The universe is in France; outside it, there is nothing.
GERMAINE DE STAËL
IN MAY 1795, Germaine de Staël wrote to a friend that she was ‘joyeuse, sur la route de Paris’. After nearly three years of exile, she was returning to the city she loved more than anywhere else in the world, the place that consoled her for the happiness that continued to elude her in her private life. Heavily pregnant, she had left blood-soaked Paris in September 1792, as the massacres spread across the city. She spent three months at her father’s house, Coppet, in Switzerland, waiting for her second son to be born, and five weeks later rushed to England to be with his father, her lover of four years, Louis de Narbonne.
Narbonne had not been waiting for her. Devastated by the news of Louis XVI’s execution, he believed that he had betrayed the royalist cause by not dying at the king’s side; he had little emotional energy left to devote to the woman who had persuaded him to change his political allegiances when they fell in love. The path of their affair, conceived at the start of the revolution, had followed its course from exhilarated optimism through passion and betrayal to resigned futility.
Germaine returned to Switzerland and to Monsieur de Staëlin the early summer of 1793, each brought back to their marriage by necessity rather than affection. Germaine, her reputation destroyed by her public devotion to Narbonne, needed the respectability of a husband; Éric Magnus, ruinously bankrupt and incapable of economy, needed his father-in-law’s millions.
Reluctantly reconciled to their rapprochement and excruciatingly aware that Narbonne no longer loved her, Germaine comforted herself by gathering together a group of friends at the house she rented near Coppet. ‘Talking seemed everybody’s first duty,’ observed a visitor, describing the way Germaine and her endless stream of house-guests followed no daily routine, instead meeting at meals to discuss, argue, debate and be dazzled by their hostess. ‘The only thing she feared was solitude, and boredom was the scourge of her life.’
For a long time she mourned Narbonne, her first adult love, and poured the pain she felt at the failure of their relationship into her work. On the Influence of Passions on the Happiness of Individuals and of Nations, begun in 1792 and published four years later, meditates with agonizing poignancy on the connection between passion and suffering and the impossibility for women–especially exceptional women–of achieving true happiness in both love and work. After Narbonne, as she put it, she had ‘to begin life anew, but minus hope’.
Throughout the autumn and winter of 1793 Germaine embarked on an expensive programme of expatriation, helping more than twenty friends and friends of friends escape from Terror-struck France. She paid Swiss men and women, specially selected to resemble the people they were rescuing, to travel to Paris, where they would hand their passports over to the person waiting for them who would then cross the border into Switzerland with legitimate, but wrong, papers. The rescuers would leave France either on forged passports or claiming that they had lost their papers. If there was a problem the Swiss border guard could confirm their identities. ‘There is, in the short span of existence, no greater chance of happiness than to save the life of an innocent man,’ wrote Germaine at this time. It was a sentiment with which Thérésia Tallien would have whole-heartedly agreed.
Mathieu de Montmorency, one of the most distinguished liberals of Germaine’s 1789 salon, was just one of the friends she rescued in this way. In the spring of 1794 he heard news from Paris that his brother had been guillotined; his wife and mother were still in prison. Gradually, Montmorency’s views changed. The former duke who had fought under Lafayette in the United States and demanded the abolition of aristocratic distinctions in France had become a committed monarchist, finding refuge from his political regrets in devout Catholicism. Montmorency’s wife and mother, saved by Robespierre’s fall, joined Germaine’s colony after their release from prison, soon after Narbonne’s long-awaited arrival there. Her heartbreak healing, Germaine had recently embarked on a liaison with a dashing Swedish count. Narbonne’s pique did not prevent him resuming his former affair with Mathieu de Montmorency’s mother. And so, notwithstanding the unusual circumstances, a strange harmony was restored to Germaine’s unconventional household.
This harmony was upset with the arrival on the scene of the gangling, red-haired Swiss Benjamin Constant, who called at Coppet late one autumn evening in 1794 hoping to meet the celebrated Germaine. On hearing that she had just left, he galloped after her carriage. When he caught up with her, she invited him to continue his journey inside. Thus began a conversation that would last for fifteen years.
Brilliant, precocious, eccentric and unstable, Constant found in Germaine his intellectual match and fell in love with her at once. In his unfinished roman à clef, Cécile, he described her when they met–she was twenty-eight, he a year younger–as being neither tall nor slender, with an unattractive complexion and strong, irregular features, but ‘the most beautiful eyes in the world, very beautiful arms, her hands a little too big but dazzlingly white, a superb bosom’. Despite her physical flaws, in animation she became ‘irresistibly seductive’, her ‘very sweet voice’ breaking endearingly when she was moved. ‘Her gaiety had an indefinable charm, a kind of childlike goodwill which captivated the heart, establishing between her and those she was talking to a complete intimacy, which broke down all reserve, all mistrust, all those secret restrictions, those invisible barriers which nature puts up between all people’.
Disinclined to relinquish her Swedish count, Germaine admired Constant but was unimpressed by his efforts to make her love him. Benjamin, she wrote to her lover, was dying of love for her ‘and inflicts his unhappiness on me in a way which removes his only charm–a very superior intelligence–and makes me in turn pity him, which in turn tires me’. If Count Ribbing heard that Constant
had killed himself in the woods of Cèry, which he has just rented so that he can spend his life in my garden and in my courtyard, do not in truth think it to be my fault [she continued]. I have praised him sincerely for his work entitled L’Esprit des religions, in which he shows a talent like Montesquieu’s, but [he] forgets that his looks are an invincible obstacle, even for a heart that did not belong to you.
This was harsh from a woman who was so insecure about her own looks that she could not bear to hear other women described as ugly.
When Constant was not tormenting Germaine with staged suicide bids (much as she herself had pushed Narbonne away with letters declaring her own desire to die two years earlier), their extended, impassioned conversations led to a productive working partnership. She and Constant, by this stage both convinced republicans, influenced and edited one another’s thoughts as they debated France’s future.
His influence on her thinking is evident in her December 1794 Reflections on Peace Addressed to Mr Pitt and to the French, in which she argued for an acceptance of the Republic as a fait accompli and urged its new rulers to create a constitution which would unite ‘the possible with the desirable’. Above all, she declared, peace must be achieved so that France–and Europe–could be saved. ‘If France crumbles, Europe must crumble,’ she wrote. ‘As long as one persists in pitting foreigners against them [the French] they will fight, they will win’, and French victories would spread revolution and unrest across the globe. She was delighted to discover that Pitt’s opponent, Charles Fox, twice quoted from her pamphlet in the House of Commons in March 1795 when he called for peace with France and stressed the need for morality in international relations.
Given her obsession with French politics, and the changed situation in Paris since 9 Thermidor, it is perhaps surprising that Germaine had not rushed back to re-establish her salon there. Certainly she had hopes of playing what her father worriedly called an ‘honourable and unexpected role’ in public life, and had ‘a secret plan to make yourself talked about’. But in May 1794 her mother had died, unregretted by Germaine but profoundly mourned by her father, and she was reluctant to leave him behind alone and grieving.
Instructed by the Swedish government to open communications with the new French regime, M. de Staël returned to Paris in January 1795. Against all his advice his wife, accompanied by her elder son Auguste and Benjamin Constant, finally joined him there five months later. On hearing the news that she had crossed the French border, Staël staggered into his secretary’s room, gasping, ‘Damnation! My wife is arriving!’
Germaine and Benjamin arrived in Paris five days after the Prairial risings to find the streets full of troops and the people sullen, resentful and starving. It was a strange, dislocated time. The fervour and focus of the Terror had been replaced by a strange lassitude, in which idealism had been replaced by bitter cynicism.
With both of their assets safely held abroad, for Germaine and Constant as for Thérésia, living was cheap. ‘What things a man could do here with 200,000 francs in cash!’ marvelled Benjamin. He took a large suite of rooms near the rue du Bac on the rue du Colombier, for which he paid one silver écu a month, while Germaine reinstalled herself at the Swedish embassy. They were the lucky ones. The once desirable neighbourhood of Saint-Germain was desolate and empty, its grand hôtels vacant, vandalized, pillaged, boarded up, posted with signs reading ‘propriété nationale’ and daubed with revolutionary slogans.
Almost immediately Germaine’s salon became a meeting-place for moderate political opinion, attracting many of the same people as La Chaumiére but there to talk politics rather than do business. ‘What do they do at Mme de Staël’s?’ asked a newspaper. ‘On s’arrange’–they place themselves, they improve themselves, they sort things out. Without disowning the friends of her caste, the royalist aristocracy, said Antoine Thibaudeau, Germaine was ‘frankly republican’. Her salon in the rue du Bac was ‘open to all parties’ and its hostess was forgiven this impartiality ‘by virtue of her sex, her wit, her talent, her principles’.
Germaine threw herself back into the social whirl. ‘Like the muse of history beside a dancing-girl of Herculaneum’, she visited her old friend Thérésia Tallien at La Chaumiére, thanking her husband for escorting her out of Paris in September 1792. She was horrified by the bals des victimes, but enthusiastically embraced the merveilleuses’ fashions: the following winter, having returned ahead of the new styles to Lausanne, she appeared in front of astonished guests at a ball in her honour clad in ‘flesh-coloured pantaloons that clung very tightly to her skin, and covered only with gauze, like the ballerinas at the opera’. The Grecian look Thérésia had popularized did not suit everyone as well as it did her.
‘We hear about nothing but Mme de Staël’s dinners,’ noted the Gazette de France. ‘We have even noticed that as a result of those charming evenings some of the men of the day are better turned out.’ Germaine had been compared to Circe, it continued, but unfairly. ‘Circe transformed Ulysses’s courtiers into bears [in fact pigs], whereas here Mme de Staël has almost managed to do the opposite.’
Bears had indeed changed into courtiers and courtiers into bears in her absence; Germaine found society much changed. Impoverished former aristocrats and returned exiles stood out despite the new plainness of their dress because of their innate elegance. Many of them were trying to recover lost fortunes, confiscated by the revolutionary government during the Terror. Germaine had her own case to pursue. Not only was Necker on the government’s proscribed list of émigrés, but when he had resigned from the ministry and left France in 1790, as a gesture of confidence he left behind the two million francs–more than half his own fortune–that he had personally deposited in the state treasury; this she hoped to recover.
Surviving Jacobins, over-sensitive to the nuances of polite society and unsuccessfully emulating the manners of the old regime, were often surrounded by aristocratic women hoping to obtain their help on behalf of ruined sons, brothers and husbands, pouring ‘graceful flattery’ into their ‘rough ears’. Those implicated in the Terror–like Tallien and Barras–excused themselves with inconceivable sophistry, arguing that they had sacrificed themselves for the public good or somehow been compelled to act as they did. Many admitted that they had failed to stand up against the horrors of the time simply out of fear. Little by little the new leaders of Thermidorian society were recreating a court with all its abuses, ‘only taking great care to appropriate them [the abuses] to themselves’.
The new constitution was submitted to the Convention in June 1795, the month after Germaine’s return; it was discussed as much in her drawing-room as in the halls of the Convention. All anybody on the streets wanted was a fresh start, free from the cursed legacies of both the ancien régime and the Terror, but the Convention decreed that two-thirds of the new Councils of Five Hundred and of the Elders would be chosen from among their number, rather than by general election. As Thibaudeau explained to Germaine, ‘the principles of the revolution must be abandoned, but power must stay in the hands of the men who made it’. Their hopes of succeeding to government by legitimate channels dashed, the constitutional monarchists began to consider seizing power by force.
As the remaining Jacobin deputies mustered their opposition to the proposed Directory which they feared would be dominated by counterrevolutionaries, Tallien (by this time openly associated with the right wing but distrusted by them for his revolutionary past) was publicly called a Septembrist and Germaine was accused of politicking and royalism as well as cuckolding her husband, and asked to leave Paris. Although she agreed to leave the capital, she did not go far, staying at Mathieu de Montmorency’s nearby château and continuing to involve herself in politics.
Knowing that the Jacobins would respond with brutal savagery to a monarchist rising, she warned her aristocratic friends to be careful. ‘They hate you more [than the Convention] and have hated you for a longer time…I foresee only bloodshed and the blood of my friends shed in vain.’ She counselled them not to try to force political change, but to wait until they could use legitimate channels to promote their interests. ‘To speak of the sovereignty of the people is something quite new for you,’ she told Thérésia’s friend, the royalist journalist Charles de Lacretelle. ‘You are fumbling with a language which they know better than you and which they created for their own use.’
Some listened to her advice, but others did not. In early October, after the election’s unpopular results had been announced, with the incoming councillors heavily weighted to former deputies of the Convention, several moderate Paris wards declared themselves in a state of insurrection and sounded the call to arms. On 4 October, as the rain poured down outside, the Convention granted Paul Barras emergency command of the army, making him responsible for turning back the muscadin-dominated insurgents preparing to march on the Tuileries.
Barras’s young protégé, Napoléon, was at the theatre when the note arrived commanding him to report for duty at once. According to Napoleonic legend, the unemployed general took his time to decide whether to join Barras or the forces opposing him. The day before he had told his friend Jean-Andoche Junot that if the rebels would make him their chief, he ‘would see to it that the Tuileries would be invaded within two hours, and we would chase those miserable deputies out of there’.
By the next afternoon (13 Vendémiaire Year III), when the rain had finally stopped and the fair-weather rebels prepared themselves to attack, Bonaparte was ready for them. For the first time in revolutionary experience, a popular offensive was met with gunfire–Napoléon’s celebrated ‘whiff of grapeshot’ that killed about three hundred rebels, dispersed the rest within a matter of minutes and confirmed the imminent ascendancy of Barras and the Directory.
Benjamin Constant and François de Pange, an old friend of Germaine’s with whom she was at this time unrequitedly in love, were arrested on the day of the attempted coup and only released after Germaine appealed directly to Barras. Despite her efforts to warn her royalist friends against challenging the Convention and despite her avowedly republican opinions, so many of Germaine’s friends were implicated in the Vendémiaire rising that she was labelled dangerous, ‘a corrupter of all those deputies she invites to dinner’ and ordered to leave France.
M. de Staël managed to obtain a suspension of the decree on condition he could persuade his wife to leave Paris voluntarily. She spent the autumn at a spa in Normandy and in early 1796, once her exile had been officially confirmed–M. de Staël may not have been entirely assiduous in his efforts to have it overturned–she went back to Switzerland after less than six months in her beloved Paris. She would not return for over a year.
On 3 November 1795 the Directory officially began and Paul Barras–the Don Juan of Jacobinism, as one of his many enemies dubbed him–became the most powerful man in France. He had informed the Convention before it dissolved that the man responsible for their deliverance was Napoléon Bonaparte, and requested that the young officer popularly known as General Vendémiaire replace him as Commander in Chief of the Army of the Interior.
The love affair engineered by Barras between Bonaparte and his mistress Rose de Beauharnais began at about the time of Vendémiaire. Rejected by Thérésia, Barras wrote, Napoléon began to pursue her friend, sending her cashmere shawls and diamonds purchased with his generous new salary as head of the French army. Each believed the other to have expectations of a fortune–expectations Barras, as confidant to both, did nothing to quell. Thirty-two-year-old Rose’s past did not deter Napoléon; as he said to Barras, he preferred love ‘ready-made’.
Napolèon had his own brusque methods of courtship. During the winter of 1795–6, magicians and fortune-tellers were all the rage. Thèrèsia and Rose both loved having their fortunes told, and Thèrèsia read the cards. One night at La Chaumière, Napolèon pretended to be a palm-reader. He took first Thèrèsia’s and then several other people’s hands, ‘inventing a thousand follies’. When he came to Lazare Hoche, an ex-lover of Rose’s and a military rival, his mood changed and he said curtly, ‘General, you will die in your bed.’ Less than two years later, his prediction had come true: Hoche, at only twenty-nine and one of the most talented and charismatic soldiers of his generation, had died of pneumonia.
Rose allowed Napoléon to seduce her, but, not in love, she was more wary about marriage. Eventually, counselled by Barras, she consented. The Scottish courtesan Grace Dalrymple Elliott, who also claimed to have rejected Napoléon, visited Rose while she was engaged, admiring an expensive blue and silver dress from England lying on her bed. ‘How could you marry a man with such a horrid name?’ asked Grace. ‘Why, I thought that he might be of service to my children,’ replied Rose. ‘I am going to dine at the Directory by-and-by, and shall go part of the way with Bonaparte.’
Barras wanted to use Rose–or Joséphine, as Napoléon called her, and as she would become known to history–to manage his impetuous, besotted friend. He waited until they were engaged before arranging for the French army in Italy to be handed over to Napoléon’s control. As Frénilly observed, Barras ‘got rid of her by giving her the Italian army as a dowry’.
Joséphine would disappoint her former protector, her extravagance forcing her to greater and greater follies of debt, scandal and pleas for intercession on her behalf. Despite their past relationship and his continued closeness to her during this period, in his memoirs Barras savaged Joséphine, describing her as a money-crazed nymphomaniac who deceived all her lovers with other men and never loved ‘except from motives of interest…the lewd Creole never lost sight of business’. Her charms, he said, were derived from artifice and cunning, and she was so jealous of Thérésia’s beauty that ‘they seemed, so to speak, to be waging a mutual war, even when they were actually sharing each other’s triumphs’.
Joséphine married Napoléon on 9 March 1796. The bride, wearing a white muslin dress with a tricolour sash tied beneath her breasts, and a medallion Napoléon had given her engraved with the words, ‘To Destiny’, arrived at the dingy mairie on time at 8 p.m. The groom, distracted by his invasion plans for Italy, was three hours late. Jean-Lambert Tallien and Paul Barras, Thérésia’s husband and her new lover, served as witnesses to the ceremony. Thérésia attended Joséphine; their bond was as close as ever. The complicated nature of their intertwined relationships bothered neither of them. For the moment, their friendship ran deeper than love affairs could touch.
By early 1796 Thérésia was established as Barras’s mistress. Although he was reticent about the exact nature of their relationship in his memoirs–and far more loyal to her than he was to Joséphine–they were frequently seen in public arm in arm. Thérésia made no secret of her disdain for Tallien and acted as Barras’s hostess at lavish receptions in his official apartments in the Luxembourg and at the house parties he gave at his country house, Grosbois (once the property of one of Louis XVI’s brothers), just outside Paris.
Thérésia was probably also taking other lovers, a circumstance which seems to have left the amoral Barras unmoved. ‘It was a known fact that Mme Tallien braved her husband to a certain extent, when she wished to love another than him,’ he wrote, commending her for preserving her decorum. Her liaisons, said Barras–and who knew better?–‘were for her genuine enjoyments to which she brought all the ardour and passion of her temperament’. In London, Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire’s sister Lady Bessborough heard that Thérésia ‘has not taken vows of chastity, but is not by any means as much the reverse as is pretended’.
Despite Barras’s detachment, or perhaps because of her passionate temperament, theirs was still a tempestuous relationship. Barras also took other lovers–men as well as women, it was rumoured, though no evidence of his homosexuality survives. Observers reported frequent arguments and reconciliations. But their mutual dedication was unshakeable, utterly different in nature from Thérésia’s relationship with her husband. She always concluded her letters to Barras with sentiments like, ‘I love you and will love you all my life, with a devotion nothing can touch’, and she meant it.
The intimacy of the little coterie at the heart of Directory life, centred on Thérésia, is revealed in the letters written to Joséphine by Napoléon from Italy in the spring of 1796. In the midst of white-hot protestations of adoration, in which Napoléon declared that he could not live without his Joséphine, he tortured himself by picturing her not thinking of him, imagining her with Thérésia, dining with Barras or playing with her bad-tempered pug. At the bottom of every letter were messages for her friends: remembrances to Barras, Thérésia, Tallien and often to their children. When seven-year-old Théodore de Fontenay started at boarding school Thérésia requested that he be allowed to share a room with Eugène de Beauharnais, Joséphine’s son, and Jérôme Bonaparte, Napoléon’s brother, so that he would feel at home.
Finally Napoléon persuaded Joséphine to join him on campaign. Thérésia invited her teenaged daughter, Hortense, to stay at La Chaumière while her mother was away, but Hortense was less malleable than her brother Eugéne. Assheputit, she ‘stubbornly’ refused, preferring to stay on at school for the holidays. Thérésia may not have realized it, but staying at La Chaumière would have ruined Hortense’s reputation.
Joséphine’s letters from Milan betray her homesickness. Despite the round of splendid parties held in her honour, she was bored to death, she told Thérésia; all she could do to cheer herself up was talk to other people about her ‘chère Thérésita’ for whom she was busy hunting out the antiquities that she loved. ‘Ah, if she were here, I would be more happy,’ she continued, asking for news of home, of Tallien, of Barras and of the children, especially her two-year-old god-daughter Rose-Thermidor, and lamenting her foolishness in marrying Napoléon. If it were not for him, she would still be Thérésia’s ‘dear little mother’, Joséphine wrote, referring to their ten-year age gap, and sending her ‘mille baisers bien tendres’. She sent a bolt of crêpe and a couple of straw hats back to Thérésia, some coral for Rose-Thermidor and cheeses for Tallien’s breakfast; she told Thérésia how happy she was to have received a letter from Barras, whom she adored.
To outside eyes, the almost incestuous nature of this dense web of relationships at the centre of the new government was evidence of its fundamental corruption, and Thérésia became the focus of a swelling tide of censure. Napoléon’s friend Junot described leaving Barras’s apartments in the Luxembourg, while Napoléon was away winning battle after battle in Italy, with Joséphine on one arm and Thérésia on the other. Hordes of people pressed in to stare, pointing Joséphine out as ‘Notre Dame des Victoires’–‘and see who is on the other side of the officer;–that is Notre Dame de Septembre!’
The press, too, for so long her champions, began to turn against Thérésia. In the spring of 1796 the Tableau de Paris, sarcastically listing her accomplishments, marvelled at how ‘a woman of so many talents has found the secret of boring all the world!’ At the same time, across the Channel, Thérésia’s exotic beauty was transformed beneath James Gillray’s biting pen into something altogether more coarse, reflecting the racism of the day, with thick frizzy hair and African features. Some years later, satirizing Napoléon’s rise to power, Gillray portrayed Thérésia and Joséphine dancing naked and bejewelled for a sozzled Barras while Napoléon peeped hungrily out from behind a curtain.
Thérésia’s evident adultery and her suspected promiscuity gave the press and the public ample scope for criticism. Early one morning, returning home alone from a ball, her dark red coach was attacked by thieves. An admirer who was following her chased them away. ‘Moved to tears at this proof of the young man’s solicitude for her welfare,’ Thérésia ‘insisted on his driving home with her’, reported the Petite Poste, adding that her cavalier did not leave La Chaumière until the next afternoon. ‘Her humanity is so general that she is now as unwilling that any man shd pine away in an hopeless passion for her, as she was anxious to save those persons who under Robespierre’s reign were destined for the guillotine,’ wrote one visitor to Paris. When she walked out in public, people stuck signs to her back reading ‘Propriété Nationale’ or ‘Res Publica’ [literally, ‘public thing’]. ‘They begin to make so many jokes about her that she is quite to be pitied.’ Confronted by rude and staring crowds, Thérésia maintained an extraordinarily dignified imperturbability.
Without naming her friend, even Germaine–one of the women to whom Thérésia attributed her initial fall from virtue before the revolution, and herself a notorious adulteress–bemoaned the erosion of manners and respect in Directory society. ‘How shall a pure and proud model of woman be found in a country where social relations are not guarded by the most vigorous propriety?’ she asked. In a republic, where distinctions between people are based solely on personal qualities, she argued, both men and women ought to be doubly scrupulous about their behaviour.
But despite the general denigration of her actions, Thérésia remained the most celebrated woman in Paris. She exemplified her age. When Lord Granville Leveson Gower arrived from London as part of a peace mission in October 1796 he told his mistress, Lady Bessborough, that Paris was ‘by far the most profligate place I ever set my foot in; there does not appear to be a remnant of any thing like virtue or principle’. All Lady Bessborough wanted to hear about was Thérésia Tallien: what she looked like, what she wore, how she behaved. Gower confirmed that she and Joséphine were ‘the only women much admired at Paris’, and added that his best chance of seeing them was at one of the public balls. Thérésia’s dresses all came from London, Gower reported, and he ordered a wig for his beloved from her wigmaker.
Thérésia’s perceived depravity mirrored the lavish dissolution of the society that both reviled and adored her. The Directory was a period of corruption and lassitude, its rule, in Tocqueville’s words, ‘nothing but anarchy tempered by violence’. The men who controlled its administration were ‘second-rate revolutionaries’ who occupied the government, but did not govern. Helen Williams said that some of them were former Jacobins who had sacrificed their principles for power, others were simply speculators and gamblers, while most were ‘indifferents, who, from a sort of benevolence of temperament generally voted with the moderate side of the house’ but who, when their stomachs started rumbling, would abandon the debates on which the salvation of their country hung, throw off their official robes, ‘and the first sound they utter is soupe à la tartare’.
Only the army (and the men who supplied it), sweeping to victory under Napoléon’s command, was thriving. Clumsy, inept laws were decreed and ignored by people who lacked the strength either to obey or to resist them. In February 1796 the assignats, the paper money on which the economy officially depended, were worth no more than they cost to print. The Directory government spent more time debating what its official costumes should be than in seeking to engage the exhausted, cynical public with their regime.
It was not until 1798 that the councillors and deputies began wearing their long-awaited uniforms, flowing red toga-style capes, ‘like tragedy heroes’, over blue coats, tricolour sashes and dramatically plumed hats. Since a man’s politics were thought to be revealed in his dress and demeanour, it was hoped that fitting out the nation’s leaders in classical dress would mould them into ideal classical rulers. But inspired by the same impulse to fancy dress that motivated Thérésia and the merveilleuses, the gilt-trimmed costumes’ very theatricality, according to one onlooker, prevented them from being ‘seriously dignified and truly imposing’. Barras, tall, elegant and deadpan, was one of the few men it suited–but he preferred to wear his own clothes.
Germaine de Staël, who had spent most of 1796 with her father at Coppet in Switzerland, talking, writing, finally falling in love with Benjamin Constant, and trying in vain to persuade the French government that she was a French citizen and thus could not be prevented from returning to the country of her birth–they countered that she was the daughter of one foreigner and the wife of another–arrived back in Paris in May 1797. She was eight months pregnant.
Although her husband was no longer Swedish ambassador, Germaine set up house once again in the rue du Bac, where she gave birth to a daughter with Benjamin’s flame-red hair. Within a week of her accouchement she was sending out invitations to dinner.
‘I still love this country,’ she had written to a cousin, when she crossed the border into France; she felt she had come home. ‘We have hardly any security, no money at all, and much discomfort. But there is meaning in the very air one breathes, there is energy, there is a kind of welcome from people known and unknown which one feels in one’s own country.’ Germaine found in France, she said, ‘more space to live in, less limited thinking even among common people; a sweeter air, what can I say?’
Recent elections had brought into the Directory, for the first time, a majority of constitutional monarchists. People began to parade their royalist sympathies openly, wearing black collars on their coats as coded mourning for Louis XVI or clothes embroidered with fleurs-de-lis or white plumes; ladies’ fans bore the spangled motto ‘Vive le roi!’ Returned émigrés made a point of speaking English to show that they had spent the revolutionary years across the Channel, even though most had not bothered to learn the language while they were there. ‘When in public we even made a rather amusing pretence of poverty, eating for instance, out of culs noirs, as though china were too costly. It was the height of good manners to be ruined, to have been suspected, persecuted, and above all, imprisoned,’ remembered Auguste François de Frénilly. ‘People greatly regretted that they had not been guillotined, but said they were to have been the day after or two days after the 9th of Thermidor.’ Even Barras was said to be prouder of his pre-revolutionary title of viscount than of being a Director of the new Republic.
In late 1796 another former aristocrat, Talleyrand, had returned to France from the United States, where he had spent some time with Lucy de la Tour du Pin and her family on their homestead in upstate New York. Germaine, who had been instrumental in having his name struck off the list of émigrés barred from returning to France, was delighted to be reunited with her old friend. She and Thérésia Tallien set about introducing him to Directory society, recommending him to Barras as a man–a republican–of talent and diplomacy. ‘No man,’ said Talleyrand, ‘could equal a woman in serving the interests of a friend or lover.’ Barras appointed him Minister for Foreign Affairs the following July, allowing Benjamin Constant (as a compliment to Germaine) to tell him of his new post. While they drove to the Luxembourg, so that Talleyrand could thank Barras for the appointment, Talleyrand could talk of nothing but the vast fortune he hoped to make.
Germaine continued what Joseph Fouché, once Barras and Tallien’s accomplice in Robespierre’s fall and soon to become Napoléon’s chief of police, called her ‘intriguing’ throughout the spring and summer of 1797. She was trusted by neither side. ‘Who has asked you to meddle in matters that are of no concern to you?’ demanded a royalist newspaper. ‘Miserable hermaphrodite that you are, your sole ambition in uniting the two sexes in your person is to dishonour them both at once!’
Despite the prominent social and cultural role seized by women like Thérésia during the Directory, as this attack on Germaine shows the misogyny that had characterized the early revolutionaries was still very much alive; it was one of the few attitudes shared by the Robespierrists of 1793–4 and the Directory government. In 1795, echoing Antoine Saint-Just’s views on female education, the Committee of State Education was hearing suggestions that schoolgirls should spend their time washing their brothers’ shirts. A report the following year confirmed that women’s principal role was that of mother. Female sexual desire was thus not only useless but dangerous, since it interfered with the fulfilment of their sole obligation to society.
Although Barras had praised Thérésia’s easy, uninhibited sexual nature he did not want to see women stepping out of a purely domestic role; part of his criticism of Joséphine stemmed from his disapproval of her using sex for gain. ‘Far from contesting the superior merit women may have displayed in the various ranks of society,’ he wrote in his memoirs, describing how he had pointedly declined an invitation from Manon Roland to dine at the Ministry of the Interior in 1792, ‘I have rarely found that their happiness or that of others was in any way bettered by their unsexing themselves and taking upon themselves men’s duties.’
During the Directory, as with the dissolute Barras, women were viewed merely as sensual creatures of emotion and superficiality. Only a few lonely voices dared contradict the prevailing view. Louis Theremin argued in 1798 that women had been ‘entirely neglected’ by the revolution, either because their indifference had been assumed or because they were thought to be unworthy of participating in it. Since the revolution, lamented Germaine, ‘men had found it politically and morally useful to reduce women to the most absurd mediocrity’. Theremin suggested that if women were given a stake in the new regime they might have an interest in its survival.
Louis-Sébastien Mercier condescendingly held that the reason women were supporting the counterrevolution was because, loving baubles like magpies, they had been distressed to see their lovers’ epaulettes, ribbons and robes swept away by the political changes. When ‘they perceived that there was something severe and serious in a revolution,’ he concluded, ‘they turned away from it’.
One female figure had quite literally turned away. In September 1792, the figure of Liberty chosen for the new national seal had stood proud and direct, facing towards the viewer with her pike at the ready in her hand. The Directory’s seal, by contrast, showed her turned away from the viewer, seated and pensive, a figure not of youth, courage and vigour but of matronly contemplation, even remorse.
Thérésia, Joséphine and the merveilleuses all personified the Directory view of femininity–indeed, they surpassed it. Despite their tender hearts and determined frivolity, their awareness of their beauty and its worth, of the power of public interest in their private lives, was astonishingly modern. Through their creative patronage of art, architecture and design they shaped the image of the Directory that survives to this day, moulding an entire aesthetic movement. The column inches devoted to the ever-changing extremes of fashion during this time were just one indication of the contemporary obsession with women and their place in society.
Some onlookers saw this as a positive development–‘Never have women occupied public opinion in a similar fashion; never have they influenced affairs in so apparent a manner,’ wrote one journalist–but others disagreed. ‘The Pompadours, the Dubarris [sic], the Antoinettes return to life, and they are the ones who govern,’ raged the Tribun du Peuple, ‘and who kill your revolution.’
Cultured, exclusive courtesans in the tradition of Mme de Pompadour and Mme du Barry had returned to high society; indeed many saw Thérésia herself as no more than a high-class prostitute. She played on these assumptions, dressing for parties as Aspasia, the Greek courtesan who became Pericles’ consort. Barras also compared his mistress to the hetaerae of ancient Greece. When he saw Thérésia and Talleyrand tête-à-tête at the Luxembourg, he called her his ‘beautiful Athenian’ and asked her if she wanted to govern like a second Aspasia.
Such comparisons were not always complimentary. A pamphlet addressed ‘to the greatest whore in Paris’ reviled Thérésia for her ‘revolting’ voluptuousness, her impudence and her decadence. ‘Your whims and your tastes are more closely observed than the decrees of the government,’ stormed the anonymous author, who signed himself Beelzebub, demanding to know who paid for her jewels and accusing her of corrupting innocent young men. The prostitutes on the streets were angels compared to her, he continued, and Thérésia set them their example. Lower-class whores flooded Paris’s streets in the late 1790s. They teemed beneath the arcades of the Palais Royal among the ice-sellers, pickpockets and lottery-ticket vendors–looking like cheap versions of Thérésia and her friends with their ‘breasts uncovered, heads tossing, colour high on their cheeks, and eyes as bold as their hands’–whispering obscenities to male passers-by.
The prostitutes interrogated by the police were on average in their early twenties and came mostly from the provinces. They had had no one to fall back on in Paris when they lost their position in a household or were left pregnant by a lover who failed to marry them as he had promised. Driven on to the streets because they could not afford to buy food or had a baby to feed, they lived desperate, itinerant lives, sleeping where they could find a bed, stealing handkerchiefs or a loaf of bread if an opportunity arose, and always hungry. Their experiences underlined the vulnerability of women in revolutionary France and the hazards and insecurity facing them in a society that valued them so little.
It was these frightened, lonely young women who drove up the suicide rates. Richard Cobb gives the example of Louise-Émilie-Charlotte Harmond, aged fourteen, whose body was fished out of the Seine at Sévres in July 1799. The description of the clothes she was wearing when she died survives in poignant detail: the embroidered muslin dress over a toile slip stitched with her initials, a pair of dirty cotton stockings and shoes, a scarf of blue and white striped silk around her neck, and a tiny piece of soap wrapped in chiffon.
All through the spring and summer of 1797, émigrés streamed back into Paris and the royalists mustered their strength. Lucy de la Tour du Pin and her husband came back from their farm in the United States hoping to recover some of their lost fortune. One new way of making money was surprising and unwelcome to her: when she landed in France Lucy sent for a hairdresser, who astonished her by offering her 200 francs for her long fair hair. The blond wigs popularized by Thérésia were still the height of fashion.
One of Lucy’s first calls was to La Chaumière to thank Thérésia, to whom she owed her escape from Bordeaux. Thérésia, who was just pregnant (probably with Barras’s child), wept as she told Lucy how unhappy she was with Tallien, describing what she called his unreasonable suspicions, the speed with which he took offence and how he threatened to kill her when he was jealous. The scenes she had enjoyed provoking in Bordeaux had acquired a dark new import; on one occasion, when she arrived home late after a party, she had been forced to flee the house as he loaded his pistol. That March, she had instituted divorce proceedings against him on the grounds of irreconcilable differences but, persuaded out of it by her friends and hoping they might still make peace, she abandoned them soon afterwards.
Other observers confirm that Thérésia was, during this period, trying in vain to justify why she had felt obliged to marry Tallien in the first place, saying that she had never loved him but had sacrificed herself ‘to his wishes in order to spare the blood of many who were likely to be victims of the then established tyranny’. As Lucy was leaving La Chaumiére, Tallien arrived. Frostily, she thanked him for the favour he had performed for her in Bordeaux and he replied that she could always count on him.
The elections had brought a majority of moderate royalists into the two houses of the Directory in April 1797, and only the Directors themselves (three of the five, Barras, Louis La Révellière and Jean-François Reubell, were committed republicans) stood between them and control of a France longing for a new regime of peace and stability. Lucy was amazed to see how indiscreetly confident her former friends were, loudly discussing their hopes and plans in front of servants and republican deputies. When she told them she was sure Talleyrand knew of every plot they were hatching, they laughed at her. Nearly every day she saw Germaine, whom she described at this time as ‘all powerful’.
Over the summer Barras, supported by his two fellow-Directors, Talleyrand, the republican deputies and the army, decided that military action was the only means by which he could safeguard the Republic and his own power. In early September, as the streets filled with soldiers and the air of crisis intensified, Barras advised Thérésia, who was seven months pregnant with his child, to leave Paris for a few days. On the night of 3 September, Barras dined with Talleyrand, Germaine and Benjamin Constant, while outside the army, commanded by one of Napoléon’s officers, peacefully occupied the city. Paris awoke the next day (18 Fructidor Year V) to discover its walls plastered with justifications of the coup and the news that anyone wishing to restore the monarchy or the 1793 constitution would be shot without trial.
About midday Lucy de la Tour du Pin and a friend, dressed inconspicuously, set out through streets full of soldiers to call on Germaine and find out what was happening. They were forced to take a circuitous route, as so many roads were blocked, and as they walked they were terrified by a ‘number of those horrible women who appear only during revolutions or disorders, [and who] began insulting us, shouting “Down with the royalists”’. Much shaken, they arrived at the rue du Bac to find Germaine and Constant arguing about the inevitability of the coup and its possible repercussions.
Germaine’s fears about the consequences of the coup were realized the following day when Barras and the Directors re-established their control over the dispirited and passive deputies. Prominent royalists were deported; press censorship was re-imposed; the spring elections were proclaimed invalid; and, on pain of death, refractory priests and returned émigrés were ordered to leave Paris within twenty-four hours and France within a week. The Republic’s triumph had come at a price. Individual liberties and the principles of liberalism had been sacrificed, and Napoléon’s support for the coup had left the government dangerously in his debt. As Barras had predicted earlier in 1797, ‘we will all perish by the generals’.
Lucy de la Tour du Pin and her family were once again trapped without passports in a France hostile to their cause. Her husband approached Talleyrand who, despite the fact that he had spent the day of the coup playing whist, was too preoccupied by his own future to help anyone else. Remembering his previous helpfulness, Lucy went to see Tallien, who drew up a statement outlining their circumstances and delivered it by hand to the Minister of Police, returning it with his signature and recommendation to her after several anxious hours and with a note apologizing for not having been able to do more. ‘The end of the letter,’ she wrote, ‘might have been construed to mean: “I wish you a good journey.”’
Given the state of his marriage and the damage that helping royalists would have done to his shattered political career, it is surprising that Tallien was so ready once again to help his wife’s aristocratic friends, but he seldom refused an appeal to his heart. Victorine de Chastenay was another desperate young woman who asked for Tallien’s assurance after Fructidor and found him a gentle, obliging, trustworthy man–a far cry from the violent, gun-brandishing monster depicted by his unhappy wife or the self-serving hypocrite painted by his political enemies.
After Fructidor, Germaine fell once again under official suspicion. Extremists of both sides portrayed her as an intriguer and a threat to political stability. Despite her republicanism, her closeness to Talleyrand and Barras and the fact that her salon had been at the centre of the government’s plans to crush the counterrevolution, she continued to make every effort to help and protect her royalist friends, calling it a woman’s duty to come to the aid of her friends whatever their opinions, and even enlisting Thérésia’s help in obtaining the release of Charles de Lacretelle and a friend of his. Talleyrand observed with his customary cynicism that Germaine enjoyed throwing people overboard simply to have the pleasure of fishing them out of the water again. Only Barras’s generous arguments on her behalf prevented her arrest.
Fresh from his victorious campaign in Italy, three months after Fructidor Napoléon returned to Paris a conquering hero, clothed like a wolf in the guise of a man of peace and humility. He pretended to be prouder of honours such as his election to the newly created academic Institute of France than of his military triumphs. Affectedly republican, he made a point, at a time when using ‘Citoyen’ as a form of address had fallen into disuse, of continuing to address people thus. The general rejected the ostentatious fancy dress so beloved of the period, wearing austere, modest clothes, appearing on even the grandest of occasions in a plain grey greatcoat. His carriage, drawn by just two horses, was conspicuously unadorned.
Germaine was as enthralled by Bonaparte as was the rest of France. She spoke the words on everyone’s lips when she told a friend in July that he was ‘the best republican in France, the most-freedom loving of Frenchmen’–the man who could save France from itself. His ‘tone of noble moderation’, she said, inspired confidence: ‘in those days, the warrior spoke like a judge, while the judges used the language of military violence’. Having received no reply to the letters of admiration with which she had already bombarded Napoléon, apparently urging him to discard his ‘insignificant’ wife in her favour, she begged Talleyrand to allow her to be present when her hero made his first official call at his ministry on 6 December.
Still exhausted from his campaign and the journey back to Paris, a sallow Napoléon arrived at Talleyrand’s offices punctually at 11 o’clock. Germaine had been waiting there for an hour. For once, she was overwhelmed: the ‘confusion of admiration’ made her uncharacteristically speechless at first, and she found she had difficulty breathing when faced with those cold, marble eyes. But Napoléon ‘bestowed very little attention upon her’, as Talleyrand noted; he was more interested in meeting Talleyrand himself, to whose flattering letters he had been replying.
Subsequent encounters did not lessen Napoléon’s fearsomeness. Germaine, admitting that he ‘constantly’ intimidated her, sensed he was impervious to her charms. ‘I had a confused feeling that no emotion of the heart’–by extension, Germaine herself, the embodiment of passion–‘could act upon him’. He was, she felt, ‘not like a creature of our species’: ‘his face expressed a sort of casual curiosity about all those human shapes he planned to bring into subjection as soon as he had the power to do so’.
Still she persevered in the belief that he would one day recognize her worth, continuing to send him letters that he did not read and attempting to engage him in debate. One day, calling on him unannounced, she was told that the general was in the bath. To Napoléon’s horror, she tried to push her way upstairs, exclaiming, ‘Genius has no sex!’ Joséphine’s daughter Hortense said that Germaine pestered Napoléon so much during this period ‘that he did not, and perhaps could not, sufficiently try to hide his annoyance’.
On 10 December a reception was held for Napoléon in the courtyard of the Luxembourg palace. When his distinctively simple carriage drew up, the crowds outside cried, ‘Vive la République!’ and ‘Vive Napoléon!’ Talleyrand introduced the victor of Austria and Italy to the audience of dignitaries gathered in the courtyard as the ‘son and hero of the Revolution…Far from fearing what some would call his ambition, I feel that the time will come perhaps when we must tear him away from his studious retreat.’ After Talleyrand’s hymn of praise, Napoléon allowed himself to be persuaded, with a great show of modesty, to speak a few terse words.
Talleyrand also gave a magnificent, old-fashioned ball in Joséphine’s honour on 3 January that heralded the return to Parisian society of the spirit of the ancien régime. As at Versailles, only the ladies were seated at dinner; they were personally served by the male guests, who stood behind their chairs. The treasures Napoléon had looted in Italy were on prominent display. A daring, delicious new dance imported from Germany, the waltz, was danced in Paris for the first time that night.
After dinner Germaine, undeterred as ever, accosted Napoléon and asked him which woman he loved most. ‘Madame, I love my own,’ he replied stiffly. But which did he most admire? she persisted. ‘The one best able to look after her household,’ he said. Well, who was the greatest woman in history? ‘The one, Madame, who has had the greatest number of children,’ he replied, turning on his heel and leaving her, taken aback, to gasp, ‘Extraordinary man!’ at the small crowd of onlookers who had gathered to gape at the encounter.
It is unlikely that Thérésia attended Talleyrand’s ball because she had recently given birth to a stillborn baby, probably Barras’s, and had retreated at his suggestion to Grosbois to recuperate. An English visitor saw her at another party later in the month, looking, despite the pearls and diamonds in her hair, embattled, tired and preoccupied. Even republican wives disdained to visit her, he reported, and she was frequently exposed to unpleasant scenes and confrontations.
Recognizing that the time was not yet ripe for a seizure of power, Napoléon kicked his heels in Paris in the early months of 1798. When Talleyrand suggested that he invade Egypt, cutting off British routes to India and establishing a base from which to harry them in the Mediterranean, he adopted the idea enthusiastically. Between them, in March, they convinced a reluctant Directory to approve their notion, and secret plans were put in place for the campaign. The ambitious expedition was to be funded by annexing Switzerland and its rich resources of gold. Germaine managed to get an appointment with Napoléon to try to dissuade him from invading, but as ever with him her impassioned appeals fell on deaf ears. He would only repeat to her that the Swiss–who had been the happy citizens of a thriving republic for centuries–needed ‘political rights’.
Germaine returned to Coppet in time to be by her father’s side as they watched the French troops marching into Switzerland, listening to the army’s drums sounding out along the tranquil shores of Lake Geneva. By special order of the Directory, Necker was left undisturbed. For Germaine, the only positive consequence of the invasion was that Swiss citizens were automatically granted French citizenship. Against her better judgement, her dreams of officially belonging to France had finally been realized.
Napoléon left France in May, mystery swirling around him like dust. Jean-Lambert Tallien followed a few weeks later. Tallien had lost his seat in the Council of Five Hundred and hoped, on foreign fields, to rebuild his career. The night before his departure, Victorine de Chastenay saw him at Barras’s, where he still came, she said, ‘with an appearance of friendship–but bitterness in his soul’. She had few hopes for her friend’s future; life in a camp ‘sans épaulettes’ would not be easy.
Tallien wanted a fresh start. The six years he had spent in the service of his country, he told his mother before leaving, had brought him nothing but ingratitude. Intriguers and rogues were the only people who flourished in times such as theirs, but he would never be either. He assured her that he would find friends among Napoléon’s companions; he intended to establish himself in the world not only for his own sake but also for his children’s. Circumstances demanded this heart-breaking separation from all he held dear, he said, but he was resolved to bear it and return to the bosom of his family a changed man in two years’ time.
As his letter to his mother showed, Tallien still hoped that he and Thérésia had a future together. After the catastrophic French defeat by the British under Nelson at the battle of the Nile on 1 August, which he watched from the shore, Tallien wrote to his wife. He did not know, he said, whether she had yet received his previous four letters. Life in Egypt was hard, he told her: far from home, deprived of water, food and sleep, tormented by insects of all descriptions, of the forty thousand Frenchmen there were not four who did not wish themselves elsewhere. As for him, he wrote, although he had their little dog Minerve with him, he missed ‘notre charmante Chaumière’ twenty times a day. ‘Farewell, my good Thérésia, the tears drench my letter,’ he concluded. ‘The memories of your goodness, of your love, the hopes of finding you again still affectionate and faithful, of embracing my dear daughter, are the only things that sustain the unfortunate Tallien.’
The letter never reached Thérésia; it was intercepted by the British fleet. The following spring she began an affair with the young banker Gabriel Ouvrard, who had made his fortune in paper and then in supplying the French army and navy. They had known each other since the first careless days at La Chaumiére. Barras stood aside with no ill-will, having them to stay at Grosbois together. In Feburary 1799, according to Thérésia, Ouvrard took her to a beautifully fitted house on the rue de Babylone and handed her the keys; she said that he had bought it for her because she had helped him so much in his work. In fact it was Barras who had paid for the house. Apparently unaware of his wife’s new domestic arrangements, Tallien would remain in Egypt for three years.
He was away almost as long as Germaine, who stayed at Coppet with her father throughout the spring of 1798, to the delight of the republican press. ‘The baroness among baronesses, the pearl of her sex, the divinity of oligarchs, the favourite of the God of Constancy, the protectress of the émigrés, in a word, the universal woman has at last left France,’ hissed the journal Amis des Lois. ‘Hapless Frenchmen, you will not see her again.’
Over the next eighteen months Germaine made regular experimental forays back to Paris, retreating at hints from the police or warnings from friends, and never able to re-establish herself securely in France because the government made it clear to her that she was not welcome there. Her ‘intriguing’ was seen as perfidious and her writings incendiary. Hell, she wrote, began to appear to her ‘in the shape of exile’.