7

GERMAINE DE STAËL’S GERMAN LESSONS

In the world of influence and the transmission of ideas, it is good to be rich, and Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker de Staël (1766–1817) was one the richest—materially and intellectually.¹ (See figure 7.1, Madame de Staël.) Without question a giant of her age, de Staël wrote novels featuring beautiful, smart, and independent protagonists who star as foremothers for women writers to come. Reaching across time and space, her work has inspired women writers as various as George Sand, George Eliot, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Willa Cather. De Staël also furnished a template for the American transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, the brainiest in her company of elevated spirits.² All of that was yet to come, but in her own time de Staël also built the crucial conveyor belt between German thinkers of all kinds and a vast audience of lay readers in France, Britain, and the United States who lacked direct access to writing in German. She publicized the genius of Goethe, the naturalist religion of transcendentalism, and the way of categorizing Europeans as members of several different races. Her book De l’Allemagne (On Germany, 1810–13), in particular, forms the vital link between German and non-German intellectuals.

Possessing “a European spirit in a French soul,” Germaine Necker displayed a passionate intellectual curiosity early on.³ Her mother, Suzanne Curchod Necker (1737–94), nurtured Germaine’s intelligence, exposing her to the best minds (Denis Diderot, Jean D’Alembert, Claude Helvétius, and other luminaries frequenting Madame Necker’s salon) and encouraging her even as a child to write novels and poetry. Such nurturing came naturally to the phenomenally wealthy Necker family. Jacques Necker, a Protestant banker originally from Geneva, had made a fortune in the financial world and gone on to serve as controller general of finances for Louis XVI. When Germaine at age twenty married an aristocratic Swedish diplomat, her husband received a dowry of £80,000, the equivalent of more than US$1.5 million in the early twenty-first century.⁴*

Fig. 7.1 Germaine de Staël as Corinne, by Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, French painter of the aristocracy, ca. 1807. Oil on canvas, 140 x 118 cm.

Although her husband soon squandered the dowry, Madame de Staël still continued to enjoy ample wealth and a large retinue throughout her life. She lived in her own château, traveled in comfort, and met other aristocrats on an equal footing. (She and her fellow exiles ran short of money while in England in 1792 only because the revolutionary government froze her French accounts.) Towering German intellectuals served her pedagogic needs. She learned German from Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Berlin aristocrat responsible for Prussia’s educational system and the founding of the University of Berlin and brother of the noted traveling scholar Alexander von Humboldt.* She also employed August Wilhelm Schlegel, a poet and critic known as an originator of German romanticism, as her son’s tutor.

Because she was a woman, descriptions of de Staël always mention her appearance. More charitable observers balance their evaluation of her looks with an appreciation of her brilliance. One 1802 visitor noted, “The man who should murmur against her lack of beauty would fall at her feet dazzled by her intellect. She was born an intellectual conqueror.”⁵ The English avatar of romanticism, Lord Byron, thought she towered over all other women, concluding, “She ought to have been a man.” Like most of the men she encountered, Byron found her “overwhelming—an avalanche.”⁶ Her first American biographer, the American feminist abolitionist author Lydia Maria Child, began her 1832 study of de Staël as follows: “In a gallery of celebrated women, the first place unquestionably belongs to Anne Marie Louise Germaine Necker, Baroness de Staël Holstein.”

But brilliance could not outweigh the nearly universal impulse to make unattractiveness—she was a fairly ordinary-looking, slightly plump matron—Madame de Staël’s main characteristic. Maria Child chose to note only her “finely formed hands and arms,” which Child described as “of a most transparent whiteness.”⁷ In linking transparency to whiteness, Child employs a trope of white beauty whose illogic has not diminished its longevity. Transparent skin—skin with a minimum of melanin—is not white. Instead, it reveals the subcutaneous body as a mottled pink, blue, and gray. This is the “blue” of blue bloods.* On the other hand, the appearance of whiteness, of light skin color, requires some melanin to mask the darker blood vessels and flesh underneath. Thus, the metaphor of “transparent whiteness” may signify an idea of perfect whiteness in language, but it has little to do with actual physical appearance.

 

DE STAËL matured during an age of literal revolution. The French Revolution, starting in 1789, with its Enlightenment ideals of human equality and brotherhood, reinforced trends already underway. On one side, it undercut arguments supporting slavery and inequality, fostering emancipation even in places beyond the reach of French power. On another side, however, French revolutionary ideology annoyed conservative believers in natural human hierarchy. De Staël rather tended toward the liberal side, but her lofty social status also attracted trouble.

In fact, de Staël fell quickly on two wrong sides of turbulent French politics. The too radical and too bloody revolution trampled her preference for a constitutional monarchy, which she loudly proclaimed. Her opposition to tyranny, her defense of unlimited freedom of speech, and her outspokenness as a woman made her persona non grata first in Paris and then in all of France. At least she had places to go: fleeing Paris in 1792, she crossed over to England and then doubled back to her family’s château at Coppet, Switzerland. Her parents, originally from the Lake Geneva region, had purchased the Coppet château on the lake before the revolution.

Returning to Paris in 1794, after the Reign of Terror, she leaped into politics, promoting Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup in September 1799 (or 18 Fructidor, according to the French revolutionary calendar) and maneuvering her former lover, the agile aristocratic diplomat Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand into his post as minister of foreign affairs. But politics did not occupy de Staël totally. Her literary career took off commercially with two novels, Delphine (1802) and Corinne (1807). Both feature the aforementioned brilliant, free-spirited, autobiographical heroines who soar intellectually and emotionally but must eventually fall victim to their limitations as women. Delphine and Corinne were widely translated and widely read, but Corinne became so famous that the very name still symbolizes a smart, independent-minded woman. This was not a figure likely to please Napoleon, whose relationship with de Staël quickly soured.

In a conflict of the “Emperor of Matter vs. the Empress of Mind,” Napoleon disapproved of Madame de Staël for almost two decades, from their first meeting in 1797 until his ultimate downfall in 1815.* Toward the end of his life Napoleon reread her Corinne, reminding him what he thought of her: “I detest that woman.”⁸ Ostensibly it was her outspoken opposition to his policies and her Anglophilia that motivated his persecution, but he also simply could not stand a woman who was so loud.

And de Staël did talk incessantly, about politics and anything else. A friend called her a “talking machine.” To the men who heeded her views, her femininity seemed less essential than her intelligence. Although three children survived her, she failed to embody one of Napoleon’s fundamental womanly ideals: fecund motherhood. In 1803 he forced her to put 150 miles between herself and Paris. So she went to Weimar, in the Saxon center of German romanticism starring the poets Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller, and on to Berlin, where she associated with the brothers Schlegel and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, inventors of early German romanticism, with its nature-centered themes of transcendentalism.

De Staël had already written a study of European literature, De la literature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (literally “On Literature Considered according to Its Relationship to Social Institutions,” usually translated simply as On Literature, 1800). This work examines the literatures of Italy, France, and Germany; because Germany was only just becoming visible as a source of interesting literature, German intellectuals appreciated notice from a representative of French letters, even an exile. Even a woman. The success of On Literature and the warmth of its reception in Germany inspired three German research trips, in 1803, 1804, and 1807, in preparation for de Staël’s greatest work of nonfiction, De l’Allemagne (On Germany).

During most of Napoleon’s reign de Staël remained exiled outside her beloved Paris, her book on Germany unpublished. Napoleon had seen to that, ordering the destruction not only of the entire 5,000-copy print run of On Germany but also of its plates and manuscript. Fortunately de Staël somehow managed to salvage the plates and manuscript for later publication. Such a severe blow to her writing raised fundamental questions: Should she admit defeat, give up on life in Europe, and start afresh in the New World? She and her seventeen-year-old son, Albert, secured passports and prepared to immigrate to the United States.

 

IN 1810 de Staël wrote to President Thomas Jefferson, saying she and her son planned to make a life in the United States. The president and de Staël were not strangers. Decades earlier he had frequented her Paris salon. In a warm return letter Jefferson assured her that her military-aged son would find a good welcome in the United States. About Madame de Staël herself, however, he said nothing, a silence that spoke volumes about the current state of American society. Jefferson knew de Staël could never have survived a long stay in such a crude land. Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, one of de Staël’s closest friends, had spent much of 1795 in the United States as a young man, and the experience had driven him to a singular conclusion: “If I stay here another year I’ll die.”⁹ Certainly, no American city of the early nineteenth century could give de Staël the brio she enjoyed in Paris. Furthermore, by 1810 not only was de Staël no longer young—at forty-four years old—but she was also addicted to opium, and fragile in health. She obviously needed her brilliant retinue as much as her European setting.

De Staël actually owned land in upper New York State on the shores of Lake Ontario, purchased in 1800. An important factor in this purchase had been one of New York’s founding fathers, Gouverneur Morris (1752–1816), whom de Staël’s family had met in the early 1790s when Morris represented the United States in France. Ever the booster, he urged the rich Neckers to invest in American land. After de Staël and her father did so, Morris advised them on the management of their holdings.

Boosterism notwithstanding, Morris joined the chorus advising de Staël to stay put. During his years in Paris, Morris had experienced the gulf between American and French levels of sophistication. In the Necker/de Staël salon at Coppet, the “Estates General of European Thought,” Morris felt like a provincial bumpkin: “I feel very stupid in this group,” and “I am not sufficiently brilliant for this consultation,” he wrote in a letter back home. Hardly a dull American, Morris at home belonged to the highest reaches of American society. He had attended King’s College (now Columbia University) and studied with New York’s most prominent lawyer. No mean wordsmith, Morris wrote the phrase “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union.” Among Americans, Morris could never be a bumpkin. But even upon its highest summit, American society lacked the brilliance of de Staël’s French milieu. Morris described her salon as “a kind of Temple of Apollo.” Utterly lacking counterparts in the United States, she would wilt and die, for Americans “are ignorant of the charms of good French society.”¹⁰

Over to the east, Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s leading poet, drew parallel conclusions. He had seen how the cream of Russian society bored de Staël to death when she visited there as a refugee from Napoleon’s France in 1812. Moscow’s best and brightest had tried to entertain her, but Pushkin realized they were simply not good enough: “How empty our high society must have looked to such a woman!…not a thought, not a remarkable word during these three long hours: frozen faces, a stiff attitude. How she was bored!”¹¹ Over time, Americans and Russians would often find themselves equated as members of young and promising, but crude, societies.

In any event, Madame de Staël did not immigrate to the United States. In fact, she never even visited or wrote a book about the United States and its people.* She continued to hold strong opinions regarding American society, however, and viewed slavery as the country’s weak spot. In Considérations sur la Révolution française (1813–16) she glimpsed the possibility of American future greatness, but with a major caveat: “There is one nation that will one day be truly great: that is the Americans. Only one stain obscures the perfect reflection that brightens that country: it is the slavery that still exists in the South.”¹² Unlike many others, she could not separate the institution of slavery from the meaning of the United States as a society.

 

MEANWHILE, THOUGH Napoleon foiled the intended French publication of De l’Allemagne in 1810, it did appear in London in 1813. In the early nineteenth century the rest of the Western world was waking up to the value and power of German scholarship, but knowledge of it remained shadowy in France, Britain, and the United States because very few non-German intellectuals read German. Some means was needed to internationalize German thought and views. De Staël’s accessible introduction to German thinking filled that need.

De l’Allemagne/On Germany took the British intelligentsia by storm. France, the rest of Europe, and a number of cosmopolitan Americans began singing its praises. The reason is not hard to see. First, many of de Staël’s readers largely shared her unrepublican inclinations and thus her conservative picture of German thought. Importantly, her chapters on German mysticism and enthusiasm (“God in us”) introduced Americans to what became known as transcendentalism. But for our purposes, her discussion of race, which appears at the beginning of On Germany, is paramount.

 

VARIOUS ANALYSTS had, through the years, posited a varying number of European races. De Staël chooses three—Latin, German, and Slav—tracing differences between them to climate, government, language, and history. In her view, Roman dominance (political and religious) had shaped the Latins—Italians, French, and Iberians—and endowed them with earthy interests and pleasures. Being proud, she explains, the Germanic or Teutonic races—Germans, Swiss, English, Swedes, Danes, and Dutch—had long successfully resisted Roman conquest and Christianization. In the process, Germans had grown more adept at abstract thought than Latins and more deeply marked by medieval chivalry. Regarding the Slavic race—led by Poles and Russians—de Staël has little to say, for she considers Slavs too new and unformed a race to have struck a balance between their European and Asiatic components.¹³

Much of de Staël’s racial commentary in De l’Allemagne flows directly from one of her prime advisers on German thought, a little remembered bicultural counterrevolutionary from the French-German boundary region of Lorraine who thought the French ought to take lessons from the Germans.¹⁴ After a career in the French military, Charles-François-Dominique Villers (1765–1815) had begun studying at the University of Göttingen at the late age of thirty-one in 1796. Between 1797 and 1800 he was a prime contributor to the Hamburg Spectateur du Nord, journal politique, littéraire et moral, in which he published some sixty articles.¹⁵ These articles cover much of what de Staël relates in On Germany.

Villers had first come to de Staël’s attention as an essential guide to the notoriously difficult philosophy of Immanuel Kant. In addition to several short pieces on Kant, Villers published La Philosophie de Kant, ou Principes fondamentaux de la philosophie transcendantale in 1801, and he began corresponding with de Staël in 1802 after reading her De la literature, with its survey of the literature of Germany.* Thereafter, Villers guided de Staël through German thought; in return, On Germany includes a note praising him as one always at the forefront of all “noble and generous” views: “he seems called, by the grace of his spirit and the profundity of his studies, to represent France in Germany and Germany in France.”¹⁶

As a member of the reactionary, race-obsessed Göttingen circle of Christoph Meiners, Charles Villers felt certain that race determined culture. In an 1809 essay on German history and literature, he divides Europe between two opposite “peoples,” one Gallic, the other Germanic. To Villers, Gallic literature encompasses the empire of reality, while the literature of Germanic peoples encompasses the empire of ideas. According to Villers, “our little Europe” includes two neighboring peoples whose “genius and character [fall] at the two extremities of the intellectual line which it is given to man to traverse. These are the French and the Germans…[who] offer in their general ideas and the views which they take of life such contradictions and such total opposition, that it appears as if all means of understanding one another were impracticable, and all efforts to do so superfluous.”¹⁷ Four years later, de Staël repeats this supposed contradiction in On Germany.¹⁸

De Staël also reiterates Villers’s definition of romanticism, but in better French; she preferred to speak of enthousiasme. Villers had so thoroughly Germanicized himself that he expresses his contempt for the French language by speaking of “la Romantique,” a suspiciously German turn of phrase. The French romantisme is a masculine noun; the German Romantik is feminine. De Staël Villers’s view that German romanticism has grown out of a native national literature based on medieval chivalry and Christianity—never mind the definition of Germans as people who had resisted the Romans and their Christian religion. This she contrasts with Greek and French classicism.¹⁹

The theme of French/German opposition resonated throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in belles lettres, anthropology, war, and peace. Until the turn of the nineteenth century, the genealogy of European genius and the source of its power had run directly back through the French Enlightenment and the Italian Renaissance to Greco-Roman antiquity. Villers, de Staël, and their followers took another path. In their view it was medieval northern European paganism that fueled the fire of nineteenth-century greatness.* Paradoxically, perhaps, enthusiasm for the Dark Ages and its pagan barbarians increased as northern Europe grew richer and more powerful.

For the most part, Charles de Villers’s influence on On Germany remains in the background, much like his colleague Christoph Meiners’s near-invisibility in the anthropological work and Caucasian theories of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. By contrast, another rising leader of German letters stands at the forefront of On Germany’s text.

 

NORTHERN GERMAN genius needed an iconic figure to make the Meiners-Villers-de Staël race theory work, and it found one in the person of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. On Germany contains a chapter on Goethe’s intellect, additional chapters on his principal writings, and excerpts from his work. De Staël concludes, “Goethe alone can represent the whole of German literature,” for he “possesses all by himself the principal traits of German genius.”²⁰ Goethe, as we have seen, was closely associated with the town of Weimar in eastern Germany, and the German cultural renaissance was centered in Saxony. For the purposes of the present book, we need to keep in mind the existence of three different Saxonys. One Saxony, important for Europeans, would remain anchored in this eastern German province bordering Poland, with Dresden and Leipzig prominent as central Europe’s richest cultural and mercantile cities. Another, western Lower Saxony produced the Hanoverian kings of England and the University at Göttingen. The third Saxony, the mythical homeland of the medieval Saxons of England, lay on the western side of the Germans lands, off between Denmark and the Netherlands on the North Sea. This third, obscure Saxony towered in importance only in the minds of British and American Anglo-Saxonists.

De Staël had admired Goethe’s work since the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), praising its “sublime combination of thoughts and feelings, enthusiasm and philosophy.” In return, Goethe had reviewed Delphine positively.²¹ Yet their personal relationship did not run smoothly when de Staël came to Weimar in 1807 to work on her German book. Goethe avoided her as long as possible. When she finally caught up with him, he found her hard to take, despite respecting her as a celebrated French intellectual at a time when the French led the world intellectually. She talked too much; she clung too fiercely to her own convictions (she let it be known that Goethe spoke most brilliantly only after finishing off a bottle of champagne); she did not, in short, defer to him sufficiently.²² In the end, however, On Germany pretty well satisfied Goethe as a means of increasing German national self-esteem after its Napoleonic manhandling in 1806–07 and perpetual intellectual subservience to the French—and, doubtless, as a very nice puff piece for himself.

De Staël’s admiration of Goethe as the quintessence of German genius contained serious contradictions. On the one hand, she conveyed his Winckelmann-inspired fascination with ancient Greece into the nineteenth century. On the other, however, she accepted Villers’s depiction of romanticism as quintessentially German, stemming from medieval Christianity. On Germany promotes romanticism (briefly) and depicts classicism (at length) without ever solving the long-standing ancient-medieval contradiction.* Greeks and Germans frequently appear together in De l’Allemagne, as though modern Germans descended from ancient Greeks. They stayed together in the nineteenth century, as On Germany soared in influence.

The cosmopolitan American abolitionist author Maria Child reckoned that de Staël did “more than any other mortal to give foreigners a respect for German literature, and German character.”²³ And, indeed, de Staël did. London’s first edition of 1813 sold out in three days. French and German editions appeared in 1814. Positively and internationally reviewed in 1814, On Germany inspired at least five pamphlets within a year and remained the most traveled route into German thought—the bible of the romantics—well into the 1830s.²⁴

 

DE STAËL not only introduced German thinking to Westerners who did not read German; she clearly located German genius in northern, not southern, Germany. She found energy and imagination in the north, whereas Vienna, the cultural capital of Germany, seemed stuck in a monotonous, Frenchified past. In this way de Staël replaced Vienna with Saxon Weimar, Dresden, and other northern German intellectual centers where the identification between Germans and ancient Greeks flourished. She made German genius Saxon.

It was by virtue of such influences that, by the nineteenth century, virtually all Western belletrists echoed de Staël’s and Villers’s location of worthiness in the north and frivolity in the south. German theory thus inspired writers in English, and English thinkers, in turn, passed along to Americans German theories of racial meaning. With German assumptions at its base, Anglo-American thought thoroughly incorporated notions of personal beauty as an index of inner worth and of ancient Greeks as perfect beauty’s singular representation.

And that was important because, while lofty themes of ancient Greek beauty and German theories of race originated worlds away from the muddy facts of American life, by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Western intellectuals were recognizing the United States as an important white outpost. Race theory there fell on fertile ground, for the emergence of class as a dimension of race thought was already underway across the Atlantic.