In the Considérations sur la Révolution française, Madame de Staël refuses to separate out her own family romance from her analytic reflections on history and politics. Her family romance and political or historical theory not only complement, but mutually constitute each other. This strange dialectic may make Staël’s history less than legitimate in the context of historiographical tradition, but it also engenders a different kind of history, less restricted in its self-definitions, in its ways of knowing and expression.
Her father, Jacques Necker, the popular Finance Minister on the eve of the revolution, embodies within him the key connection between the modern state and its new reference, public opinion. Her mother, Madame Necker, shows her daughter a space where this public opinion is formed in the presence of women, the salon. Daughter Germaine does not just synthesize these influences, for they are both inadequate to the full realization of the revolution Staël would like to articulate herself. But she has a rival: Napoleon.
Father/Trust
As Louis XVI’s Director General of Finances, Necker understood the way public borrowing would change the political situation. Staël recounts her father’s analysis of the historical conjuncture that produced the interdependence of fiscal planning and people: “for no country can nor should wage war with its revenue alone: credit is therefore the true modern discovery which has linked governments with peoples.”1 Modern warfare made old resources of tax collecting inadequate; like the first investment companies (proto-trusts in which Necker participated), the monarchy needed the promise of future funds. Thus, it had to instill confidence in its people. Necker knew that the original trust between king and subjects derived from those long-forgotten medieval pacts or charters. Moreover, his daughter, Madame de Staël, became one of the first and most articulate political thinkers to remind the French of their basic liberal heritage: “It is liberty that is old [ancienne], and despotism that is modern” (70). Necker added the modern twist of money, which should have given the king more impetus to cooperate.
According to Necker (as read by his daughter), public opinion was a kind of national credit rating. If the population supported the state, the state could raise money. By the second half of the eighteenth century, the relationship between opinion and credit was like two sides of the same coin: “Opinion and credit, which is only opinion applied to financial affairs, became more essential each day” (79). Etymologically both public opinion and credit have to do with belief, with the trust between participants that creates the integrity of the nation. The credibility of a government depends upon the people’s belief in itself, and this confidence establishes the state's credit line.
Necker, not Mirabeau or Robespierre, incarnated, in Staël’s view, the true principles of the new society. The Finance Minister warned the king that he should make the national budget public. In these times of upheaval, Necker never lost sight of the true political north, the direction of the future, what he and his daughter called l’esprit public or l’opinion publique: “M. Necker constantly studied the esprit public like a compass” (134). Necker was a member of that esteemed group, first among equals, whom Staël names the “true friends of liberty” (386). And in principle this group never erred in its judgments and never misread the compass of opinion: “The true friends of liberty are enlightened in this regard by an instinct which does not deceive them” (386).
As the revolution progressed, however, that public esprit became harder to read, so the “cause” of freedom became obscure: “The fear of counterrevolution had unfortunately disorganized the esprit public: one didn't know where to grasp the cause of liberty between those who dishonored it and others accused of hating it” (332). Are the “true friends of liberty” unaffected by this eclipse of liberty in a present confusion where neither opposing attitude corresponds to the freedom it is supposed to represent? In the face of this crisis, Staël needed to keep some (symbolic) figure uncontaminated, someone she could trust to read opinion—why not her father? These political beliefs of father and daughter did not prevent them from being accused of occupying the false alternative of the political right: “those who hate liberty.” The walks with daddy “under the tall trees of Coppet” (258) provide the calm in the storm. Necker, the model of exile in Switzerland, would always appear to his daughter as “this large shadow that is there on the summit of the mountain, and that points a finger to the life of the future” (389). That finger was Stall’s compass. All this gives Necker more legitimacy as the real father of the French Revolution. Even Napoleon said so: “Bonaparte indicated M. Necker as the principle author of the revolution” (378).
Necker is so closely linked with the revolution in Staël’s story that his second exile seems to trigger the march to the Bastille. “As soon as the news of M. Necker’s departure spread around Paris, they barricaded the streets” (161, July 11, 1789). A few days later, on his return to Paris after the king recalls him, women kneel all along the road at the carriage’s passage. By the time Necker arrives at the Hôtel de Ville on July 30, he is given a rousing hero’s welcome. The extraordinary scene parallels that other scene of apotheosis, equally ambiguous in the later histories of Cabet, Michelet, and Blanc: Marat’s triumph after his acquittal (April 24, 1793). The scene also anticipates Lamartine’s illusory victory in the exact same spot, February 1848. Staël’s history pivots around these scenes, familial or more often self-dramatic. They cannot be extracted from the analysis;2 indeed, they are integral to the analysis, despite or because of their excess and melodrama.
After pleading inside the Hôtel de Ville for amnesty (reminiscent of the old Swiss tradition of the fourteenth century confédérés du Rutli), Necker appears on that famous balcony amid the cheers and hysteria of the crowd. The phantasmic joy of the crowd brings about a complete political union, also sexual in its connotations, which expresses the daughter’s desire. Or rather, the daughter represents in one intense figure the symbolic total adherence of the crowd’s gaze. “M. Necker then came out onto the balcony and proclaimed in a loud voice the saintly words of peace among the French of all parties; the entire multitude responded to this with emotion. I saw nothing more after that moment, because I lost consciousness from so much joy” (168). The moment of communal and personal ecstasy blends into a universal swoon. But the gaze in Staël is not simple, as Nancy Miller and Naomi Schor have demonstrated in their respective essays.3 The protagonist loses consciousness in both climax and prohibition. No reader can look on this most public of private moments, or this most private of public moments.
Almost every history of the revolution has its apogee, the celebration of society’s union, if only fleeting and symbolic: the Tennis Court Oaths, the Fêtes des Fédérations, L’Être Supréme. And this moment often has sexual overtones, even if virgins present the bouquets. Unlike Michelet whose hero is le peuple of the fêtes, more like Cabet who places hopes on Robespierre, Staël preserves an individual leader in the midst of this scene. And this leader merges not only with the crowd but with an individual in the crowd, his own daughter, who also doubles as the ideal (female) reader. The high point of the new society would be like this intimacy of father and daughter, that kind of unspoken understanding. Foule would be no different from fille. This is an astounding metaphor for a goal of social, or revolutionary, communication. In Corinne, Staël reverses the fantasy, putting the woman in the center of the people-lover.
Staël’s Terror keeps that reversal of the woman—Staël herself—in the middle, but the fantasy has turned into nightmare. In the same square of the Hôtel de Ville, the daughter is almost the sacrificial victim of the radicalized revolution. Is that the punishment for the illusion of harmony the father tried to enforce—or for dreaming of putting him and so herself in the center, for usurping that sacred, paradoxical space of the popular democratic leader?
The rumors of the September massacres spread. On September 2, 1792, a pregnant Madame de Staël takes off in her biggest Berlin carriage with horsemen in their finest livery. She thought the spectacular effect would help, not condemn her. But did she also want to intensify the risk? Or do I suggest that she “asked for it”? Her carriage is stopped by the old harpies of the people and dragged slowly to that fateful square where the new Commune under Robespierre will verify her passport. There Madame de Staël emerges into “an armed multitude”: “I advanced under a vault of pikes.” A man lifts his pike that a gendarme blocks with his sabre: “It is in the people’s nature to respect what is still standing; but when the victim has already been struck, they finish it (her?) off” (285). Staël is like a doe being charged by hunters. Once inside the Hôtel de Ville, Manuel, a friend still in good graces, hides her and her maidservant in his office. Another man in trouble, a knight of Malta, very unchivalrously insists at the hearing that his case has nothing to do with that lady’s. He shamelessly abandons her. Such an experience inspires her vow to herself: “to be useful to myself” (285). This scene in which the female protagonist is given (reads) the lesson of vulnerability and betrayal is as troubling and suggestive as the apogee of her father.
Staël does a short analysis of the Terror as a throwback to the familiar tactics of the Old Regime. Michelet and Quinet take up this same interpretation and elaborate on it.4 The modern reader, however, does not share a horror for the Terror, especially when the Terror is rendered in overly dramatic—so almost comical—scenes like the one above. Already in her day, the fact that Madame de Staë1 linked the Terror up with the past started the process of assimilating it into the history of France, as Thiers and nineteenth-century historians after him also did without always meaning to. In the Considérations, the Terror occupies only two chapters in Part Three of a book divided between Necker (Parts One and Two) and Napoleon (Parts Four and Five). These proportions confirm that Napoleon instigates a more lasting terror for Staël than 1793.
Mother/Talk
A subhistory of the salon parallels the history of the revolution, if not the history of France; or rather, the salon represents a condensed version of that history, its essence. At first in the Considérations, the salon appears to be the private in opposition to public space, the living room as opposed to the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville. But when it works, the salon fuses private and public, personal and political domains, just as Staël’s Considérations fuses memoir and history, family and nation, anecdote and analysis. The year 1791 marks the height of the salon, the revolution, and French culture in general. But the salon, like public opinion—even like that symbol of public opinion, the father—could not keep up its reputation as the place of the “true” revolution. The brilliant conversation that inspired constitutions could turn into petty bickering over etiquette. Public opinion could become bitchy.
Madame de Staël got her training and aspirations from her mother’s prestigious prerevolutionary salon in Paris. At that time, artistocratic women held considerable social and political status that was, nonetheless, susceptible to being undermined—by none other than the father. “Women of a certain rank were involved in everything before the revolution. Their husbands or brothers always used them to go see the ministers; they could insist without violating decorum, go too far even, without anyone’s having reason to complain; all the insinuations that they knew how to make while talking, gave them a lot of influence [empire] on most of the men around. M. Necker listened to them very politely; but he was too smart not to unravel these ruses of conversation which produced no effect on enlightened and natural intelligence” (101). In this disturbing, almost schizoid passage, Staël begins by extolling women like her mother and ends by appearing to take on, hook, line, and sinker, the opposite judgment of her father. The women could go farther than the men in expressing their opinions. At the end of Staël’s long, impressive sentence, the metaphor of “empire” describes women’s power. But then comes the flip of interpretation: from female to male? All that talk, superficial complicity, really went nowhere, because the naturally smart men did not listen.
The parents’ culture taught the daughter this double standard. Women appeared to have power when they actually had none. One time Necker was upset because his wife went to plead at court in his behalf without his knowing. Was she more effective than he was? Was there a scéne de ménage when she got home that the daughter remembered? The daughter was smart, like her mother, and even more ambitious—was the daughter jealous that her mother could argue beyond the measure of decorum while she herself was constantly, rebuked? The men whom Madame de Staël wanted to impress humored her by pretending to listen: Necker and Napoleon.
In the early years of the revolution, the salon managed, however, to achieve its full, utopian potential. By then Madame de Staël had left her parents in Switzerland and set up her own coterie. Brilliant language, both talk and speech, characterized the period: “In no other country or time has the art of talking in all its forms been so remarkable as in the first years of the revolution” (228). Parliamentary speeches could spill over into the talk of the salon, and vice versa. If men ruled the Assemblée, women led the salon conversation even when the subject turned to politics. French women had an advantage over their British sisters: “Women in England are accustomed to being quiet in front of men, when it is a question of politics, the women in France direct almost all the conversations in their houses” (228). In her salon, Madame de Staël rivaled Mirabeau.
The revolutionary salon stood as the privileged place (the place of privilege) where public opinion shaped itself to the maximum satisfaction of all potentially hostile parties, left and right (male and female).5 In this hybrid public/ private space, public disputes could soften and blend: “Talk [la parole] was still an acceptable mediator between the two parties. … It is the last time and in many ways also the first, that Parisian society could give the idea of this communication of superior minds among themselves, the noblest pleasure of which human nature is capable” (229). Staël makes strong claims for this time and place as the one instance of true social communication. Whereas she participated in the jouissance that the communication of her father with the people generated in 1789, this pleasure, restricted but no less symbolic, is all hers. The utopian suggestion plays on a magic cord (Athenian?) in Madame de Staël’s work that returns at regular intervals: the communion of great minds together, in talk or, at the very least, in books. This social vision lacks modern class-consciousness, and I suspect that the “great minds” Staël has in mind are male. But she, the author, chips away at her own image of the ideal society as her history progresses. Even so, she needs that utopian reminder just as she needs the principles of liberty and true public opinion while her critique expands to ever-broader social forms.
If the fêtes of 1790 and 1791 are Michelet’s revolutionary high points and everything after is decline, or Robespierre’s social program is. Blanc’s, then the salon of 1791 is Staël’s revolution. Before Madame Roland’s prominence and unlike the people’s hero Théroigne de Méricourt, Madame de Staël was a power-broker of her time. The Constitution of 1791 was supposedly composed in part at her house. She and her lover Narbonne (the baron de Staël has long ago been left behind) seemed to command politics, foreign policy, and society from their room. Michelet titles a chapter of his history: “Madame de Staël and Narbonne in Power (December 1791-March 1792).”6 But the power does not stay forever, nor does the lover Narbonne.
In the same Considérations, the 1791 salon-society can also contradict that utopian space. The critique is clearer in Corinne where the salon is seen through the eyes of Oswald, influenced by D’Erfeuil. The Parisian revolutionary salon does not enhance public opinion, but degrades and deforms it. Critics Gengembre and Goldzink remark that “D’Erfeuil expresses how impoverishing it was for opinion to be assimilated into manners and decorum (convenances, bienseances)”7 High-minded talk of liberty slips into picky disagreements about social behavior. The salon is less a place of uplifting negotiation as one of social repression. Had that always been one of its functions, even in Madame Necker’s day? Did the mother try to give the daughter manners in her salon?
Staël does not clarify from where the reverse and negative judgment comes: “In the first years of the revolution, you could suffer somewhat from the terrorism of society” (481). The word “terrorism,” even if flattened into a catechresis, is too close to the Terror in this context not to take on some of its power. The place that situated the true revolution, the salon, is here closely related to its other, the Terror. In the context of the passage, société is a euphemism for salon culture, although it can also suggest that this particular society, the “aristocracy” of the revolution, serves as a synecdoche for the entire social body. In any case, are the people left out? On is either someone excluded from what might have then appeared to be even more brilliant and powerful because of the exclusion, or someone finally admitted into the salons without being able to keep up with the scintillating conversation: “The influence of women, the ascendency of the right company, what one vulgarly called the salons dorés, appeared formidable to those who were not admitted” (317). As these men, Jacobins, gained in political power, the women needed to flatter them as much as Old Regime ministers before. How can Madame de Staël separate herself and her own salon from this contaminated figure of the utopian space? Was the “terrorism” snide, ostracizing play or a serious political threat to those who did not respect salon values? Was the salon allied with a superficial, dying aristocracy, a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century custom, or was it the place where liberty traveled up from the ancient charters to modern liberal society?
The Directory proved to be as suspicious of salon conversation as the Jacobins were.8 In 1795 Madame de Staël managed to divert her order of exile, but in 1796 the police were supposed to arrest her if she returned to France.
Step-brother/Police
In the Considérations, the salon—its “terrorism”—was the only place of resistance left for the “friends of freedom,” led by outspoken women, when Napoleon consolidated his power. “The political personality most in contrast with the principles we just outlined” (394), Napoleon inverts Necker and all he stands for. In place of the sincere light of public budgets and common trust stands the dark slimy secrets of arbitrary decision: “In fact, if the friends of liberty respect opinion, want public information [publicité], look everywhere for the sincere and free support of the national wishes, it is because they know that only the dregs of souls show themselves in the secrets and intrigues of arbitrary power” (434). Whereas Necker respects, even reveres “divine” public opinion, Napoleon, figure of “the arbitrary without boundaries” (412), shows a total “indifference toward fate and disdain for men” (367). But, paradoxically, suspicion and an excessive system of security attest to the vulnerability of this indifference.
It is easy to criticize Staël’s analysis of Napoleon as being subjective, personal, and even based on that most irrational informant, the body. Jacques Godechot gives Napoleon’s response to Madame de Staël in the notes to his edition (“That woman is crazy”). The note makes it look as if Staël complained about Napoleon’s indifference because of the indifference he showed to her overzealous advances: “The general answered only with an indifference which is never forgiven by women” (Mémoires de Sainte Héléne, in Considérations, 651). Napoleon destroyed Madame de Staël’s letters so we cannot judge for ourselves.
In the Considérations, Staël recalls that every time she was in Napoleon’s presence, she had trouble breathing. She generalizes her physiological or psychological reaction to Napoleon as the effect he had on the society at large: “a difficulty in breathing which has since become, I believe, the sickness of everyone who has lived under Bonaparte’s authority” (358). Staël theorizes or transforms into social critique what could be read as a hysterical response to the all-powerful general. In the process, Staël renders the French body politic in a most concrete manner. Everything slowly suffocated around Napoleon: good writing, interesting conversation, and independent thought. Staël describes the desolation of any country under foreign occupation fairly early in her book, but that description begins to fit retrospectively more closely Napoleon’s regime, whether in an occupied country like Staël’s Switzerland or in Paris itself. People’s homes, their heads and hearts, are (as in World War II Paris) dominated by an inside/ outsider. The only response possible is silence; “As in prison where silence placates the jailors more than complaint, you have to be quiet as long as locks have closed down both feeling and thought” (190). All of Europe became a prison under the Occupation.
This was personally intolerable to Staël because Napoleon, the foreign usurper, literally “grafted” himself onto the tree of revolution. A kind of Tartuffe, he tried to slip inside the holy family and presented himself as rightful and natural heir to the revolution. The true daughter of the revolution—Swiss but more Parisian than the Corsican …—could not believe people were so blind to the hypocrisy of the false son. Staël was the chosen daughter of the revolution both literally and figuratively. She could see through Napoleon and accuse him: “Many said: he is the child of the revolution. Yes, doubtless, but a patricidal child” (420). Whereas patricide usually referred to the crime of killing Louis XVI, Napoleon killed the revolution that fathered him. If Necker’s exile prompted the fall of the Bastille, his death signals the end of liberty: “His life ended the same year as Bonaparte was going to make himself emperor” (391). The scandal of the Empire kills the old man on the Swiss mountaintop. Napoleon is not only Creon dealing with all the vengeful daughters rolled into one—Electra, Antigone, Cordelia—but a sibling rival. This rivalry between brother and sister, man and woman, gives a different twist to the tragedies.
A crucial passage in Staël’s chapter “De l’exil” (Part Four) analyzes the female resistance to Napoleon. Whereas at first she had effaced herself in front of her father’s work, here Staël finally brags. But hers is a strange claim to fame:
I was the first woman Bonaparte exiled; but soon after, he banished many others with the same opposing opinions. One especially interesting person, among others, the Duchess of Chevreuse, died from the heartache her exile caused.… And since, on the one hand, women could not further in any way his political plans, and on the other, (these women) were less accessible than men to fears and hopes which power dispenses, (the women) annoyed him like rebels, and he got pleasure from saying hurtful and vulgar things to them.… He retained his old behavior from during the revolution, a certain Jacobin antipathy against brilliant Parisian society, where women exercised great ascendency; he feared in them the art of banter (plaisanterie), which, we have to agree, belongs especially to French women. If Bonaparte had wanted to keep to his superb role of a great general and first magistrate of the republic, he would have soared with the elevation of a genius over the petty, sniping aspects (perils traits acérés) of salon mentality. But when he had designs on becoming an upstart king, bourgeois gentilhomme on the throne, he exposed himself precisely to the high-toned mockery, and he couldn’t restrain it except as he did, through spies and terror. (386–87)
The women, whom Napoleon disdained and didn’t listen to, had nothing to gain from him, so they formed the only possible enclave of independence. They were “like rebels”: the word rebelle, usually an adjective, is made for feminist politics. Their conscious, un-Freudian weapon was wit. The use of wit makes literal meaning hard to pin down in the tribunal. This witty, mocking passage itself is one of the best examples of what Staël means.
Bonaparte begins as the socially ill-at-ease, envious Jacobin. He tries to compete where he has no business competing and ends up looking foolish. In the salon of sharp-tongued, articulate women, the outflanked general resembles Molifère’s bougeois gentilhomme. Because there is a tiny place on earth where he does not excel and dominate, which humiliates him, he must stamp it out. But the salon is still an ambiguous place. Do the banter, snipping and mocking ton compose an organizable opposition or only aggravation? Whether mere distraction or rebellion, the salons elicit the response from Napoleon with which he is most at home: police terror.
Staël mentions in particular the Duchess of Chevreuse. In a note, Godechot tells us that the Bulletins of Napoleon’s secret police listed her in 1808 as “une des plus mauvaises langues" (658)—translated as “bad mouth” or “evil tongue”? How much worse a tongue did Madame de Staël have, whose salon bred conspiracy? In both 1802 and 1813, Madame de Staël tried to put her man, Bernadotte, on the throne, in place of Napoleon. Staël’s traveling salon (Germany, England, Sweden) could have helped crystallize the opposition that did eventually bring him down.
So exile defined Madame de Staël during the last years of her life (Dix annees d'exil, published posthumously). Add the exile of being a woman and the internalized exile of being a passionate, committed, smart, and powerful woman surrounded by silence. Daughter of the revolution, daughter of liberty, Madame de Staël was, like the “true” revolution, exiled wherever she went. She fills in the gap of exiles in the Swiss mountains between Voltaire and Quinet. She joins the grand tradition of exiles dating back to Dante and the Biblical Ruth. She stands beside the self-created giant exiles of her century, Chateaubriand and Hugo. Hugo’s poetic model of exile went back to Satan (La fin de Satan), echo of the révolte created by Milton whose work Staël also particularly admired. Rebuffed by each regime in turn, the endlessly exiled Madame de Staël settled on this aphorism: “Resist, keep resisting, and find the center of your support in yourself” (245). Not only the regimes, but the men she depended on—father, Manuel, Narbonne, Constant, Barante—were so many knights of Malta that (luckily) could not defend her. She is finally useful to herself. Staël held onto her Revolution through the perverse forms of the false revolutions: Terror, seedy Directory, stifling Empire, cynical Restoration. She was the revolution’s last activist and the first “intellectual dissident” (Pierre Barbéris’s term)9 of postrevolutionary, modern society. She could very well have written her own version of Hugo’s line: “S’il n’en reste qu’une, je serai celle-là.” (If only one is left, it will be me).
Daughter/Writer
The Considérations are Staël’s revenge on Napoleon, her way of competing with the little general, the illegitimate son, for the true heritage of the French Revolution. Napoleon and Staël were engaged in a duel not only for the memory of the revolution but for the future of France. Whichever side prevailed, Staël and the friends of liberty, or the partisans of the arbitrary, would decide the kind of society to come. They were engaged in an old duel, as proverbial as the game of paper, stone, scissors, to see who wins: pen, monument, or sword. In this ongoing struggle, conditions seem to favor the historian. The historical actor cannot defend his glory when he is dead. Chateaubriand delighted in calling himself Tacitus to Napoleon’s Nero. In the Memoires d'outre-tombe, more like the Considérations than any other book, Chateaubriand sees his mission in metaphorical, political terms: “When everything trembles before the tyrant… the historian appears, charged with the vengeance of peoples.”10 Here the historian assumes the same role in historiography as the hero in history (Charlotte Corday, Brutus). Along with her modesty, Staël, too, sees herself in no lesser light. But the joke is then on them, the historians, for the mortal combat of words and historical or literary tradition can never stop with any one. Chateaubriand and Staël become subject to interpretation and the projection of others’ desires and political agendas.11 Each in turn enters into the open cultural space of discursive competition.
Exiled from orality, Staël, like Corinne, turned to writing. Her writing, as Joan DeJean observes, retains the “openness” of the salon tradition from which it comes.12 But this displacement from orality to writing elicits even more repression. (During her life was she “exiled” as well into fiction, while Constant and Barante wrote political philosophy and history?) In 1802 Delphine may have incited Napoleon’s ire as much as had Necker’s Derniéres vues de politique et de finances. The 1803 order of exile demanding that she stay at least “40 leagues outside of Paris” was, in an approximate count, her fourth or fifth exile not counting Necker’s three in which she too participated. In 1810, Minister of Police Rovigo both exiles her from France and orders the destruction of any trace of De l’Allemagne. Then Napoleon extends his police to Geneva, and Staël is essentially exiled from her exile. At that point the only place left to go is England, by way of Moscow, Petersburg, and Stockholm. She begins the manuscript of the Considérations in Stockholm on the run. It will be published after her death (1818).13
It is hard to gauge what caused Madame de Staël the most suffering: interminable political exiles or attacks and ridicule heaped upon her work by the “literary police” (419). A sniveling host of little scribblers thrived in the wake of Napoleon’s power. Their newspapers, Staël laments, “harassed you with their state-ordered banter” (419). Is this barbed persecution the inverse of the bantering Parisian women perfected? The same weapon is put to the service of opposite values, on the one hand servility, on the other, independent thinking.
A fleeting but uncanny image of Madame de Staël in her own history haunts me as much as the one of Michelet brooding over the empty Champ de Mars or Hugo talking to the seawinds from his Guernsey promontory. On August 1, 1812, Madame de Staël arrives in Moscow just ahead of Napoleon’s continental forces. The text is uncanny because it superimposes one upon the other a double consciousness, that of Madame de Staël the character and that of Staël the narrator. They are different, in fact, extreme opposites. Like Carla Petersen’s reading of Corinne, the narrator achieves a victory the character cannot envisage.14
I was in Moscow a month, day for day, before Napoleon’s army entered, and I did not dare stop but a few moments, already fearing its approach. Walking on top of the Kremlin, palace of the ancient czars which looks out over the immense capital of Russia, and over eighteen hundred churches, I thought that Bonaparte would surely see empires at his feet, as when Satan offered them to our Savior. But precisely when nothing was left for him to conquer in Europe, destiny grabbed him up to hurl him down just as quickly as he rose. (430)
Madame de Staël, the literary character, is a breathless, terrified woman tearing across Europe like Frankenstein’s monster pursued by the master. She is also a little girl transgressing on the promenade of ancient czars and modern dictator. She imagines Bonaparte arriving at the Kremlin after her own flight; he is now conqueror of the world, like Christ to whom all the earth has been offered. But Christ resisted the temptation. Not Napoleon. And the little woman who rushes before him also comes after him as narrator and historian and (pre)knows his defeat there where she most trembled at his imminent victory. Now the writer can take pleasure at the certainty of her enemy’s downfall (at the time of her writing, Napoleon is at Saint-Héléne). The vulnerable female character turns into the victor of the victor. She did not flee Napoleon as much as lead him on to his demise. She becomes herself the ultimate Romantic epic figure of exile: a female Satan. In imaginary retrospect from her literary heights, she looks over the wide world of her readership from the Kremlin.
The unfinished Considérations ends in a situation of profound ambiguity. The concluding section, which I’ll call De l’Angleterre (counterpiece to De I’Allemagne), should have functioned as the synthesis French history was not able to achieve. English liberal democracy should have brought together both the legitimacy of public opinion and salon social space. But the implicit disregard for women’s opinion in the French prerevolutionary salon reappears explicitly confirmed in the British parlor. The reader is left, then, with Staël’s bitterness and rage—which other Romantic historians, too, express—when all the inspiration, promises, and efforts toward liberty end up in a post-Napoleonic society of complete political indifference, or worse: a total complicity with a naturalized repression.
Staël first attributes the reticence of English women to “custom,” but later she goes on to say that men who get their free speech back “naturally” reclaim their position of dominance over women: “(English) women are, in this case, extremely timid; because, in a free state, when men assume again their natural dignity, women feel subordinate” (556). Does this tricky sentence imply, first, that women are better off in societies without freedom (like Rosie the Riveter in a time of war) and, second, that men are “naturally” more dignified than women who are naturally subordinate?15 Again, is there irony here? Whether Staël accepts the ideology of “natural” oppression, she shows that gender roles are no mere quirk but fundamental to the system. The silence of women allows British society to function, is inseparable from its public political life, religious and moral supports.16 Liberalism, like the French Republic, depends upon the repression of women’s speech and political activity. In England, Corinne can no longer perform her stunning improvisations, and eventually her writing is stifled. This kind of liberalism is a kind of social, not just political, terrorism integrated so thoroughly into everyday practices that it is taken for granted.
The last chapter of the Considérations, “De l’amour de la liberté,” lyrically evokes liberty, still latent like public opinion and the “true” revolution but lost in the superficial, indifferent post-Napoleon French société. A sixteen-line sentence recalls in its rhetorical sweep all the time spent, sacrifices made, and even progress of the last twenty-seven years (1789–1816), if not centuries, which then funnel down to a shrug, the grande fatuite (Constant’s favorite theme, too)17 that so disgusted Staël about this new modern society: “When for so many centuries all generous souls have loved freedom; when the greatest actions have been inspired by it; when (etc.)… what can we say about these petty, extremely fatuous men who declare in a dull and affected accent like their whole being … that after all the horrors we’ve witnessed, no one cares anymore about freedom” (602). Staël recognizes like her other romantic colleagues that the revolution will not logically unfold as hoped for according to a public opinion that turns out to be much harder to read than originally suspected. Instead, the revolution is either deformed inside or remains radically outside a nonlinear history, in which essence and accident can switch places brutally or almost imperceptibly. In such a history, the revolution is not lost or discredited. On the contrary, it is what gives history momentum, if not meaning. This illusive quality of revolution and of democracy makes the history book all that much more important for nineteenth-century writers. For Staël, as for Michelet or Tocqueville, liberty lives, if nowhere else, at least in their writing.
Staël, like her nineteenth-century descendents, was obsessed with what it meant to be a postrevolutionary writer.18 She knew it meant praxis, something subtler and more influential than education, that ultimate nineteenth-century republican value. She wrote in Des circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la Révolution et des principes qui doivent fonder la republique en France that “writers advance public spirit quicker and farther than national education.”19 Writing has a special relationship, perhaps the closest one, with opinion, which, it turns out, is feminine or at least androgynous: “It/she [Elle] possesses both finesse and force at the same time” (115). That all-important figure of opinion, moving through the entire Considérations, is also the selfreflection of the author.
The postrevolutionary writer had to keep renewing the preconditions for liberty upon which rests the capacity of public opinion to read and express herself. Democratic values cannot by definition be forced. A whole new kind of technique is needed: “You have to arouse [faire naître] desire instead of commanding obedience and even when the government with reason wants particular institutions to be established, it has to treat public opinion carefully enough [menager] to give the impression of according what it [public opinion] desires. Only what is well-written can in the long run direct and modify certain national habits.”20 Instilling one’s désire in the other—the faire désirer of seduction or, using Staël’s maternal metaphor, the faire naître—replaces both teaching and military or police methods of compliance. But already the defects and reversals show up: obligation and necessity return, il faut [you have to] and il doit [it has to]. Then comes hypocrisy, “to give the impression.” How far away is crime? But trust me, implies Staël, because only the best writing of the friends of liberty succeeds in blending so closely with the popular psyche and “national habits.” The whole point of the revolution is to make the new “nation” appear as old, customary, and friendly as “habit.” Literature is on the side of liberty, but it, too, employs invisible strategies similar to the dark intrigue of arbitrary states.
Staël’s Considérations participates in the founding of both modern liberal political thought and modern historiography (its touchstone: the French Revolution). She should be there in the historical canon with Thiers and Michelet, and in the canon of political philosophy with Mill, Constant, and Tocqueville. Moreover, the ambiguities of her work do not allow for an easy definition of liberal democratic society, revolution, or historical knowledge.21 If these ambiguities are preserved, readings of Staël could help change the political and historiographical traditions as we now know them.
Just as the French Revolution evolved a hegemony that nonetheless twisted and ignored many essential differences (gender, regions, religion, race), the historiography of the revolution continues the constant process of social and political reorganization, if not repression. The “brothers,”22 from Payne and Burke to Vovelle and Furet, have dominated that history and the modern practice of history in general. The competition still goes on to see who is the real “son” of the revolution (witness the Bicentennial) with more disruptions from the “daughters” and other dissatisfied siblings.
Changing the historiographical canon like the literary canon is, therefore, a political act. But such a program, which calls for all strategies possible (revisions of the canon, analyses of how the canon and canonic writers function and dominate, an overabundance of studies on the same and different noncanonical writers), also demands rethinking as it goes along. How much critical selfconsciousness is possible and even desirable; is it compatible with retaining as much passion in our studies as possible? How do we critics and historians want to set up parallel canons? If canons require hegemony as societies and histories do, that is, some consensus, can the intellectual community radically redefine how the canon or tradition works, what status it holds?
Where Staël is most subversive to me is her form. Her Considérations sur la Revolution franfaise is a book of many books: My Life with Father, The Story of My Life, The History of the Revolution and of Modern France, On England, On Liberty, …. It practices almost every genre imaginable: lyricism, autobiography, satire, travelogue, political philosophy, aphorism, journalism, the study of comparative governments and societies, fiction, with, as ensemble and interruption, history. This diversity pushes the limits of history, even the “omnigenre” of Romantic history, which Madame de Staël inaugurates,23 beyond fiction to one of the most innovative forms of writing available then, and now.