Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France

by Moore, Lucy

This group did not include her husband, whom she charitably described as being, ‘of all the men I could never love…the one I like best’. Éric Magnus de Staël was an affable Swedish diplomat seventeen years Germaine’s senior who had begun pursuing the greatest heiress in Europe when she was twelve. Her parents made it a condition of their betrothal that Staël be appointed ambassador to France for life; King Gustavus of Sweden conveniently made his betrothal to Germaine a condition of his appointment as ambassador. The wedding took place in Paris on 14 January 1786, the contract signed the day before by the king and queen.

  Staël married Germaine for her money, and she married him for her freedom. As Claire says to Julie in Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse, ‘If it had depended on me, I would never have married, but our sex buys liberty only by slavery and it is necessary to begin as a servant in order to be a mistress someday.’ After their wedding day her husband was a virtual nonentity to her although for the first few years, almost surprised to be wooed by him, she did try to treat him kindly.

  Germaine’s first lover was probably Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. A refined, cynical libertine, thirty-four-year-old Talleyrand was so amoral that his own mother opposed his appointment as Bishop of Autun in 1788. Like Germaine, Talleyrand skilfully deployed his abundant charm and subtle wit to make people forget his appearance; this was quite a feat, since he had been crippled since childhood and was described in 1805 as having the complexion of a decomposed corpse. Their relationship did not deepen into passion–besides, Talleyrand already had an ‘official’ mistress–but the love and the friendship endured.

  In 1788 Germaine fell deeply in love with a friend of Talleyrand’s, Louis de Narbonne, the man she called her magician. The sophisticated Narbonne, illegitimate son of Louis XV (and, it was whispered, of his own sister, Mme Adélaïde), united, according to Fanny Burney, ‘the most courtly refinement and elegance to the quickest repartee’. Narbonne was as celebrated for his wit as for his looks–‘the inexhaustible treasures of grace, absurdity, gaiety, and all the seductions of his conversation’–and, at thirty-three, had already run through three fortunes (those of his mother, the comtesse de Narbonne; his godmother, Mme Adélaïde; and his wife) and fathered at least two illegitimate children.

  ‘He is a miracle,’ wrote a young German acquaintance, some time later, marvelling at Narbonne’s sparkling intelligence, courtesy, courage and modesty. ‘It is no surprise that Madame de Staël should be so attached to this friend, even more so, as she was lumbered with a husband incapable of creating a recipe for potatoes, let alone gunpowder.’ Her uninspiring husband was the man tradition and society had dictated that she marry, but Narbonne was her choice, her heart’s partner, her soulmate, and Germaine dedicated herself to him and to their love with all the ardour and idealism of youth. The strength and purity of her feelings for Narbonne were all the justification she needed for a crime (infidelity) she considered society’s, not her own.

  A constant interchange of notes between Germaine and her husband, to and from her parents’ lodgings in Versailles (where she stayed when she was called upon, as she often was, to play hostess for her father) and their house in the rue du Bac, indicates how rarely they were together during this period, and how often she would have been able to entertain Narbonne alone. When Staël accused her of doing so, she did not hesitate flatly to deny it: ‘stop your famous jealousy,’ she insisted. ‘You will lose me if you continue [to make demands on me],’ Germaine wrote in another letter, ‘and it will only be your fault.’ Personal freedom was evidently as important to her as abstract political liberties.

  To outside eyes, the union between Staël’s wife and the elegant courtier, Narbonne, was a strange one: ‘her intellectual endowments must be with him her sole attraction,’ wrote the naïve Fanny Burney, on being told that Germaine and Narbonne were lovers. ‘She loves him even tenderly, but so openly, so simply, so unaffectedly, and with such utter freedom from coquetry, that, if they were two men, or two women, the affection could not, I think, be more obviously undesigning.’

  By July 1789, the month the Bastille fell, their relationship was public enough for Gouverneur Morris – who was chasing Talleyrand’s mistress, Adéle de Flauhaut, with some success – to refer to Narbonne in his diary as ‘the friend of Mme de Staël’. Another suitor, Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre, was not deterred from declaring his love for Germaine that autumn, but her relationship with Narbonne did allow her to reject him gently, telling him how much she loved ‘le comte Louis’ who had ‘changed his destiny’ for her the moment he saw her, breaking off his other attachments and consecrating his life to her.

  By this she meant politically as much as emotionally. The aristocratic but relatively liberal Narbonne told Morris that July that he feared a civil war was inevitable; he was considering rejoining his regiment. He felt trapped between his duty to the king – his godfather and probably his nephew–and his political principles, urged upon him by Germaine. The American Morris, safe in his self-righteous republicanism, could smugly reply that he knew ‘of no duty but that which conscience dictates’, and speculate that Narbonne’s conscience would ‘dictate to join the strongest side’; but he was underestimating both the conviction that lay behind the progressive views of Germaine and her friends and the genuine conflict of interest they faced as they watched the revolution gather momentum. Narbonne allowed himself to be convinced by his mistress’s eloquence, and remained in Paris with her to pursue glory through, rather than against, reform.

  Germaine welcomed the early changes of the revolution with all the passion of her nature. Her upbringing had been a strange one. The only child of cool, ambitious, rather selfish parents, worshipping her father and jealous of her beautiful prig of a mother, she had lived among adults all her life. She was taught elocution by the greatest actress of the day, Mademoiselle Clairon (who later became her husband’s mistress). Instead of playing, she watched Diderot, Gibbon, Voltaire, Grimm and Buffon spar in her mother’s Friday salons; she did not have a friend her own age until she was twelve.

  Germaine’s intellectual brilliance, like her emotional intensity, was evident early on, and at twenty-two she published her first important book, Letters on Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Her passion for Rousseau was an indication both of her personal veneration of romantic love and of the philosophical atmosphere of the times. He was the most popular author of the second half of the eighteenth century, and probably the most important ideological inspiration to a generation of revolutionaries from Germaine herself to Robespierre. Even Marie-Antoinette had made a pilgrimage to his grave.

  Rousseau’s most celebrated and incendiary phrase comes from his treatise The Social Contract – ‘Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains’ – but his influence was far more than just political. He created a cult of sentimentality, exalting love not as a fashionable diversion indulged in outside marriage but as a noble, all-consuming calling: as Julie, the gentle but ardent heroine of La Nouvelle Héloïse, says, love became ‘the great business of our lives’. In Julie, Rousseau gave Frenchwomen a new role model; her lover, sensitive, introspective Saint-Preux, provided a new romantic ideal.

  Implicit in Rousseau’s ideas about love was a rejection of conventional ideas about society’s constraints, about status and about individual worth. ‘I am not speaking of rank and fortune,’ the commoner Saint-Preux tells his noble mistress Julie proudly, ‘honour and love suffice for want of all that.’ Germaine knew only too well that the bonds imposed by society meant nothing beside the bonds imposed by the heart.

  Because of Rousseau, wrote the English traveller Mary Berry, ‘maternal love became as much the fashion as soon afterwards balloons and animal magnetism’. Rousseau called motherhood a woman’s highest responsibility. His works reunited a generation of mothers with their children, encouraging them to breast-feed (hitherto rare; middle-and upper-class babies had usually been handed almost immediately after birth to wet-nurses) and take an interest in their children’s
education. Before Rousseau, children had been treated as miniature adults. They were not allowed to run around or ask questions, and were dressed in stiff adult clothes. Rousseau recommended that they be allowed to play outside, that their curiosity be encouraged and their innocence nurtured. The exquisitely intimate, informal mother-and-child portraits of the late eighteenth century were direct responses to this new philosophy.

  Rousseau, in glorifying women as wives and mothers, denied them any role outside the home. ‘There are no good morals for women outside of a withdrawn and domestic life,’ he wrote. ‘A woman outside her home loses her greatest radiance, and is shorn of her true adornments, shows herself indecently. If she has a husband, what is she out seeking among men?’ For him, as for so many of his generation, sexual inequality created an ideal equilibrium: men were dominant, active and reasoning, and their role was public; women were emotional, modest and loving, and their role was private. ‘A taller stature, a stronger voice, and features more strongly marked seem to have no necessary bearing on one’s sex, but these exterior modifications indicate the intentions of the creator in the modifications of the spirit,’ he reasoned in La Nouvelle Héloïse. ‘The souls of a perfect woman and a perfect man must not resemble each other more than their appearances.’ According to this argument, the complementary differences between the sexes were essential to maintaining social harmony.

  Despite the fact that her own ambitions were thwarted by his way of thinking, Germaine was typical of Rousseau’s female readers in disregarding his prejudices because the vision he offered of love as redemption was so powerful, and the importance he attached to the domestic role so flattering. She conceded that ‘Rousseau has endeavoured to prevent women from interfering in public affairs, and acting a brilliant part in the theatre of politics,’ but while he attempted ‘to diminish their influence over the deliberations of men, how sacredly has he established the empire they have over their happiness!’ Even the committed campaigner for women’s rights, Mary Wollstonecraft, famously described by Horace Walpole as a ‘hyena in petticoats’, was not immune to Rousseau’s allure: she admitted she had ‘always been half in love with him’.

  Part of the reason for this is the hidden currents lying beneath the surface of Rousseau’s work. Although he told women they should be subservient to men, his heroines were in fact often more capable and passionate than the men in their lives. In Émile, ou De l’éducation, Sophie ‘sought a man and…found monkeys’. When Émile falls in love with her, he recognizes that she must be his guide, just as in La Nouvelle Héloïse Julie tells Saint-Preux that she will direct their common destinies. For all its melancholia and high-mindedness–Germaine said that he had made ‘a passion of virtue’–Rousseau’s writing was also thrillingly erotic. He himself said his books ‘can only be read with one hand’.

  The duality in his books echoed that in his life. Although he idealized motherhood, Rousseau abandoned his own children; although he wrote about pure, innocent love he openly admitted to masochism and masturbation; although he praised submissive women his own first mistress, with whom he lived in a ménage à trois alongside her herbalist, was a speculator, adventuress and sometime spy. His Confessions, published posthumously, revealed vanity, vices and frailties but only added to his appeal.

  While he explicitly excluded women from political life, Rousseau’s writings inadvertently made women political creatures. They may have read his works for pleasure, but they also found in them rejections of tyranny and pleas for justice so persuasive that they came to believe the inequalities and constraints of society that they had once unquestioningly accepted were absurd.

  Rousseau’s philosophy, both public and private, set the tone for salons like Germaine’s of the late 1780s. Her circle rejected the ancien régime world for its hollowness, its arbitrariness and its superficiality. ‘It laughs at all those who see the earnestness of life and who still believe in true feelings and serious thought,’ she lamented later. ‘It soils the hope of youth.’ The French, she said, were ‘too civilised in some respects’, their rigmarole of manners and conventions grading ‘people instead of uniting them’.

  But while Germaine’s salon was notable for its liberalism and lack of prejudice, and welcomed newcomers if they had something to offer, its habitués were largely drawn from a small group of aristocrats who, in Germaine’s words, ‘preferred the generous principles of liberty to the advantages which they enjoyed personally’. Despite her democratic ideas, Germaine lived and entertained on an almost royal scale: two rows of footmen flanked the anteroom through which her fashionably free-thinking guests entered the gold and marble salon. Victorine de Chastenay was thinking of Germaine’s friends when she said that at the start of the revolution the most progressive nobles were generally ‘not the provincial gentry and those least qualified, but the most brilliant youth, men whose families had been the most loaded with gifts and honours at the Court’. ‘It was the fashion to complain of everything,’ wrote one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting. ‘Unnoticed, the spirit of revolt was rampant in all classes of society.’

  Many of Mme de Staël’s friends had served in the American army during the late 1770s and early 1780s when the French government supported the United States against the British (the burden of its spending there precipitating the financial crisis of the mid-1780s) and saw in the United States a republican idyll of freedom, simplicity and virtue. The marquis de Lafayette had fought beside George Washington and considered him his adoptive father. He and Washington were also united by their freemasonry, one means by which the enlightenment philosophies that inspired the revolution were disseminated; the writer Louis-Sébastien Mercier called masons’ lodges in the 1780s ‘a kind of school for oratory’. Germaine remarked that the love of liberty ‘decided every action’ of Lafayette’s life.

  Another idealistic American veteran was Mathieu de Montmorency, a friend of Lafayette’s and a prominent member of the Estates-General, who demanded a Declaration of Rights and happily relinquished his aristocratic privileges in August 1789. A year later, he called for the abolition of titles themselves and all marks of nobility, like servants in livery and coats of arms on carriages, façades and church pews. ‘All Frenchmen shall wear from henceforth the same ensigns,’ he declared, ‘those of Liberty.’ Like Germaine he looked on Rousseau as a hero, petitioning for him to be honoured by the French nation in 1791.

  As well as Frenchmen who had served in America, Germaine knew several Americans in Paris, including Thomas Jefferson (who advised Lafayette on his drafts of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen before leaving Paris in September 1789) and Tom Paine. One of her most regular American guests was Gouverneur Morris, who admitted he felt very stupid in the rue du Bac. His pursuit of Talleyrand’s mistress did not stop him making eyes at the wild, enchanting Aimée de Coigny. ‘We have some little compliments together, Mme de Coigny and I,’ he confided to his diary after a dinner in 1791 at Lady Sutherland’s,–the British ambassadress was another member of Germaine’s set, – ‘and I think it possible we may be pretty well together, but this depends on the Chapter of Accidents for she must be at the Trouble of bringing it about. Stay late here.’

  Morris was not entirely in agreement with the politics of Germaine’s salon. Soon after his arrival in Paris in early 1789 he described Germaine’s friend and Lafayette’s cousin Mme de Tessé, a member of the queen’s household, as a republican ‘of the first feather’; a week later he was told her friends saw him as an ‘aristocrat’, with ideas ‘too moderate for that company’. This was partly true. Morris thought the French too depraved for liberty–but perhaps he was simply intoxicated by the pleasures of the ancien régime and did not want them replaced by republican austerity before he had drunk his fill.

  The most radical aristocrat of Staël’s group was the marquis de Condorcet, a mathematician and philosopher. Reserved and painfully timid, Condorcet lacked social polish – he was said always to have hair-powder in his ears–but his pas
sion for modernity illuminated his views. The first stirrings of reform confirmed all his faith in the perfectibility of mankind. ‘Everyone tells us that we are bordering the period of one of the greatest revolutions of the human race,’ he wrote optimistically. ‘The present state of enlightenment guarantees that it will be happy.’

  Condorcet, married to a celebrated intellectual (and another celebrated salonniére) twenty-one years his junior, Sophie de Grouchy, known as la Vénus lycéenne, was one of the rare feminists of the age. In his political writings of the late 1780s he called repeatedly for the franchise, when it came, to be extended to women as well as men. ‘Either no individual in humankind has genuine rights,’ he declared in On the Admission of Women to Civil Rights in July 1790, ‘or all have the same ones.’ Excluding women from political life, he argued, violated the entire principle of natural rights on which the first revolutionaries were basing their calls for reform. The right to participate in the government of their country is a right men hold by virtue of their reason, not their gender; thus women, who also possess reason, cannot be deprived of those rights. Furthermore, he insisted, women’s active contribution to society could only be of benefit to it.

  According to the historian Madelyn Gutwirth, Condorcet was so concerned to avoid the ‘posture of bogus rococo gallantry’ that marked so much eighteenth-century writing about women that he lamented his lack of it. ‘Sighing philosophically, he observes that in robbing women of their myth by speaking of their “rights rather than their reign”, he may fail to earn their approval, for he saw all about him the stampede among women to Rousseauist views’, which granted them dominion over men’s hearts but no political rights.

  Although the constitution of the newly formed United States had not granted rights to women, its democratic example was an inspiration to Condorcet. ‘Men whom the reading of philosophic books had secretly disposed to love liberty were filled with passion [during the War of Independence],’ he wrote in a eulogy to Benjamin Franklin. ‘They seized with joy this occasion to publicly confess sentiments that prudence had obliged them to maintain in silence.’