Madame de Staël. Bella Duffy
Etat should be doubled, so as to balance the influence of the other two parties. Royalists affirm that this was a fatal error, since from that hour the Revolution became inevitable. Madame de Staël, jealous of her father’s reputation, maintains that reasonable concessions on the part of the Court faction and the higher clergy would have nullified the danger of the double representation. But the point was that such an aristocracy and such a clergy were by nature unteachable; and every moment wasted in attempting to persuade them was an hour added to the long torture of oppressed and starving France.
The kind heart, liberal instincts, and administrative ability of Necker taught him that without the double representation the voice of the people might be lifted in vain. But the weakness of his character, and the awe of his bourgeois soul for the time-honored fetich of monarchy, prevented his understanding that the power he invoked could never again be laid by any spell of his choosing. By seeking to arrange this or that, to pare off something here and add something there—in a word, by trying to be just all round, when nobody cared for mutual justice but himself, he rendered a divided allegiance to his country and his King. If there were no conscious duplicity in his character, there was abundance of it in his opinions; and to say that nobody could have succeeded better is to beg the question. In the face of the savage, inflexible arrogance of the aristocrats and clergy, there was but one course open to a really high-minded man, and that was to leave the Court to its own devices, and, throwing himself with all of earnestness and wisdom that he possessed into the popular cause, to be guided by it, and yet govern it by force of sympathy and will.
He might have failed; in the light of later events, it can even be said that he would have failed. But such a failure would have been grander, more vital for good and sterile for harm, than the opprobrium which eventually visited the honest Necker and pursued him to his grave.
Needless to say that opinions such as these never found their way into Madame de Staël’s mind. On occasions—perhaps too frequently renewed—the portals of that enchanted palace were guarded by her heart. In her view, everything might yet be saved, were Necker only listened to and obeyed. “Every day he will do something good and prevent something bad,” she wrote to the reactionary and angry Gustavus, and thus betrayed that preoccupation with the individual, his virtues or his crimes, which, for all her intellect, blinded her not rarely to the essential significance of things.
With breathless interest and varied feelings of sympathy and indignation she watched the great events which now followed in rapid succession. Her father was monarchical, and believed that a representative monarchy on the English model was the true remedy for France. Madame de Staël—incapable of differing with so great a man—endorsed this opinion at the time, although eventually she became republican.
But nobody was republican then—that is in name; people had not yet realized to what logical conclusions their opinions would carry them. Madame de Staël, hating oppression, blamed the sightless obstinacy of the nobles, but, on the other hand, was but little moved by the famous Serment du Jeu de Paume. She deplored the rejection of Necker’s plan—that happy medium which was to settle everything, and stigmatized as it deserved the imbecility of the Court party, as illustrated by confidence in foreign regiments and the Declaration of the 23d June. Always optimist, and confident of the inevitable triumph of Right over Might, she clung to the belief that a thoroughly pure character, in such a crisis, was the one indispensable element of success.
The mysterious nature of Sièyes repelled her; she preferred the virtuous Malouet to the titanic Mirabeau, and was almost as blind as her father to the enormous electric force of the tribune’s undisciplined genius. For if often prejudiced, she rarely was morbid, and false ideas did not dazzle her. No splendor of achievement unaccompanied by loftiness of principle could win her applause. But she failed to grasp the fact that perfection of moral character, by its very scruples and hesitations, is necessarily handicapped in any race with the velocity of public events. No man can bring his entire self—very rarely can he even bring all that is best of himself—into a struggle with warring forces and contradictory individualities. In such a contest, swiftness of insight, power of expression, and force of organic impulse are the only factors of value. In supreme moments of action, men are greater than themselves—made so by the sudden, unconscious contraction of their complex personality into one flame-point of consuming will.
All this Madame de Staël seems never to have felt. If she loved unworthy people (and how many she did love!), it was because she deceived herself regarding them, as all her life she deceived herself about her father. She was intolerant of any triumph but that of virtue, and was thus rendered unjust to the great deeds of men who, imperfect and erring themselves, can sympathize with the aspirations of the human heart because its baseness is not unknown to them.
On the 11th of July, at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, M. Necker, who had become a sort of Cassandra to the Court party and was detested in proportion, received a letter from the King ordering him to quit Paris and France, and to accomplish the departure with the utmost secrecy and despatch. He was at table with some guests when this order was handed to him; he read it, put it into his pocket, and continued his conversation as though nothing had happened.
Dinner over, he took Madame Necker aside, and informed her what had occurred. Nothing was communicated to Madame de Staël; probably her father thought she would be too much excited. M. and Madame Necker hastily ordered their carriage and, without bidding anybody farewell, without even delaying to change their clothes, they had themselves conveyed to the nearest station for post-horses. Thence they continued their journey uninterruptedly, fleeing like culprits from the people whose indignation was feared by the King.
Madame de Staël is lost in admiration of this single-minded conduct of her father, and lays especial stress on the fact that, even during the journey, he made no effort to win for himself the suffrages of the multitude. “Where is another man,” she naïvely asks, “who would not have had himself brought back in his own despite?”
Certainly an ambitious man might have adopted this theatrical plan; but it is much more likely, under the actual circumstances, that an ambitious man would never have left at all. M. Necker had only to announce his disgrace to the people of Paris, and go over once for all to the popular side, to have received an intoxicating ovation. As it was, the news of his dismissal cast the capital into consternation. All the theatres were closed, medals were struck in the fallen Minister’s honor, and the first cockade worn was green—the color of his liveries. What a career might then have been his if, instead of being an obedient subject, he had chosen to be a leader!
Madame de Staël thought that it was to the last degree noble and disinterested of him to vanish from the sight of an adoring multitude rather than bring fresh difficulties on the master who had deserted him. But the destinies of a nation are of higher value than the comfort of a monarch, and there are certain responsibilities which no man who does not feel himself incapable (and that was not Necker’s case) is justified in declining. To throw back the love and influence offered him then for the last time by France, to sympathize with the popular cause and yet to abandon it, and to do all this out of obedience to the senseless caprice of a faction and the arbitrary command of a king, was to behave like a Court chamberlain, but in no sense like a statesman.
The taking of the Bastille, and the King’s declaration at the Hôtel de Ville, followed immediately on Necker’s retirement. Madame de Staël records these events in a very few words, and shows herself, at the moment and henceforward through all the opening scenes of the Revolution, more alive to the humiliation and dismay of the Royal Family than to the apocalyptic grandeur of the catastrophe.
The acts committed, as one reads of them quietly now, are revolting in their mingled grotesqueness and terror. To those who witnessed them, they sickened where they did not deprave. The livid head of Foulon on the pike; the greasy, filthy, partly drunken populace, who rose as from the depths of the earth to invade the splendid privacy of royal Versailles; the degraded women dragged from shameful obscurity and paraded in the lurid glare of an indecent triumph; Madame de Lamballe’s monstrous and dishonored death; Marat’s hellish accusations, and Robespierre’s diseased suspicions, were things that must have destroyed in those who lived through them all capacity for admiration.
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