismissing rather than provoking
her, it does reveal a significant underestimation of her influence. Considerations on
the French Revolution would become a touchstone for the liberals under the
Bourbons. In her final years, her Paris salon became a classroom for the
indoctrination of the "Doctrinaires"÷Camille Jordan, Prosper de Barante, François
Guizot, and her son-in-law, the Duc de Broglie. These royalist liberals were
instrumental in ending the Bourbon rule and bringing the "Citizen King" Louis Philippe
to the throne in 1830. But Madame de Staël was not to enjoy Paris for long. In
February 1817, she suffered a stroke. Left paralyzed, she survived five months in
Coppet, surrounded by a few remaining friends and her family. Gangrene set in in
early July and she died on Bastille Day. Rocca survived her by only a few months.
Madame de Staël’s political influence faded by the mid- 1800s, but her life and
literary works, especially Corinne, transformed the lives of women readers for
generations. It is difficult to imagine, for example, Margaret Fuller, whom Emerson
named the "Yankee Corinna," embarking on her career as America’s first self-
supporting critic and foreign journalist without Madame de Staël’s example. Indeed,
Fuller’s life strangely paralleled her role model’s. Fuller’s father subjected her to a
rigorous intellectual regimen that brought her to the edge of nervous collapse. A true
daughter of New England Puritanism, Fuller’s affairs were purely cerebral, yet the
same voracious need for intimacy as Madame de Staël’s frightened off many friends
and suitors. Fuller was a scintillating conversationalist who inevitably charmed those
initially put off by her "rather mountainous ME." Once Fuller began publishing, she
was repeatedly derided for her homeliness and her assertiveness. "There are men,
women, and Margaret Fuller," Edgar Allan Poe declared. She championed women’s
education and was the first to introduce Goethe, Novalis, Herder, Schiller, and the
Schlegels to the New England intellectuals. The Transcendentalist movement that
was central to Fuller’s social and intellectual worlds for years is a variant, with
Unitarian overtones, of Madame de Staël’s enthusiasm. Fuller sailed to Europe in
1846 and soon joined the Roman Revolution against the domination of Austria and
France, all the while sending dispatches to the New-York Daily Tribune. She entered
into a secret marriage with a man ten years her junior who, though decidedly
unintellectual, was utterly devoted to her. She even bore a child in secret, barely
suspending her duties in a hospital for wounded revolutionaries. The eminently
pragmatic Margaret Fuller was clear-eyed about Madame de Staël’s weaknesses but
had enough spirit to rise to the challenge of her example. In Woman in the
Nineteenth Century, Fuller÷in her penchant for overheated prose, again, like
Madame de Staël÷wrote an assessment that remains as accurate today as it was in
1844.
De Staël’s name was not so clear of offense; she could not forget the Woman in the
thought; while she was instructing you as a mind, she wished to be admired as a
Woman; sentimental tears often dimmed the eagle glance. Her intellect, too, with all
its splendor, trained in a drawing-room, fed on flattery, was tainted and flawed; yet
its
beams make the obscurest schoolhouse in New England warmer and lighter to the
little rugged girls who are gathered together on its wooden bench. They may never
through life hear her name, but she is not the less their benefactress.
1TEN YEARS OF EXILE, by Germaine de Staël. Trans. from the French by Avriel
Goldberger, with an introduction by Simone Balayé and Avriel Goldberger. Northern
Illinois University Press. $45.00. Goldberger has also translated Mme. de Staël's
major novels, Delphine (De Kalb, Illinois, 1995) and Corinne, or Italy (New
Brunswick, New Jersey, 1987).
Return to article
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