Germaine de Staël: A Political Portrait

Pity Madame de Staël. First, the republican politics that she fervently embraced through the 1790s with her lover Benjamin Constant were from the first associated with terror, violence, electoral manipulation and a permanent state of political crisis. Second, the man she and Constant hoped might save the republic, Napoleon Bonaparte, became a tyrant, putting an end to the sovereignty of the people and in de Staël’s view to the revolution, and conducting a personal vendetta against de Staël that resulted in her fearing assassination and living in exile in Switzerland for almost ten years. Third, the father she venerated as the greatest living sage in politics, Jacques Necker, was attacked mercilessly as a fool of a man and a minister serving Louis XIV, failing to understand the nature of the French Revolution, and allowing the monarchy to fall by putting a personal need to justify himself, and his reputation for financial probity, above the need to maintain the state. All of this meant that de Staël’s politics faced the greatest of challenges, that of reinvention in altered circumstances, and in conditions where the goals of politics were being sharply narrowed—from being capable of creating a better world of happiness for all to bringing peace and avoiding extremism. One issue that bedevilled de Staël after 1798 was whether the pursuit of a more aspirational politics, introducing rights and liberties for all, had resulted in the brutality and instability that suddenly made reform a dirty word for the generation that survived into the new century.

De Staël, Bianca Fontana shows in this precise and illuminating study that concisely deals with all of her political writings, from first to last, answered in the affirmative. Whereas enlightenment projectors and enthusiasts had imagined better worlds of harmony and virtue, so powerful as to attract ardent young philosophers such as de Staël herself, the new task of politics was to entrench moderation and counter every form of superstition that might lead to a renewal of political violence. If the enlightenment imagined happiness for humans living in communities, the post enlightenment sought peace. De Staël, in addressing this urgent issue, underwent a transformation in her politics by coming to the realization, described as being akin to a religious conversion, that her father Jacques Necker was right and had always been right. In her great Considérations sur les principaux événements de la révolution française, her final book published posthumously in 1818, she reasserted themes found in all of her writings since the establishment of Bonaparte’s First French Empire in 1804, centring on the then treacherous claim that Britain was a better state than France, that the British constitution was the surest foundation for liberty in the modern world, and that peace and moderation would be restored to the world only when France became more like Britain, both in terms of its economy and in terms of its political culture. The additionally controversial claim was that Necker had known precisely this from the 1780s, and lived a tragic life in ceaselessly pushing France towards the British model, both beside his master Louis XVI and under the Republic.

Neither de Staël nor Constant, who accompanied her on this journey, were starry eyed about the new politics they had begun to espouse. One enormous problem was that Britain had near universally been described by French writers as the most corrupt state on earth, with a bankrupt economy and commercially driven politics, resulting in an evil international strategy promoting war and dedicated to British dominion; the epithet perfidious Albion appeared close to an indisputable truth for the French at the end of the 1790s. How, therefore, could the worst become the best? It was vital to analyse British history and the histories of states that in so many respects mirrored British experience, that existed across Germany and which de Staël studied in De la literature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales and in De l’Allemagne. Fontana shows how arduous de Staël’s journey was from revolutionary to moderate and from republican to liberal. She also shows that in de Staël’s case, and the numerous writers who surrounded her and shared her grand project, the journey was also exciting, and remains relevant.