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Chapter 13 reviews Staël’s contributions to her second husband John Rocca’s memoirs of the Peninsular War. When we consider the new Europe of nations that Staël bequeaths us, Romantic Spain seems striking in its absence. Her article “Camoëns” of winter 1811 has more on exiled genius than on Iberia; in Delphine, 1802, Léonce and the family of his Spanish mother are proud and devout to excess; and finally, the description in De la littérature (1800) of Spain’s inability, in contrast to Italy, to fuse the Arab South and the Christian North – a sterility born of priests and despotism – is fundamental for the 1813 debates of Staël, Schlegel, and Sismondi (DL 164–166). But here stands proof that she revised the war memoirs of her husband Rocca to show a popular struggle that checkmated Napoleon’s troops.
Chapter 14 reviews the texts published in French in 1814 by A. W. Schlegel, Staël, and Sismondi – core members of the Groupe de Coppet – which led to them being dubbed a confédération romantique. The texts furnish a Romantic dialectic and a vision of the new man for the various anti-classical reactions playing out in Europe over the previous fifty years. Schlegel offers Shakespeare and arguments to reject France, Staël proposes Faust and Kant, and in Sismondi, finally, one finds a free Middle Ages opposing that of Chateaubriand. But the three also offer an idea of the nation that seems as influential as their literary ideas, and tools to transform the Europe of the nineteenth century. These writers elaborate a new Europe of the imagination to confront the dead Europe of the Emperor. Romanticism is vast, and these texts are distinguished above all by the immense scope of the subjects they treat.
Staël with Delphine in 1802 split Paris into two camps, with conflicting views of art, politics, religion, ethics, and the place of women in society; the quarrel also reached Britain, Germany, and the Alps. Chapter 7 aims to situate several fine studies of the novel’s politics and reception within the broad continuum of a struggle in the field of power over textual meaning and the future of France, fought between Staël’s liberal camp and the camp of Bonaparte – who exiled her from France to end their argument. During this debate, Staël drafted three things – a new preface for Delphine, reflections on the novel’s moral purpose, and a less controversial ending – then chose not to publish them; so, we are looking in a sense at a revision that never happened. Delphine’s original suicide, deleted in the revised manuscript ending, offers a microcosm of this whole debate and will be our focus.
Chapter 11 demonstrates that De l’Allemagne’s surviving 1810 texts are not identical, as had been thought. We have texts from all three proof runs. In Vienna sits a copy of the 1810 edition; the censors’ proof and the copy‑text for 1813 subsist. This makes a mockery of Napoleon’s efforts to obliterate the book, allowing a peek at the “lost” 1810 edition and tracing a remarkable interplay between four conflicting pulls on the author. Her desires to clarify imprecise or obscure passages, and to use key words from elsewhere in De l’Allemagne, confront her desires to be faithful to her sources and to the facts. Exerting its own pull on this interplay is the fierce pressure on Staël to tone down her polemic. These forced revisions fall in with her book’s slide from politics into literary history, which for two centuries now has dimmed the ringing attack on tyranny that caused its pulping.
Chapter 4 proposes answers to the problem facing the friends of liberty when Rousseau’s social contract succumbed beneath the Terror. First, Rousseau in Le Contrat social identifies liberty with citizens’ active participation in the polis or res publica. Jacobin discourse returns often to this definition. Second, as early as the Consulat, Constant opposes this ancient and public liberty, now discredited by the Terror, to the modern private liberty he celebrates: These “positive and negative” liberties have since become a touchstone of modern liberalism. As it happens, this distinction already appears in Staël’s neglected political treatises and broadsides written under the Convention and the Directoire, as shown here. Third, this “negative liberty” of classical liberalism, whose weaknesses we begin to underline today, presents a problem for Staël as a woman that was necessarily less crucial to her friend, a new problem to which her work again offers a solution.
Chapter 6 reviews De la littérature. When Staël published this work, she had spent the previous decade growing older alongside the French Revolution, but the coup of 18 Brumaire had just ushered in the Consulat: Napoleon’s star was on the rise. This was not the most obvious time for an ex-minister for war to become a literary historian. Why then did Staël choose this juncture to write and publish her 400-page tractatus? Though we could descend into the weeds of Staël’s many literary details, we would there risk succumbing to a range of propagandist forces. Genevan, liberal, female, and Protestant, Staël has faced two centuries of critics eager to sideline or indeed privatize her achievements, presenting them as tangential to the public shaping of what it means to be French. This chapter argues that Staël’s 1800 work is engagé and focused on saving the Revolution if not the Republic.
Honoré de Balzac, Le Père Goriot (1835), closing words
Eugène de Rastignac gazes out over Restoration and issues a Promethean challenge to end Honoré de Balzac’s book. There is something larger than life to many a Romantic hero, and that is the case of Staël in her wanderings from the reign of Louis XVI to that of his brother Louis XVIII, from Napoleon’s France to London via a Moscow not yet in flames. The shape of Europe was apparent to Staël because she spent long years of exile traversing it. Few living authors thus loomed over Romantic Europe, and few indeed held the Revolution in their hands. She was Napoleon’s worthy enemy, standing for dignity and freedom as he stood for dictatorship and war.
Chapter 10 reviews Staël’s impact on French nineteenth-century theater, from her critical discussions in treatises like De l’Allemagne, to which Romantic drama theory owes profound debts, to her own performances in Geneva and across Europe, to her substantial dramatic output, from Voltairean verse tragedies to vaudevilles and avant-garde drames, source for at least two Romantic authors including E. T. A. Hoffmann. Staël’s complex relationship to German Romanticism, from Hoffmann to Tieck and the Schlegels, gains from this review.
This book, fruit of some years of archival research, follows Germaine de Staël (1766–1817), daughter of Louis XVI’s minister Jacques Necker, from a childhood watched by Denis Diderot in her mother’s salon on to Revolution – during which the Bastille fell three days after her father’s dismissal – to her years with Benjamin Constant as the Republic died and her ten years of exile at Napoleon Bonaparte’s hands. It tracks her flight to Moscow, weeks ahead of Napoleon’s army, and on via Stockholm and London at last to Paris in 1814, three years before her early death. It follows Staël through a close reading of her manuscripts and publications, recreating her life as author and stateswoman and thereby reworking some received wisdom both about Staël’s various publications and about her literary and political action.
Chapter 17 retraces the Groupe de Coppet’s work toward abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, from Staël’s parents in the 1780s to Staël’s children in the 1840s. What links these fighters is Staël. Staël’s gender, her religion, her life of revolution and exile all fed the flame that drove her struggle forward. Staël’s thought, trained in the Enlightenment, strives constantly toward universal and timeless truths, which brings a special excitement and power to her discussion of freedom and its antithesis, slavery, in the age of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme. In the history of abolitionism, many aspects of Staël’s thought are curious: her broad refusal of the slave-despot metaphor; her geographical and historical sweep; and her refusal of topoi designed to short-circuit discussion, like the Christian slaves in Algiers. Thirty-odd years of thought about freedom will produce some words on slavery, but Staël and her circle joined deeds to words.
Staël responded to the Terror with De l’influence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des nations. Chapter 5 has two parts. First, I review Staël’s use of her sources: her private life, France’s public Revolution, and the texts of the moral philosophers. Cathartic for herself as a woman, Staël’s book is also a public stand on the Terror and a manifesto for the French Republic’s future. It draws on a startling range of texts, from Cicero through Condorcet. These sources reveal above all what Staël does not do; she systematically transforms them, reading, then flouting, two millennia of passion theory to construct her own new moral vision. Second, I review what Staël offers the French Republic: a way out of ping-pong coups d’état by grounding the Directoire in coalition and moral principle, precisely the vision of her partner Constant’s simultaneous brochures, on which we know she quietly collaborated.
Chapter 9 argues that Staël saw a Faustian bargain in Corinne ou l’Italie, took it, and paid the price; its triumphs and failures thus stand or fall together. What Staël gained was mythic power; what she lost was the ability to control its fate. Corinne’s political impact in Europe and America, standing as it does at the birth of modern nationalism, is both real and unquantifiable – witness the coinage nationalité, part of the larger impact of Staël’s ideas on national genius, reflected in Blackwood’s praise of her in 1818 as the creator of the science of nations. The novel’s esthetic impact on a century of readers is both fascinating and somewhat easier to assess, an invitation to future study already made in 1825 by Stendhal in a remark from Racine et Shakespeare: “Je ne vois réellement que Corinne qui ait acquis une gloire impérissable sans se modeler sur les anciens.”