STAËL, MME DE (1766–1817)

STAËL, MME DE (1766–1817)

Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, Baronness de Staël-Holstein was born in Paris to Swiss Calvinist parents, Jacques and Susan Necker. Her father was the finance minister of Louis XVI in 1789. Her mother opened one of the most flourishing literary salons in Paris during the last decades of the old regime. The sole daughter of the family, she married the Swedish ambassador to France, Baron Erik de Staël-Holstein, in 1786 and joined European court life.

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 626 Thanks to her privileged social background and excellence in conversation, Mme de

Staël became the most famous salonnière of the revolutionary period. She is also known as an eminent woman author of the revolutionary period, whose seventeen volumes of collected works cover a wide variety of genres, including novels, plays, moral and political essays, literary criticism, history, biography and poems. She was also and above all a political thinker, and among the founders of LIBERALISM in France.

While her gender has obscured her due place in male-centred historical traditions, it certainly contributed to de Staël’s concept of public opinion. As an heir to the salon culture of the old regime, de Staël placed women at the centre of the formation of public opinion. Historically, salons started during the religious wars at the end of the seventeenth century. Initial salonnières perceived salon activities as a social movement that could pacify society by transforming the belligerent mentality of men through literature and polite conversation. By 1750, salons were at their apogee. French philosophes believed that salonnières embodied modern civilization, defined as peaceful, tender, sociable and enlightened. As Montesquieu remarked, their mission was to co- ordinate different and egotistic opinions expressed by their male participants into a moral consensus in the name of public opinion.

Mme de Staël adapted this salon culture of the old regime to the revolutionary period. In Lettres sur Rousseau, she suggested that women should shape public opinion by transmitting the civilizing and prescriptive force of salon culture to print culture, and that

a modern salonnière should be simultaneously an author. In this light, her principal literary works, such as De l’influence des passions, De la littérature and De l’Allemagne had an eminently political function of creating a common moral and cultural disposition among mutually opposing monarchists and republicans as a pragmatic means of ending the social dissension engendered by the French Revolution.

A keen concern for the moral regeneration of the ruling elite nourished her reflections on liberty as well. In Lettres sur Rousseau, de Staël combined the spiritual liberty of Rousseau and the theory of natural sociability of sensationalist philosophers, and defined moral liberty at the crossroad of liberty and order. She assumed that the freedom of judgement, a crucial component of individual liberty, derived from a delicate balance between the ethical independence of individuals from society and the social influence upon individuals of state action and education. She considered that religious feeling guided reason towards conscientious acts. This is where she sympathised with Rousseau’s ‘religion of the heart’ and her Genevian Calvinism influenced her political posture. This synthesis of two mutually opposing discourses was another major characteristic of de Staël’s thought.

Although de Staël held her salon continuously between 1786 and 1817, her direct political influence as a salonnière reached a peak in 1791, when she collaborated with Narbonne, her then companion and the minister of war, to assist in stabilizing the constitutional monarchy. However, by the time she returned to Paris in 1795 as a newly converted republican, after a short exile to Switzerland and England during the Terror, her salon became an important laboratory for developing political and philosophical reflections on liberty rather than an arena of direct political influence.

De Staël’s republicanism between 1795 and 1799 went hand in hand with her inclination towards the ideas of the idéologues, the politically influential intellectuals of the Directory who were frequent guests at her salon. During this period, she laid

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emphasis upon some of their ideas, including the assumption that ideas were shaped by external influences via sensation, as well as a faith in applying an analytic method and calculation in the social and moral sciences. She even asserted that state actions and the role of writers were indispensable to familiarize the French with liberty, though she was strongly opposed to the idéologues’ atheistic and materialistic tendency.

However, by 1803, de Staël parted from the idéologues and mockingly called their ideas ‘the moral founded upon interest’. Her antipathy was crystallized after the idéologues assisted in bringing Napoleon to power on the 18 Brumaire. Indeed, representative idéologues such as Destutt de Tracy and Volney became senators of the empire although they were soon disappointed by Napoleon’s neglect of liberty. De Staël considered that a lack of a spiritual and metaphysical dimension among the idéologues made them obedient to the unjust temporary sovereign in exchange for material rewards, and that the utilitarian and atheistic aspects of their sensationalist philosophy had laid a moral foundation for Napoleon’s political despotism.

Instead, de Staël reasserted that the metaphysical independence of individuals from social influence was essential to moral judgement, an idea fully expressed in De l’Allemagne . This was a sphere where rational calculations were useless, and included writers’ moral independence from state authority and the citizens’ judgement on the moral legitimacy of political institutions and the political conduct of policy-makers. Her alienation from republicanism therefore commenced with a rejection of its moral implication on liberty at the turn of the century.

A head-on political confrontation with Napoleon eventually led to her expulsion from the French territory in 1803. During a decade of painful exile in Coppet in Switzerland,

de Staël gained further intellectual maturity in contact with B.CONSTANT, SISMONDI and SCHLEGEL. She inaugurated a new intellectual current characterized by respect for individual liberty and a high regard for different national cultures. Finally, her ideological opposition to the Corsican reached a climax in 1813 when Napoleon suddenly banned the publication of De l’Allemagne in France. However, the success of the book across the whole of Europe was such that, by the time of Napoleon’s fall, Mme de Staël had become

a cosmopolitan woman author of unprecedented popularity.

As a political thinker, de Staël’s central concern was the division of powers. While French revolutionaries considered this in terms of a juridical division of tasks based upon the superiority of the National Assembly over the Executive, she affirmed that the most difficult problem consisted of how to unite these institutions instead of dividing them. Her master in this regard was Montesquieu, with his famous principle of checks and balances. However, she adopted two different attitudes towards this concept before and after 1793.

Between 1789 and 1793, de Staël espoused a principle of national sovereignty that considered the single National Assembly sovereign, sanctioning its pre-eminence over the Executive. She rallied to La Fayettists until the collapse of the constitutional monarchy in 1792. She also supported the constitution of 1791 that abolished nobility by rejecting the second chamber. In this context, she introduced into France some elements of the British parliamentary system, writing articles with the aim of ensuring a harmonious junction between the single legislature and the constitutional monarch. She thus promoted such notions as a distinction between the political and penal responsibility of ministers, the formation of a cabinet of ministers and the inviolability of the chief of

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the executive. While in Britain the establishment of the parliamentary system had dispensed with the monarchical veto in practice, de Staël assumed that the initiative of legislation and the veto were indispensable prerogatives of the French head of state, in order to guarantee the political unity of France.

During the Terror, she decisively parted from a juridical way of conceiving a new social and political order, and introduced sociological reflections to establish liberty in post-revolutionary France. It seems that her stay in England in 1793 and the British debate upon the French Revolution and Whig ideas in particular modified her views of the revolution. Whigs like Sir James Mackintosh had concluded that the principle of national sovereignty and an absence of the middle class in society had made the Terror possible. De Staël had introduced these British ideas of liberty into the political debates of the Directory after 1795.

De Staël followed Mackintoch in rejecting the notion of national sovereignty when she converted to republicanism in 1795. At the same time, her principal concern between 1795 and 1799 consisted of applying to the Republic two axioms of the constitutional monarchy, liberty and order. It was during the Directory that she produced her most important works as a political thinker: Réflexions sur la paix and Circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la révolution française.

According to these essays, de Staël’s political liberalism can be defined as a constitutional equilibrium between legitimate state authority and the liberty of the nation characterized by the division of legislative powers. One of the objectives of her political liberalism, guaranteed by the existence of the second chamber and its sociological composition, was to preserve the economic and social status quo, and to protect the interests of big landowners, most of whom were nobles. This is why, after 1795, she admired the English House of Lords as a tangible example of the guarantee of liberty. She considered that either the monarchy or the Republic would be legitimate as far as these conditions were met, and she sanctioned the constitution of the year III (1795) that institutionalized the second chamber for the first time since 1789.

Against a large majority of revolutionaries who tried to fuse the elite of the old regime and the revolution, de Staël tried to preserve a distinct social status for big landowners of the old regime in post-revolutionary social order:

si les deux chambers en France étaient parfaitement distinctes; si le pouvoir de l’une était prolongé par delà celui de l’autre, si la condition d’âge, de propriété était beaucoup plus forte, il s’établirait naturellement la balance des deux pouvoirs qui sont dans la nature des choses, de l’action qui renouvelle, et de la réflexion qui conserve.

Her unique definition of the second chamber reflected her efforts to rally émigrés to the French Revolution. If republicans protected property, the Republic would be loved by property owners, including émigrés, and such measures could help to terminate the revolution. Her opinion, in this regard, contradicted that of many republicans, but found some echo among émigrés at the turn of the century.

Les Considérations sur les principaux événements de la révolution française, posthumously published in 1818, was de Staël’s most influential work in terms of its impact on public opinion. It was also the first historical account of the French Revolution

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written by a contemporary. In this book, de Staël resurrected a widespread counter- revolutionary historical myth according to which the Frankish lords’ political power had gradually eroded as a result of the concomitant rise in power of the French absolute monarch and the common people during the process of state centralization. She emphasised that this historical memory led to the division between nobility and common people during the revolutionary years.

De Staël defined the objective of the French Revolution as a resurrection of aristocratic liberty linked with the notion of social inequality in a modern context, through the institutionalization of the chamber of peers. Thus, she attributed the ultimate mistake of the French Revolution to the unicameral legislature in 1789. She compared the Charter of 1814 with the political reforms of Necker between 1788 and 1789, and suggested that the Restoration could finally institutionalize liberty, thanks to the newly institutionalized hereditary chamber of peers. In fact, her historical interpretation of the French Revolution primarily reflected her political vision of the second Restoration, and her book immediately prompted the emergence of two distinct groups of liberals.

On the one hand, the Doctrinaires applauded de Staël’s notion of the moral influence of the governing elite, and considered that a key element in the liberal political institutions lay in the existence of a hereditary second chamber. However, a lack of political cohesion in the group was demonstrated by the negative reactions of some Doctrinaires, when the duc de Broglie, influenced by the ideas of de Staël, prepared the reform of the electoral law in 1819–20.

On the other hand, liberals of a more democratic tendency accepted the liberal principles of Considérations but refused de Staël’s sociological application of these principles. They gradually came to constitute a group of indépendents headed by B.Constant, who objected to her notion of hereditary magistracy. Instead, they suggested that the second chamber should be selective in terms of wealth, not restricted to landownership. It indicates that their vision of social and political change contradicted that of de Staël. While she believed in a social status quo characterized by the preservation of feudal agriculture and political domination over the peasantry, the indépendents accepted further social and economic change through the introduction of the free market in French society.

Consequently, their more bourgeois perspective led to a historical interpretation of the French Revolution different from that of Mme de Staël. In particular, Bailleul, a former republican, distinguished the French Revolution from the British Glorious Revolution of 1688, contrary to de Staël, and affirmed that the former represented a distinct historical phase marking the emergence of common people in the political sphere. By the middle of the 1820s, this democratic current became predominant among left-wing liberals, and the second-generation historians of the French Revolution, such as THIERS and Mignet, began writing the history of the French Revolution by refuting Mme de Staël and following Bailleul.

As an Enlightenment woman philosophe, Mme de Staël passed the ideological legacy of the Enlightenment on to the revolutionary period and transformed an abstract concept of liberty into a series of political and constitutional principles. While the British influence was prominent in terms of her emphasis upon the modern parliamentary system, she nonetheless conceived moral liberty under the influence of thinkers such as

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Rousseau, and rejected the exclusively materialistic and utilitarian vision of individuals inherent in eighteenth-century sensationalist philosophy.

Although her political liberalism had little effective political influence upon contemporary French politics, de Staël’s political ideas and vision of the modern individual made a firm imprint upon the subsequent generation of liberals, such as Constant, Rémusat, GUIZOT and TOCQUEVILLE. It is on this account that she might

be called the mother of French liberalism.