by Will Durant
So, on April 25, 1807, Germaine unwillingly returned to Coppet. Constant, constant despite inconstancies, accompanied her partway, but diverged at Dole to stay with his ailing father. Arrived at Coppet, she sent Schlegel to tell Constant that unless he rejoined her soon she would kill herself. Benjamin knew that this classic threat was a siren, not a swan, song, but he came, and silently bore her reproaches. He had long since ceased to love her, but “how can one tell the truth to one whose only answer consists in swallowing opium?” On July 10 Juliette Récamier came for a long visit; Germaine fell in love with her, and decided to live.
The police allowed Corinne to be printed, and its publication in the spring of 1807 gave its author a triumph that consoled her for Napoleon’s victory at Friedland on June 14. The government-sponsored reviews were hostile, but thousands of readers were charmed, and said so. Today we are not enchanted by its form—an ecstatic romance interspersed with dull and dated essays on Italian scenery, character, religion, manners, literature, and art; and no one is thrilled by the hero’s “manly face” (he turns out to be spineless), or “the divine inspiration enthroned in” the heroine’s eyes.42 But in 1807 Italy was not yet an overwritten land, more familiar to us, in history and art, than our own; romance was spreading its wings; romantic love was struggling to be freed from parental power, economic bonds, and moral taboos; the rights of women were beginning to find voice. Corinne had all these fascinations, embodied in a fair improvatrice who sings spontaneous poetry and strums a bewitching lyre. Corinne, in her prime, is visibly Germaine, with “an Indian shawl twined about her lustrous black curls;… her arms transcendently beautiful,… her figure rather robust”; moreover, her conversation “united all that is natural, fanciful, just, sublime, powerful, and sweet.”43 Strange to say, the unsentimental Emperor, stranded on St. Helena, took up the book and could not lay it down until he had read it to its end.44
4. Understanding Germany
To the task of overthrowing Napoleon and managing a menagerie of geniuses and epicures, Madame now added the delicate enterprise of explaining Germany to France. Even while her newborn Corinne was battling for life against a subjugated press, she was hiding in her secret self a bold and massive opus on the land beyond the Rhine. To prepare herself conscientiously she set out on another tour of Central Europe.
On November 30, 1807, she left Coppet with Albert, Albertine, Schlegel, and her valet Eugène (Joseph Uginet). At Vienna she heard music by Haydn, Gluck, and Mozart, but left no mention of Beethoven. During three of five weeks in Austria she carried on an amorous correspondence with an Austrian officer, Moritz O’Donnell; offered him money and marriage, lost him, and wrote to Constant letters of limitless devotion—”My heart, my life, everything I have is yours if you wish and as you wish”;45 he contented himself by borrowing some of her money. At Teplitz and Pirna she conferred with Friedrich von Gentz, an ardent anti-Bonaparte publicist; learning of these meetings, Napoleon concluded that she was aiming to disrupt the peace that he had recently signed at Tilsit in July. At Weimar she found neither Schiller (who had died in 1805) nor Goethe. She passed on to Gotha and Frankfurt; then, suddenly ill and depressed, she hurried back to Coppet.
Perhaps this intimation of mortality shared in her turn toward mysticism; Schlegel contributed to it; but a much stronger influence came from the ascetic Julie von Krüdener and the lecherous dramatist Zacharias Werner, both of whom sojourned at Coppet in 1808. By October of that year the guests and the language were predominantly German, and the lumières of the Enlightenment had yielded to a mystic religion. “There is no reality on this earth,” Germaine wrote to O’Donnell, “except religion and the power of love; all the rest is even more fugitive than life itself.”46
It was in this mood that she wrote De l’Allemagne. By 1810 it was nearing completion, and she longed to be in Paris for its printing. She wrote humbly to Napoleon, telling him that “eight years’ [exile and] misery modify all characters, and destiny teaches resignation.” She proposed to go to the United States; she asked for a passport, and permission for an interim stay in Paris. The passport was granted; the permission was not.47 Nevertheless, in April, 1810, she moved with her family and Schlegel to Chaumont (near Blois), from which she superintended the printing of her three-volume manuscript in Tours. In August she moved to neighboring Fossé.
The proofs of the first two volumes were submitted by Nicolle, the printer, to the censors in Paris. They agreed to the publication after the deletion of a few unimportant sentences. Nicolle printed five thousand copies, and sent advance copies to influential persons. On June 3 the sympathetic Fouché was dismissed as minister of police, and was succeeded by the rigorous René Savary, Duc de Rovigo. On September 25 Juliette Récamier brought to the censor the proofs of Volume III, and to Queen Hortense a full set of proofs for transmission—with a letter from the authoress—to the Emperor. Savary, apparently with Napoleon’s approval, decided that the book was so unfavorable to France and its ruler that its distribution could not be allowed. He ordered the printer to suspend the publication, and, on October 3, sent a stern notice to Mme. de Staël that she was to carry out at once her declared intention to go to America. On October 11 a detachment of gendarmes entered the printer’s plant, smashed the type plates, and carried away all obtainable copies of the volumes; these were later crushed into pulp. Other officers demanded the manuscript; Germaine gave them the original, but her son Auguste secreted and preserved a copy. The authoress reimbursed the printer for his losses, and fled back to Coppet.
On Germany, as published in 1813, is an earnest attempt to survey, with brevity and sympathy, every aspect of German civilization in the age of Napoleon. That a woman with so many cares and lovers should have found the leisure, the energy, and the competence for such an enterprise is one of the marvels of that exciting time. Through the Swiss internationalism in her background, through her marriage with a Holstein baron, through her Protestant heritage and her hatred of Napoleon, she was prepared to give Germany the benefit of nearly every doubt, to use its virtues as an indirect criticism of Napoleon and tyranny, and to present it to France as a culture rich in sentiment, tenderness, and religion, and therefore well suited to correct the intellectualism, cynicism, and skepticism then current in literate France.
Strange to say, she did not care for Vienna, though, like her, it was both gay and sad—gay with wine and talk, sad with the mortality of love and the proliferation of Napoleon’s victories. It was Catholic and southern with music, art, and almost childlike faith; she was Protestant and northern, heavy with food and sentiment, and floundering in philosophy. There was no Kant here, but there was Mozart; no ardor of controversy, no fireworks of wit, but there was the simple pleasure of friends and lovers, parents and children, promenading in the Prater and watching the Danube pass idly by.
Even the Germans disconcerted her; “stoves, beer, and the smoke of tobacco surround all the common folk with a thick and hot atmosphere from which they are never inclined to escape.”48 She deplored the monotonous simplicity of German dress, the complete domestication of the men, the readiness to submit to authority. “The separation into classes … is more distinct in Germany than anywhere else;… everybody keeps his rank, his place, … as if it were his established post.”49 She missed, in Germany, that cross-fertilization of aristocrats, authors, artists, generals, politicians, which she had found in French society; hence “the nobles have few ideas, the men of letters have too little practice in affairs”;50 the ruling class remains feudal, the intellectual class loses itself in airy dreams. Here Madame quoted Jean Paul Richter’s famous epigram: “The empire of the seas belongs to the English, that of the land to the French, and that of the air to the Germans.”51She added, pertinently: “The extension of knowledge in modern times serves to weaken the character when it is not strengthened by the habit of business and the exercise of the will.”52
She admired the German universities as then the best in the world. But she deplored the Germ
an language, with its massing of consonants, and she resented the length and structure of the German sentence, which kept the decisive verb to the end, and so made interruption difficult;53 interruptions, she felt, were the life of conversation. She found too little in Germany of the lively but polite debate characteristic of Parisian salons; this, she thought, was due to lack of a national capital which could bring the country’s wits together,54 and partly to the German habit of sending the women away from the dinner table when the men proposed to smoke and talk. “At Berlin the men rarely converse except with each other; the military condition gives them a sort of rudeness, which prevents them from taking any trouble about the society of women.”55 In Weimar, however, the ladies were cultured and amorous, the soldiers minded their manners, and the Duke realized that his poets were giving him a niche in history. “The literary men of Germany… form in many respects the most distinguished assemblage which the enlightened world can present to us.”56
Our guide had some trouble appreciating the nuances of German poetry, and even of German prose; she was accustomed to French clarity and found Teutonic depth a learned obscurity. But she took the side of the Germans in the Romantic revolt against classical models and restraints. She defined the classical style as one based upon the classics of ancient Greece and Rome; Romantic literature, by contrast, rose out of Christian theology and sentiment, spread its roots in the poetry of the troubadours, the legends of chivalry, the myths and ballads of the early medieval north. Basically, perhaps, the division lay in the classic subordination of the self to reality, and the Romantic subordination of reality to the self.
For this reason Mme. de Staël welcomed German philosophy despite its difficulty, for, like herself, it put the emphasis on the self; it saw in consciousness a miracle greater than all the revolutions of science. She rejected the psychology of Locke and Condillac, which reduced all knowledge to sensations, and so made all ideas the effects of external objects; this, she felt, led inevitably to materialism and atheism. In one of the longest chapters in her book she attempted, with modest disclaimers, to state the essence of Kant’s Critiques: they restored the mind as an active participant in the conception of reality; free will as an active element in the determination of actions; and moral conscience as a basic ingredient in morality. By these theorems, she felt, “Kant had with a firm hand separated the different empires of the soul and the senses,”57 and so had established the philosophical basis of Christianity as an effective moral code.
Though she had made a shambles of the Sixth Commandment, Madame was convinced that no civilization could survive without morality, and no moral code could dispense with religious belief. Reasoning about religion, she argued, is a treacherous procedure; “reason does not give happiness in place of that which it takes away.”58 Religion is “the solace of misery, the wealth of the poor, the future of the dying”;59 here the Emperor and the Baroness agreed. So she preferred the active Protestantism of Germany to the pretended Catholicism of upper-class France; she thrilled to the mighty hymns that resounded from German throats in choirs, homes, and streets, and she frowned upon the French way of watching the stock exchange and leaving the poor to attend to God.60 She had a good word to say for the Moravian Brethren. Her final chapter was a plea for a mystic “enthusiasm” —an inner sense of an omnipresent God.
All in all, allowing for limitations imposed by temperament and time, On Germany was one of the outstanding books of the age, a heady leap from Corinne to Kant; and Napoleon would have been wise to disarm it with faint praise—as being excellent for a woman with no sympathy for the problems of government. She had strongly censured censorship, but to deny the book to France was to illustrate and strengthen her case. She had on many pages praised Germany at the expense of France, but she had often praised France at the expense of Germany, and a hundred passages revealed her love for her native and forbidden land. She had dealt lightly with abstruse subjects, but she had aimed to interest a wide audience in France, and thereby promote international understanding. She asked for a cross-fertilization of cultures, which would have helped Napoleon’s union of the Rhenish Confederation with France. She wrote intelligently, sometimes wittily,61 adorning her pages with illuminating perceptions and ideas. Ultimately she revealed Germany to France, as Coleridge and Carlyle were soon to reveal it to England. “This book,” said Goethe, “ought to be considered as a powerful engine which made a wide breach in that Chinese wall of antiquated prejudice which divided the two countries; so that, beyond the Rhine, and afterward beyond the Channel, we [Germans] became better known—a fact that could not fail to procure for us a great influence over all Western Europe.”62 She was “a good European.”
5. Imperfect Victory
Only another author can understand what it meant to Germaine de Staël that the culminating production of her life and thought had to remain hidden in the recesses of Coppet, apparently as dead as a child stifled at birth. She discovered that her home was surrounded by agents of the Emperor, that some of her servants had been bribed to report on her, and that any friend who dared to visit her would be marked for imperial revenge. Notables whose lives and fortunes had been saved by her during the Revolution took care not to come near her now.63
She had two consolations. In 1811 she met Albert-Jean Rocca, then close to twenty-three years old, a second lieutenant wounded in battle, permanently lamed, and suffering from tuberculosis. He fell in love with the heroic Germaine, who was then forty-five, physically unprepossessing, morally imperfect, intellectually brilliant, and not without financial charm. “John” besieged her, and gave her a child. Germaine welcomed the new love as defying and delaying old age. —The other solace was her hope that if she could get to Sweden or England she might find a publisher for her hidden masterpiece. But she could not get to Sweden through any country under Napoleon’s power. She resolved to take her manuscript secretly through Austria, then up through Russia to St. Petersburg, and thence to Stockholm, where Prince Bernadotte would help her. It was no easy matter for her to abandon the home that she had made famous, and the grave of her mother, whom she could now forgive, and of the father who still seemed to her to have been a political sage and a financial saint. —On April 7, 1812, she gave birth to Rocca’s boy, who was sent to a nurse for safekeeping. On May 23, 1812, eluding all spies, and accompanied or followed by her daughter Albertine, her two sons, her old lover Schlegel and her new lover Rocca, she left for Vienna, hoping to secure there a passport to Russia, and then to find her way to St. Petersburg and a handsome, chivalrous, and liberal Czar. On June 22 Napoleon, with 500,000 men, crossed the Niemen into Russia, hoping to find there a beaten and penitent Czar.
Germaine told the story of this trip in her Ten Years of Exile. Contemplating now that strange conjunction of wills and events, one wonders at the courage that took this harassed woman through a thousand obstacles and a supposedly barbarous people, to reach Zhitomir, in Polish Russia, only eight days ahead of Napoleon’s troops.64 She hurried on to Kiev and thence to Moscow, where, challenging fate, she lingered to visit the Kremlin, to hear the church music, to visit the local leaders in science and literature. Then, a month before Napoleon’s arrival, she left Moscow via Novgorod for St. Petersburg. Everywhere, in the cities on her route, she was received as a distinguished ally in the war against the invader. She flattered the Czar as the hope of European liberalism. Together they planned to make Bernadotte king of France.
In September she reached Stockholm, where she helped to bring Bernadotte into the coalition against Napoleon.65 After a stay of eight months in Sweden, she crossed the sea to England. London acclaimed her as the first woman of Europe; Byron and other notables came to pay their respects, and she had no difficulty in arranging with Byron’s publisher, John Murray, to issue her long-delayed volumes to the world (October, 1813). She remained in England while the Allies broke Napoleon at Leipzig, marched into Paris, and put Louis XVIII on the throne. Then (May 12, 1814) she hurried across the Channel, restored
her salon in Paris after ten years of exile, and played host to dignitaries from a dozen lands—Alexander, Wellington, Bernadotte, Canning, Talleyrand, Lafayette. Constant rejoined her, and Mme. Récamier shone again. Germaine urged Alexander to remember his liberal pronouncements; Alexander and Talleyrand persuaded Louis XVIII to “grant” to his recaptured subjects a bicameral constitution based on the British model; at last Montesquieu had his way. But Madame did not like the word “grant”; she wanted the King to recognize the sovereignty of the people. In July, 1814, she went back to Coppet, triumphant and proud, but feeling the nearness of death.
Her adventures, her battles, even her victories, had brought her amazing vitality close to exhaustion. Nevertheless she devotedly tended the dying Rocca, arranged for the marriage of her daughter to the Duc de Broglie, and began to write her brilliant swan song, the 600-page Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution française. The first part was a defense of Necker in all his policies; the second excoriated the despotism of Napoleon. After his seizure of the government his every move seemed to her an advance toward tyranny; and his wars were props and excuses for absolutism. Before Stendhal, long before Taine, she likened Napoleon “to the Italian despots of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.”66 He had read and accepted Machiavelli’s principles of government, without feeling a comparable love for his country. France was not really his fatherland; it was his steppingstone. Religion was to him not the humble acceptance of a supreme being but an instrument for the conquest of power. Men and women were not souls but tools.67 He was not sanguinary, but he was ever indifferent to the carnage of victory. He had the brutality of a condottiere, never the manners of a gentleman. And this crowned vulgarian made himself the judge and censor of all speech and thought, of the press that was the last refuge of liberty, and of the salons that were citadels of the free mind of France. He was not the son of the Revolution; but if he was, he was also its parricide.68