Revolution and the Republic
Page 52
of the Revolution. Nor did legitimists necessarily agree about the political implica-
tions of this satanic event. Not all royalists were prepared to lay all the blame upon
20 Ibid. 31.
21 Ibid. 39.
22 Ibid. 36.
23 Ibid. 37.
24 Ibid. 39.
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the philosophes and many were not convinced of either the desirability or
practicality of a restored theocratic state and society. One such was François-
René de Chateaubriand.25 Chateaubriand’s reaction to the unfolding of revolu-
tionary events was vividly recounted in his justly famous Mémoires d’outre-tombe.
A native of Saint-Malo, it was from Brittany that, not without an element of
sympathy, he witnessed the first stirrings of discontent, only later to return to Paris
and there observe the storming of the Bastille and other equally horrific ‘cannibal
feasts’. These events, he recalled, ‘changed my political frame of mind’.26 He soon
departed to America and upon his return in January 1792 quickly perceived that
‘the sovereign people’ was becoming a universal tyrant, a ‘universal Tiberius’. Paris
in 1792, he wrote, ‘no longer had the same physiognomy as in 1789 and 1790; this
was no longer the Revolution at its birth but a people marching drunkenly to its
destiny’.27 Variety of dress, he noticed, was a thing of the past. He joined the
émigré army of the princes in Coblenz and later, having been seriously injured in
battle, went into exile in England. It was there that he wrote and published his first
book: the Essai historique, politique, et moral sur les révolutions considerées dans leur
rapports avec la Révolution française.28
Dedicated ‘to all the parties’, it was a book that pleased almost no one, least of all
his family. Chateaubriand himself felt that it ‘offered a compendium of his
existence as poet, moralist, writer, and politician’.29 It was quite definitely not a
book with a clear, ordered structure, but its central premise was simple enough: the
course of the French Revolution could best be understood if one studied all the
other revolutions that had taken place in the world. By revolution, Chateaubriand
explained at the outset, he understood ‘a total change in the government of a
people, be it monarchical to republican or republican to monarchical’,30 and by this
definition it was possible to identify five revolutions in antiquity and seven in
modern Europe. Thus Chateaubriand’s argument proceeded by way of constant
comparison between the ancient and modern worlds but still, he admitted, he had
difficulty grasping ‘the efficient cause of all revolutions’. This had its source, he
believed, in that ‘vague restlessness’ and dissatisfaction with our lot which itself
‘perhaps’ derived from our consciousness of another life or even ‘our secret aspira-
tion towards divinity’. Whatever its origin, Chateaubriand declared, it existed
among all peoples. Moreover, it received ‘striking confirmation’ when the causes
of the Revolution in France were examined.31
Everywhere that a small group of people held power and wealth for a long time,
Chateaubriand explained, there would be corruption. Every man had his vices, plus
the vices of those who had preceded him. This was true of the court of France,
where ‘a weak king’ had been easily misled by ‘incapable and wicked ministers’ and
25 See Jean-Paul Clement, Chateaubriand: Biographie morale et intellectuelle (1998) and Marc
Fumaroli, Chateaubriand, Poésie et Terreur (2003).
26 Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre tombe (1973), i. 220.
27 Ibid. 344–5.
28 Essai historique, politique, et moral sur les révolutions considerées dans leur rapports avec la Révolution
française (1797): references to Œuvres complètes de Chateaubriand (1861), i.
29 Ibid. 442.
30 Ibid. 275.
31 Ibid. 461.
History, Revolution, and Terror
245
their ‘host of half-starved servants, lackeys, flatterers, actors, and mistresses’. The
‘follies’ and ‘imbecilities’ of government had in turn engendered moral disorder in
society. In this situation of baneful emptiness and isolation where France enjoyed
only the appearance of wealth, was it any surprise, Chateaubriand ventured, that
the French were prepared ‘to embrace the first phantom which showed them a new
universe’? And so it was, as corruption devoured the State and as society fell into
‘general dissolution’, that ‘a race of men’ suddenly rose up and announced the hour
of Sparta and Athens. ‘The total overturning that the French and, above all, the
Jacobins had sought to bring about in the morals of the nation’, Chateaubriand
wrote, ‘was only an imitation of what Lycurgus did in his homeland.’32 The
ambition had been to attain a purity of morals as a prelude to the inauguration
of democracy and to that end France had been ‘flooded in blood, covered in ruins,
her king led to the scaffold, her ministers proscribed or murdered’.33
Chateaubriand did not doubt that the philosophes were here at fault. Their
methods and their aims were those of destruction. They displayed a ‘rage’ against
established political institutions and undermined religious faith, putting nothing in
their place but a ‘torrent of new ideas’ preaching innovation and change.34
However, it was central to Chateaubriand’s argument that, if the philosophes had
been a cause of the Revolution, they had not been the sole cause. ‘The French
Revolution’, he wrote, ‘did not come from this or that man, from this or that
book.’35 Rather, it had been inevitable, arising from the march of civilization
towards both enlightenment and corruption. That explained the ‘incomprehensible
combination of crimes grafted onto a philosophical trunk’.
The mistake, then, had been to believe that everything could become virtuous
because the corrupt French had wished it so, to imagine that a country of 25
million inhabitants could imitate an ancient realm. To act as if republics could be
created anywhere, regardless of the obstacles, Chateaubriand wrote, was both
absurd and wicked. What political recommendations followed from this? Chateau-
briand was honest enough to admit that he did not properly know. All governments
were an evil, he observed, but from this we should not conclude that they should all
be destroyed. ‘Since it is our lot only to be slaves’, Chateaubriand argued, ‘let us
endure our chains without complaint.’36 No matter what was published to the
contrary, it was always better to be ruled by one of our ‘rich and enlightened
compatriots’ than by the ‘ignorant multitude’. Happiness, in short, would return to
France only when she had been returned to the monarchy.37
Would this fill the ‘interior void’ and ‘unknown desire’ that so tormented us and
drove our discontent? Ultimately, it was Chateaubriand’s view that all political,
indeed all human, institutions were a mass of putrefied corruption and that all the
trappings of art and civilization were as nothing compared to the simplicity and
32 Ibid. 301.
33 Ibid. 364.
34 Ibid. 548.
; 35 Ibid. 548 n. 2.
36 Ibid. 466.
37 When the Essai historique was republ. in 1826, Chateaubriand nuanced this position, explaining
that he had only in the mind the model of ancient republics and that ‘the discovery of the
representative republic had completely changed the question’.
246
History, Revolution, and Terror
beauty of nature. Only this could quell our spiritual hunger and only through
nature would we be truly free. Such a liberty, he told his readers, could be painted
only with difficulty, but it could be glimpsed if they were to spend a night with him
amongst ‘the savages of Canada’ before the falls of Niagara. ‘Freed from the
tyrannical yoke of society, I there understood’, he wrote, ‘the spell of the indepen-
dence of nature which far surpasses all the pleasures of which a civil man can have
an idea.’38 Five years later, and to instant acclaim, Chateaubriand was to provide a
more sophisticated and compelling response to his own ‘doubt and sorrow’ in the
form of Le Génie du Christianisme.
Following the fall of the Directory, Chateaubriand returned to France in
May 1800, initially enjoying a good relationship with Napoleon Bonaparte.
But following the unlawful arrest and execution of the Duc d’Enghien, ordered
by Napoleon in 1804, he joined the opposition to imperial despotism and quickly
found himself exiled from Paris. He continued to write and was elected to the
Académie Française.39 In 1814 he penned a damning portrait of Napoleon and
the First Empire and not only welcomed the return of Louis XVIII but also the
parliamentary monarchy instituted by the Charte. To that extent, Chateaubriand
shared much with Germaine de Staël. Yet, as François Furet has written, the two
‘were not breathing the same air’.40 If both wished to secure the Bourbon monarchy
upon a solid foundation and if both knew that this could only be done by resolving
the question of the heritage of the revolutionary past, they belonged to two separate
and deeply antagonistic worlds: those of ultra-royalism and of liberalism. If Chateau-
briand felt a mournful nostalgia for the past, Madame de Staël had no cause to regret
its passing. His Revolution was not hers, as the Considérations sur les principaux
évènemens de la Révolution française made abundantly clear.
As we know, Germaine de Staël was the daughter of Louis XVI’s much-abused
finance minister, Jacques Necker.41 She was Swiss and she was Protestant.42
She also witnessed the opening events of the French Revolution at first hand, her
salon in the rue de Bac subsequently becoming a meeting place for political
moderates. Exile to England soon followed and when, later, she came to doubt
that the Directory would be able to provide the stable republic required by France,
she rallied to the Consulate headed by Napoleon Bonaparte. Much has been
written about Madame de Staël’s personal relationship with Napoleon—much of
it entirely speculative—but there can be no doubt that their political positions
quickly diverged and that the emperor increasingly found her to be an irritating
and troublesome presence. As a consequence she spent the greater part of the years
of the First Empire either in hiding, at her Swiss family home in Coppet, or
38 Œuvres complètes de Chateaubriand (1861), i, 622.
39 Chateaubriand did not take up his seat until after the Restoration.
40 Furet, Revolutionary France, 1770–1880 (Oxford, 1992), 286.
41 See Jean-Denis Bredin, Une singulière famille: Jacques Necker, Suzanne Necker et Germaine de
Staël (1999).
42 See J. Christopher Herold, Mistress to an Age: A Life of Madame de Staël (New York: 1958) and
Maria Fairweather, Madame de Staël (London: 2005).
History, Revolution, and Terror
247
travelling across Europe with a variety of distinguished intellectual and emotional
companions.43
Despite this life spent in almost permanent exile, Madame de Staël’s literary
output was never less than brilliantly original and influential. In 1800 she published
De la Littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales, a ground-
breaking work whose purpose was ‘to examine the influence of religion, custom,
and law upon literature, and the influence of literature upon religion, custom, and
law’. This was followed by two novels, Delphine in 1802 and Corinne in 1807: both
enjoyed enormous international success. Then, in 1810 came the publication of De
l’Allemagne. Ostensibly the study of the spirit and character of a people, it was
immediately seized and then pulped upon Napoleon’s direct orders, the implicit
criticism of the latter’s person and regime being all too clear.44
Banished from France, it was in Sweden in 1813 that Madame de Staël began the
writing of Considérations sur les principaux évènemens de la Révolution française.45 It
existed only in manuscript at the time of her death in 1817 and was published a
year later. The first edition of 60,000 copies sold out almost immediately. In truth,
Considérations sur les principaux évènemens de la Révolution française amounted to
three, if not four, books in one. Since the death of her father in 1804 it had been
Madame de Staël’s intention to write an account (and defence) of his political
career. In the process of writing, this became a description of the principal events of
the Revolution itself and of the manner in which the Terror emerged. To this was
added a paean to England and English liberty. Finally, in the wake of the emperor’s
defeat, there was added an anti-Napoleon tract.
If royalist accounts of the Revolution had already established that it was evidence
of the workings of divine providence, Madame de Staël similarly believed, although
for very different reasons, that the Revolution was inevitable. ‘Those who consider
it an accidental event’, she wrote in her opening paragraph, ‘have not turned their
attention either to the past or to the future. They have mistaken the actors for the
play; and, in order to satisfy their passions, they have attributed to transient
individuals what it took centuries to prepare.’46 To justify this assertion, she
deployed a three-stage interpretation of European history since the fall of the
Roman Empire. The first epoch was feudalism; the second was monarchical
despotism; the third was the age of representative government. Thus far, Madame
de Staël argued, only England had properly reached this ‘final perfecting of the
social order’ but, with the gradual spread of intellectual enlightenment and com-
merce, all of Europe was following the path indicated by the English and French
Revolutions.
None of this was to suggest that such progress could not be interrupted by lapses
into arbitrary government and tyranny. Indeed, it was precisely this that had
43 See Germaine de Staël, Dix années d’exil (1996).
44 Selections from De la Littérature and De l’Allemagne can be found in Morroe Berger (ed.),
Germaine de Staël: Politics, Literature and National Character (New Brunswick, NJ, 2000).
45 For an English edn. see Germaine de Staël, Considerations on the Principal Events of the French
Revolution (Ind
ianapolis, 2008).
46 Considérations sur la Révolution française (1983), 63.
248
History, Revolution, and Terror
occurred in France. As Madame de Staël sought to remind her readers, ‘it is liberty
that is old and despotism which is modern’.47 The four ‘best’ kings of France—
St Louis, Charles V, Louis XII, and ‘above all’ Henri IV—had striven to establish
the rule of law, religious toleration, and the rudiments of a representative system
but this had been subverted from the time of Cardinal Richelieu in the seventeenth
century onwards. From that moment, the government of France had been char-
acterized by corruption, intrigue, vanity, privilege, and despotism, and so much so
that the private virtues of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette had been hidden
beneath ‘the vast collection of abuses by which they were surrounded’.
It was this parlous situation that Jacques Necker had been called upon to rectify.
The clear and unambiguous message of Madame de Staël’s text was that, if her
father’s advice had been followed, administrative order and financial stability would
have been restored to France and thus the horrors of the Revolution and the
ensuing European war would have been avoided. However, this was not to be so
and, as a consequence, moderation was replaced by ‘the spirit of faction’ and ‘the
fever of revolution’.
Yet Madame de Staël was prepared to accept that, in its early work, the National
Assembly did much to earn the gratitude of the nation. It established religious
toleration and freedom of the press. It reformed the judicial system and introduced
trial by jury. It abolished the privileges of caste and suppressed unfair taxes. It
created provincial assemblies and removed restraints on industry and trade. In
short, it cleared away many of the abuses associated with arbitrary power. With
regard to the institutions it created, however, the National Assembly committed
‘the most serious errors’.
The most grievous of these was to have considered executive power as being
inimical to liberty. This explained why the king had been stripped of his preroga-
tives and why he had been reduced to a ‘public functionary’. From a fear of
supporting conspiracy followed a refusal to contemplate the usefulness of a second