When Gérard accepted the order for his celebrated painting of one of the major scenes of the novel—after an initial project by Jacques-Louis David was abandoned—he considered giving the main character the features of her recently deceased creator. Had he done so, he would have been following in Elisabeth Vigée-Le Brun’s footsteps: she portrayed Staël as Corinne, with the Sibyl’s temple in Tivoli in the background (Geneva, Musée d’Art et d’Histoire) when she stayed with the author on the shores of Lake Geneva in 1807. This small picture of a great woman writer by a great woman painter ended up satisfying neither the artist nor her model, though both initially set great store by the project. The identification of Staël with the fictitious Corinne, a sibyl for modern times, was one made by many of her readers, including some of her closest friends: she seemed, in the world of postrevolutionary France, to be the very embodiment of the independent woman who wished, to the displeasure of many, including Napoleon, to express herself on matters both artistic and political.
Staël started life as the daughter of a remarkable Swiss Protestant couple established in Paris. Her talented Mother, née Suzanne Curchod, who had something of a reputation as a charming bluestocking and gifted amateur actress and who had been courted by Edward Gibbon, had given up writing—or at least any hope of publishing—on marrying Jacques Necker, a wily financier who was to become one of France’s most renowned ancien régime ministers and felt that a woman should aim to be a good wife and to further her husband’s career. Suzanne Necker took this to heart and ran a successful salon that greatly contributed to his ambitions and prestige. Their only daughter was raised by doting parents in a loving household in which stimulating conversations among the foremost thinkers of the day were the norm. Her initial venture into print was unusual: she published a set of critical essays on Rousseau and his works in 1788, ten years after his death, when his place in the canon was being hotly contested. This shows her to have been taking a keen interest in the republic of letters, in questions regarding the intellectual’s place in the public sphere as well as in more directly aesthetic matters. She would later write two seminal treatises that changed the way people thought about literary culture, De la littérature (On Literature) in 1800, which promotes the Ossianic model and the idea of northern melancholy as essential markers of modernity, and De l’Allemagne (On Germany) in 1813, which opened French eyes to the Romantic movement flourishing on the other side of the Rhine.
Though born in Paris and deeply attached to the culture and literature of France, Staël, to her dismay, never held French nationality and, in the second part of her life, Napoleon used this against her, repeatedly exiling her from the land in which she had been brought up. Staël’s “headquarters” was the castle at Coppet by the banks of Lake Geneva, which has given its name to a loosely defined set of thinkers. The groupe de Coppet also included authors like Benjamin Constant and J.C.L. Simonde de Sismondi, who displayed a truly European spirit at work in the early years of the nineteenth century. It is probably in part because of the form of exclusion they underwent that people like Staël had such a perceptive vision of why French society assumed a remarkable part in the Enlightenment’s virtual state, the “Republic of Letters,” in which boundaries were only there to be crossed and ideas to be challenged, tested, and promoted. Although it is hyperbolic, the saying “There are three great powers in Europe: Britain, Russia, and Mme de Staël” indicates that even in her contemporaries’ eyes, and despite the opposition she had to face, the author of Corinne managed to play an important role that far exceeded what was expected of any individual at the time. Her posthumous Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution française (Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution) (1818) is a groundbreaking work in liberal thinking and had wide-ranging influence on political debates in the early nineteenth century.
Passions were often at the center of Staël’s reflections, as several of her works show, possibly most notably her 1796 treatise, De l’influence des passions sur le bonheur de l’individu et des nations (On the Influence of Passions on the Happiness of Individuals and Nations). One that was written a little earlier, during the French Revolution, displays her consciousness of the reprobation reserved to women’s participation in public debates. Called Réflexions sur le procès de la reine (Thoughts on the Queen’s Trial), and published in haste in August 1793, it is a small brochure that constitutes a brave attempt to intervene in Marie Antoinette’s fate as she languished in prison after her husband, the king, had been executed on January 21 of that year. Signed simply Par une femme (by a woman), it added that the author’s name should remain unknown, as it would be of no use. Staël wished to emphasize her sex but not rely on her reputation and high profile: she writes as a woman, about a woman’s fate and, in part, for women, hoping that their expressions of feeling might generate an emotional currency to offset the virile models promoted by a republic that was particularly harsh on the late king’s wife: she was a foreigner, known disparagingly as l’Autrichienne (the Austrian woman). Staël shows considerable political acumen in noting that as a mere consort, crowned but not anointed, the deposed queen of France had no official powers vested in her and had played no direct role in government but that, were she to be put to death, she would become a martyr-figure—“en l’immolant, vous la consacrez à jamais” (to sacrifice her is to grant her eternal consecration). The current “Toinettomania,” from Tokyo to Trianon, and of which Sofia Coppola’s film is an example, suggests she was right. Staël was taking a courageous stance in her appeal to the republican values of the revolutionaries and in her emotional address to women. Her voice was not to be heard, and the identity of the pamphlet’s author having been guessed, the diplomatic quarters of her husband, the Swedish ambassador, were given an unprecedented ransacking.
The Revolution led to an improvement in the rights of blacks or slaves. Women hoped to benefit from the new climate. Olympe de Gouges had already displayed great sensitivity to inequality by writing a play on slavery, Zamore et Mirza, which the Comédie-Française accepted in 1785 and put on (unsuccessfully) in 1789 under the title L’esclavage des nègres (The slavery of negroes). She also opened her 1788 novel, Mémoire de Madame de Valmont, with a “Préface pour les dames ou le portrait des femmes” (Preface for ladies or the portrait of women) in which she defends their right to write but also implores their support for each other. She was a prolific though not particularly esteemed pamphleteer, novelist, and dramatist when, in 1791, she drew up what is now her most famous work, the Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne (Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen), as a female equivalent to the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and dedicated it to the queen. It was turned down by the National Assembly. Its most famous disposition states, “Woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must also have that to mount the rostrum.” It is an indication of how little the message was heeded that the text was only edited fully by Benoîte Groult in 1986—though Gouges herself was executed in 1793.
Gouges—who is thought to have been the illegitimate daughter of a reactionary nobleman famous for his religious verse, the marquis de Pompignan—was one of the most vocal defenders of women’s rights. Another was Théroigne de Méricourt (1765–1817), who, in 1792, called upon her sex to rise up and form a regiment of amazons to defeat the opponents of liberty, a value, she claimed, possibly more cherished by women than by men, because they had been so severely oppressed. Some of her rousing public addresses were published during her lifetime. She wanted female fighters on the front lines and took an active part in energetic protests before being committed to a madhouse, where she died twenty-three years later.
“Liberty, equality, fraternity” might have been the order of the day, but although the Revolution helped free the theatrical and media monopolies and led to the organization of public lectures and classes, women were not expected to be stakeholders in this new cultural economy. A clear illustration can
be found in an account of life in Paris in 1801 by the admittedly reactionary émigré, Jean-Gabriel Peltier. The Lycée des Arts’s second session of the year gave him occasion to vent his spleen, because a woman had been audacious enough to give a public reading. She was Constance Pipelet, “unknown amongst the unknown” according to the journalist, and was hell-bent on emancipating her sex—her Epître aux femmes (Epistle to women) indeed calls on women to rise up and act as the equals of men. She read her own poems on men and on marriage. Peltier considered it irrelevant to pass a literary judgment on her texts but instead stressed the scandal of a newly divorced woman making public jibes at matrimony, drinking in applause, crossing the boundaries between the sexes, and making a show of herself. This was, for him, beyond ridicule: it was obviously indecent. There was a clear equivalence between women who dared to say all, to reveal all in their novels, to expose all in their poems, and those who cast off their clothes in public. In spite of such negative comments—and numerous male authors like Rousseau, a couple of decades earlier, had also vehemently denounced any foray by women into print—many successful books were written and published by them in the long eighteenth century.
One field in which women’s intervention in literature caused less of a stir than public readings was that of pedagogical texts. One of the century’s best-selling authors was Marie Leprince de Beaumont. Born in Rouen, she spent some time in the duchies of Lorraine and Savoy but became famous as a French educator to the English upper classes. She published more than a hundred volumes in various genres but is most famous for her “Magasins,” a series of dialogues first launched in the late 1750s. They include short stories, condensed histories, and biblical readings and purport to be the transcription of an educational program undertaken by young girls who progress in age, manners, and wisdom under the guidance of a governess who owes many of her characteristics to her creator. The different books that make up the series are tailored to suit the pupils’ ages. The Magasins were translated into most European languages (Greek, Hungarian, Swedish, Dutch, Russian, German, Spanish, English, and Czech, among others) and used widely for educational purposes well into the middle of the nineteenth century. They include the best-loved version of “Beauty and the Beast” (originally a more risqué tale by another woman writer, Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve). The success of the story tends to suggest that it tapped into deep-rooted concerns about love and happiness as well as, perhaps, more primeval fears—there have been Freudian readings of the tale which center on loss of virginity as an implicit motif. Leprince de Beaumont’s text is the one on which countless storybooks, Cocteau’s film, and the subsequent Disney cartoon were based. Although a man, Charles Perrault (1628–1703), penned some of the most celebrated contes de fées (fairy tales) to come out of France, like “Red Riding Hood” and “Cinderella,” he called them Contes de ma mère l’oye (Mother Goose’s Tales), and women managed to a certain extent to carve out a niche for themselves in fairy tales. The magical episodes, links to an oral tradition, and overall lack of verisimilitude meant that they were seen to be on the margins of literature proper, and the dismissive references to “old wives’ tales” show that such prejudice lasted over the decades.
Although, on the whole, Leprince de Beaumont sets out in her Magasins to educate the perfect Roman Catholic wife and mother, her books also encourage girls to think for themselves and demonstrate an interest in fields like geography or science as well as Bible studies or morality. Alongside the fairy tales that her fictional governess tells the younger girls, there are episodes from real life or drawn from mythological and religious exempla. She uses Enlightenment vocabulary, referring to the fact that children can be taught to cultivate their intellect and become philosophes by using reason and critical judgment, allowing them to speak up though hoping also to school them in not speaking out of turn. They are to be moral, but also, through acceptance of their role, they will be able to express themselves within the private sphere, to do good to those around them, and to make the world a better place. There is something of a Christian utopianism at work in Leprince de Beaumont’s vision of the positive effects of women’s acceptance of their status and function. She also published dialogues aimed at those who could be entrusted with schooling servants and the poor in the country and displayed a strong belief in the value of education for all ages and social strata.
Le triomphe de la vérité ou histoire de M. de La Villete (The Triumph of Truth, or Memoirs of Mr de La Villete), Leprince de Beaumont’s 1748 debut novel, deals with a case of what in Rousseauist terms is referred to as “negative education,” in which a young man is left to discover the Catholic faith through his own feelings and reasoning rather than by having it drummed into him. One of his adversaries in a theological discussion spouts large chunks of text that are not flagged in any way but quote directly from the Pensées philosophiques, which Diderot had published anonymously two years earlier. Leprince de Beaumont was clearly well versed in contemporary literature, even of the most scandalous nature. Her huge influence has often been discounted because historiography has neglected women writers as a whole and the very concept of religious Enlightenment sits ill with the traditional anticlerical vision of the French “Lumières.” By reconsidering texts by authors like her, scholars are currently revising the canon and attempting to produce a less monolithic vision of eighteenth-century life and letters.
Other women writers who produced important works on education include Louise d’Epinay (1726–83)—whose Conversations d’Emilie, largely based on her experience of bringing up her granddaughter, won the 1782 Prix Montoyon, then a newly created prize awarded by the Académie française for the most useful recent publication in moral terms—and the prolific writer Félicité de Genlis. Celebrated in her childhood as an exceptionally talented harpist, Genlis would go on to write numerous texts, from novels—including the best-selling Adèle et Théodore (Adelaide and Theodore, or Letters on Education), published to great acclaim in 1782, the same year as Laclos’s scandalous Liaisons dangereuses, which it outsold)—to conduct books, short stories (like the charming “Mademoiselle de Clermont”), and highly successful plays for child participants on amateur stages, through which they could learn about virtuous conduct by acting out little moral tales. Like Staël, Genlis was often reviled in the gutter press and scurrilous brochures. Her private life—she was mistress to the king’s cousin, the future “Philippe Egalité,” and governor (the masculine title was used exceptionally in her case) to his children, the Orléans princes—was used to discredit her and her writings. Her books, which number more than a hundred volumes, were widely read, translated, and circulated in many European countries.
Thanks to the various publications on female education, with women at the vanguard, the subject became one of widespread concern in the years before the Revolution—as is attested by several academic competitions, including one at Besançon (1777), in which Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and “Manon” Roland took part, and one at Châlons-sur-Marne (1783), for which Laclos prepared drafts.
If, on the whole, the idea that women could be entrusted with bringing up girls and writing about their education did not create too much controversy, particularly as they tended to stress the moral aspect of pedagogy, another field for which they were considered to have literary gifts was letter writing. Two posthumous volumes published during the eighteenth century contributed to this: the marquise de Sévigné’s seventeenth-century letters to her daughter, which give a spirited account of events, first came out clandestinely in 1725, and Englishwoman Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Letters were translated into French in 1763. Both were widely read and much appreciated by men and women alike; both are at a form of crossroads at once opening onto usually forbidden worlds (the royal court and Turkish life) and documenting the mundane concerns of private individuals. Letter writing was seen as the textual form closest to a conversation: it does not obey rules like a sonnet or a tragédie classique. As their rediscovered corresponden
ces (published long after their deaths) show, many important women authors like Charrière or Staël—or the scientist Emilie du Châtelet, whose influence in disseminating Newtonian ideas in France was of huge importance—were consummate letter writers.
While these women’s cosmopolitan education and frequent travels go some way to explaining this, material conditions for letter writing improved greatly in France in the eighteenth century: mail coaches were given regular schedules, road surfaces were improved, and literacy rates increased. Some great letter writers did not compose plays or novels but were at the center of networks of correspondents from different geographical areas and walks of life. Several women exchanged hundreds of letters with Voltaire before his death in 1778. They include his niece—and sometime mistress—Marie-Louise Denis (1712–90) and the famous salon hostess Marie du Deffand (1697–1780). The latter, who also corresponded with Walpole, was a keen observer of human foibles, a marchioness who dictated to secretaries after she went blind in her mid-fifties. Her letters display wry reactions to snippets of news that came her way and trace admirable character sketches of her guests. She was lucid about herself and about others, and her affectionate skepticism often gives way to true melancholy. According to the influential nineteenth-century critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, “Mme du Deffand est avec Voltaire, dans la prose, le classique le plus pur de cette époque, sans même en excepter aucun des grands écrivains” (Mme du Deffand is, with Voltaire, the most pure of the classics in prose of her time, excepting none, even among the great writers).
A History of Modern French Literature Page 41