Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution. Germaine de Stael

      The cuneiform inscription that serves as our logo and as a design element in Liberty Fund books is the earliest-known written appearance of the word “freedom” (amagi), or “liberty.” It is taken from a clay document written about 2300 B.C. in the Sumerian city-state of Lagash.

      Introduction, note on the present edition, annotations, bibliography, index © 2008 by Liberty Fund, Inc.

      Portrait of Madame de Staël by Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy-Trioson, ca. 1800–1824. © The Gallery Collection/Corbis. Reproduced by permission.

      This eBook edition published in 2012.

      eBook ISBN: E-PUB 978-1-61487-232-0

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       Contents

Introduction

Note on the Present Edition

Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution

       Select Bibliography on Madame de Staël

       Index

Introduction

      Liberty! Let us repeat her name . . . for all that we love,

      all that we honor is included in it.

      —Madame de Staël

      A Thinker for Our Times: Madame de Staël, Her Life and Works

      Very few individuals have left as deep a trace on their age as Anne Louise Germaine, Baronne de Staël-Holstein (1766–1817). She was one of the greatest intellectuals and writers of her time, and the influence of her works crossed national borders, cultures, and disciplines. Her powerful and sparkling personality impressed everyone she met, from Byron and Chateaubriand to Tsar Alexander I and Napoléon. Staël’s popularity was such that in 1815, soon after Napoléon’s fall from power, one of her contemporaries observed that “there are three great powers in Europe: England, Russia, and Madame de Staël.”¹

       Life of Madame de Staël

      Who was this powerful woman accepted into the most exclusive circles of her time and destined to become one of the most famous French writers? Born on April 22, 1766, Madame de Staël belonged to the distinguished Necker family, at one point among the richest families in Europe. Germaine’s mother, Suzanne Curchod, was a highly educated woman from Lausanne who closely supervised her daughter’s education, seeking to give her a truly encyclopedic knowledge of disciplines as diverse as mathematics, languages, geography, theology, and dance. Madame Necker held a famous salon attended by such celebrities as Voltaire, Diderot, Holbach, Helvétius, d’Alembert, Gibbon, Hume, and Walpole.

      Madame de Staël’s father, Jacques Necker (1732–1804), a Swiss Protestant, had risen to prominence as a banker in Paris. He made a name for himself in the political realm as Louis XVI’s minister of finance and was a leading actor during the initial stages of the French Revolution. Necker is remembered today for taking the unprecedented step in 1781 of making public the country’s budget, a novelty in an absolute monarchy where the state of finances had always been kept a secret. Necker, who thought this custom both unlawful and ineffective, realized that public opinion had become an invisible power exercising a major influence on the country and the court. Justifying his decision, Necker wrote: “Darkness and obscurity favor carelessness, [while] publicity can only become an honor and a reward.”² The public success of Necker’s Compte rendu was tremendous: more than three thousand copies were sold the first day of its publication.

      Necker was also the author of important books in which he vigorously defended liberty, constitutionalism, and moderate government: On the Executive Power in Large States (1792), On the French Revolution (1796), and Last Views on Politics and Finance (1802). Necker’s reflections on the French Revolution, an unduly ignored masterpiece, are a detailed account of his conduct during the turbulent events of 1788 and 1789, and especially during the month of July 1789, when his dismissal by King Louis XVI was followed by the fall of the Bastille and his subsequent recall by the monarch. In his political writings, Necker justified his preference for a tempered monarchy similar to the one existing in England, and he became one of the leading theorists of executive power in modern political thought.³

      Madame de Staël achieved fame as a novelist, political thinker, sociologist of literature, and autobiographer. To her thorough education she added vast political experience and an intense personal life that blended love and politics in an original way, as her rich correspondence demonstrates.⁴ A romantic and restless soul, Madame de Staël attracted the friendship of the most important men of her age, from Talleyrand, Goethe, and Benjamin Constant to J.-C.-L. Simonde de Sismondi, Prosper de Barante, and August Wilhelm von Schlegel. She witnessed firsthand the most important events of the French Revolution, which she followed closely from Paris and, later, from her exile at Coppet, in Switzerland, where she lived between 1792 and 1795, anxiously watching from a distance the rise of the Jacobin democracy, the Terror, and the fall of Robespierre on 9 Thermidor.

      Her health declined in 1816, and in February 1817 she became bedridden. Her mind remained as sharp as ever, though, and Staël had the opportunity to reflect one more time on her extraordinary life and achievements. In a letter to Chateaubriand she confessed: “I have always been the same: lively but sad. I love God, my father, and liberty.”⁵ She died on July 14, 1817, at the age of fifty-one.

       Works of Madame de Staël

      Staël’s first major book, Letters on the Works and Character of J.-J. Rousseau, appeared in 1788 and established her reputation in the Parisian circles of that time. In the aftermath of the Revolution she gained a long-awaited opportunity to again pursue her literary interests and also to become involved in politics. She published On the Influence of Passions on the Happiness of Individuals and Nations in 1796, followed four years later by On Literature Considered in Its Relations to Social Institutions (1800).⁶ Her famous novel Delphine appeared in 1802, and Corinne was published five years later. After 1795, Madame de Staël returned to Paris for longer sojourns, commented on the major political events of the day, and formulated various policy proposals meant to bring the Revolution to a successful end.

      In 1797 she completed the initial part of her first major political work, On the Current Circumstances Which Can End the Revolution, whose full text was not published until 1979. The republican tone of this book might surprise readers familiar only with Staël’s later political writings, which portray her as an enthusiastic defender of constitutional monarchy à l’anglaise. Inspired by the principles of the Enlightenment, she put forward a powerful critique of the excesses of the Jacobins while also taking to task the errors of the ultraroyalists who sought to reverse the course of French history. In order to “close” the Revolution, Madame de Staël favored a republican form of government based on popular sovereignty, representative government, and respect for private property, seen as the foundation of all political rights. She also expressed concern for the low public-spiritedness of the French, which she regarded as a corollary of the disquieting