Historical and Political Essays

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Anne Louise Germaine Necker was born in Paris on April 22, 1766. Her
father was at that time known only as a Swiss banker of high character
and reputation, who had amassed a vast fortune and had come to Paris
for his private affairs; but about two years after the birth of his
daughter he was appointed to represent the interests of Geneva at
Paris, and when she was ten years old he rose, for the first time, to
a leading place in the Ministry of France. Her mother had been the
Mademoiselle Curchod whose charms and accomplishments had captivated
Gibbon when he was a young man at Lausanne. Every reader of his
autobiography will remember the famous passage in which he describes
his engagement, the opposition of his father, and the resignation with
which he 'sighed as a lover, but obeyed as a son.' M. d'Haussonville
has published from the archives at Coppet some melancholy letters
which show clearly that Gibbon exhibited more heartlessness and
inflicted more suffering than might be gathered from his own stately
narrative. But no lasting scar remained. After a few years of poverty
and hardship, during which she was obliged to earn a livelihood as a
schoolmistress, Mademoiselle Curchod found in Necker a husband who
realised her fondest wishes; and when, soon after, she became the
centre of a brilliant salon at Paris, her former lover, then in the
zenith of his fame, was often among her guests. Madame Necker did not
always abstain from slightly veiled allusions to the past, but it is
pleasant to see that a warm and solid friendship seems to have grown
up between Gibbon and both his host and hostess. A pretty anecdote is
related of how, on one occasion, after he had left the house, they
agreed in expressing the deep regret with which they looked forward to
his approaching departure for England; when their little daughter, who
was then just ten years old, gravely offered to prevent the
catastrophe by marrying the illustrious, but by no means
prepossessing, historian.

It was a saying of Talleyrand that he who had not lived before 1789
had never known the full charm of life. Germaine Necker grew up in the
last bright flush of a society which had, perhaps, as many
fascinations as any that the world has known. Her mother, however,
though she occupied a prominent position in this brilliant world, was
never altogether of it. She shared fully, indeed, its intellectual
tastes, and had herself won some small place in literature. She threw
herself ardently into its philanthropic movements, and especially into
that for the reform of the hospitals. She formed a warm and true
friendship with Buffon and Thomas. She corresponded with Voltaire, and
attracted to her house most of the best writers of the age. But to the
last she remained eminently and characteristically Swiss, and she
never acquired the light touch, or the easy, pliant grace, of the true
Parisian. She was a little cold, a little prim, a little pedantic, a
little self-conscious. Neither her reserved manners nor her strong
domestic tastes, nor the vein of Puritanism that ran through her
opinions, harmonised with the lax and sceptical society around her,
and it was no sacrifice to her to exchange the splendours and the
gaieties of Paris for her peaceful retreat on the Lake of Geneva.

In this, as in most respects, her daughter was very different. In her
the Swiss element had altogether disappeared, and, as is often the
case with the eminent child of eminent parents, her character shot out
in directions wholly unlike both that of her father and that of her
mother. She was not beautiful, though her dark and eminently lustrous
eyes, beaming with intelligence, and her rich brown tint, gave some
charm to her large and rather coarse features; while her massive
shoulders, arms, and breast, her full lips and the firm grasp of her
vigorous hand, indicated a strong, frank, ruling, and passionate
nature, overflowing with life and with many forms of energy. Her
education was somewhat fitfully conducted, but she threw herself
eagerly into literary enthusiasms. At fifteen we find her annotating
Montesquieu. Raynal and Richardson were among her idols, but, like
most of the more ardent spirits of her generation, her ideas and
character were moulded chiefly by the genius of Rousseau. Her first
work of importance was an exposition of his doctrines, and his
influence left deep traces on both 'Corinne' and 'Delphine.' Her
strong sane judgment, however, her genuine humanity, and the
moderating influence of her father, saved her from being swept away,
like Madame Roland and most of the disciples of Rousseau, by the
sanguinary torrent of revolutionary enthusiasm; and in times of wild
passion and exaggeration she usually exhibited a singular soundness
and sobriety of political judgment. She was sometimes mistaken, but on
the whole it may well be doubted whether there is any other French
writer or politician of the period of the Revolution whose
contemporary judgments of men and events have been more frequently
ratified by posterity.

In this respect she was not of the school of Rousseau. In another and
less admirable way she was curiously untouched by his spirit, for few
superior intellects have been so openly, so utterly, insensible to the
charms of nature. She once spoke of 'the infernal peace' of her Swiss
home, and she candidly acknowledged that if it were not for respect
for the opinions of others she would not open her window to look for
the first time on the Bay of Naples, though she would gladly travel
five hundred leagues to make the acquaintance of a man of talent. On
the borders of the Lake of Geneva, with one of the fairest scenes on
earth expanding before her, she was incessantly pining for 'le
ruisseau de la Rue du Bac'--for the interest and the excitement of a
society which had become the passion of her life.

Her gifts of conversation were very wonderful, and she had a wide
range of sympathies, keen insight into character, and great power of
describing it by a few vivid words. She had, however, no reticence or
reserve, she made many enemies by her unbounded frankness, and she
often fatigued or overwhelmed by her exuberant animal spirits and by
the torrent of her words. At the same time, unlike most great talkers,
she possessed to a very eminent degree the gifts of learning from
others, of grasping the characteristic features of their teaching, of
awakening sympathies, of dispelling bashfulness, and of kindling
latent intellect into a flame. Few women combined so remarkably a
sound and moderate judgment with extreme vividness and impetuosity of
emotion. She admired deeply, and she generally admired wisely; her
first judgments and impulses were almost always generous; and,
although she was subject to violent gusts of passion, she could be
very patient with those she loved. Through her whole life she was the
warmest and most self-sacrificing of friends, and her few antipathies
were singularly devoid of rancour. One of those who knew her best
pronounced her to be 'absolutely incapable of hatred.'

She soon became the most attractive figure in the salon of Madame
Necker, and as the health of her mother declined she became its
central figure. Her rare accomplishments and her position as a great
heiress naturally would have drawn many suitors around her, but in
that age the determined Protestantism of her family was a formidable
barrier. It appears from something that she wrote late in life to a
German correspondent that, when a mere girl, she had come under the
spell of Louis de Narbonne, who asked her hand, and with whom, in
after years, she had relations which caused much scandal and which
greatly coloured her political life. The story that her parents at one
time contemplated a marriage between her and William Pitt, on the
occasion of his visit to France in 1783, was discredited by Lord
Stanhope; but M. d'Haussonville pronounces it to be quite true, though
there is no clear evidence that Pitt was apprised of the wish of the
Neckers. She was then only seventeen, and her vehement protest against
an English marriage nipped the project in the bud. In 1786, however, a
marriage was negotiated for her with the Swedish ambassador, the Baron
de Stael, who was at that time a special favourite of Gustavus III. It
was a marriage into which but little affection entered, and twelve
years later it ended in a separation. There was afterward, it is true,
a partial reconciliation, and she was present with her husband when he
died, in 1802, on the way from Paris to Coppet.

Her marriage gave her an independent position, and she mixed much in
the politics of the early days of the Revolution. She corresponded
regularly with the Swedish King, and formed intimate friendships with
great numbers of the guiding politicians. The proudest moment of her
life was in August 1788, when, amid a transport of transient
enthusiasm and extravagant hopefulness, her father was for the second
time called to the helm. Her devotion to him amounted almost to
adoration, and she would never acknowledge, what the rest of the world
soon perceived, that, though excellently adapted to be Minister in
quiet, regular times, he had neither the daring nor the insight, nor
the commanding power, that was needed to guide the bark of State
through the fierce storms of the Revolution. She fully shared the
enthusiasm with which the opening of the States General was received.
She mentions that on that occasion she was watching the procession
from a window with Madame de Montmorin, wife of the Minister of
Foreign Affairs, and that as she expressed her delight, her companion
said: 'You are wrong in rejoicing; great calamities will follow from
this to France and to us.' The words were truly prophetic. Madame de
Montmorin perished on the scaffold with one of her sons; the other was
drowned. Her husband was murdered in prison during the massacre of the
second of September. Her eldest daughter died in the prison hospital.
Her youngest daughter withered away when not yet thirty,
broken-hearted by the calamities of her family.

Madame de Stael, too, soon discovered that no millennium was at hand.
She was an eye-witness of the terrible scenes of the fifth and sixth
of October, when Versailles was invaded by a half-famished mob, when
the guards were cut down and beheaded, and when the royal family were
brought captive to Paris. She clearly saw that all power was passing
from the Government to the clubs, and that the mob violence which
reigned was either instigated or deliberately connived at by the very
men whose first duty was to repress it. 'These gentlemen,' she once
said, 'are like the rainbow; they always appear when the storm is
over.' Under her influence the Swedish Embassy became the chief centre
in which the 'Constitutional Party' was organised. Narbonne and
Talleyrand were then completely devoted to her. Segur, Choiseul, the
Prince de Broglie, and other members of the party were constantly at
her house; and at what were called her 'coalition dinners' she brought
them in contact with leading men of other groups. She had a
conspicuous talent for inspiring, encouraging, conciliating, and
organising a party; and for some months she exercised a very real
political influence. Her aim was a constitutional monarchy of the
English type; but she came gradually to believe that a republic, or at
least a change of Sovereigns, had become inevitable. She never wavered
in her devotion to liberty, order, and justice; but on minor questions
she always exhibited a spirit of compromise which was very rare in her
age and in her country. 'The true line of conduct in politics,' she
once said, 'is always to be ready to rally to the least obnoxious
party among your adversaries, even though it is far from representing
exactly your own point of view.' At the end of 1791 she had a moment
of delicious triumph, when her favourite Narbonne became Minister of
War. Marie Antoinette, who disliked her, clearly recognised her hand.
'Count Louis de Narbonne,' she wrote to Fersen, 'has been Minister of
War since yesterday. What a glory for Madame de Stael and what a
pleasure for her to have the whole army at her disposal!'

The triumphs of Madame de Stael, however, were very fleeting. Her
father had fallen irretrievably, and in September 1790 he passed
almost unnoticed out of the country where, but little more than a year
before, he had been welcomed with such enthusiasm. The Ministry of
Narbonne, to which she had attached her most ardent hopes, ended in
four months, and before its conclusion her husband, whose views on
French politics had been for some time diverging from those of his
Sovereign, was recalled. He was not, however, replaced, and Madame de
Stael remained alone in Paris till September 1792. Her position there
was an extremely dangerous one. She had long been an object of
incessant abuse in the Royalist press, and now the red waves of
Jacobinism were rising higher and higher, surging fiercely around
those to whom she was most attached. Nothing in her life is so
admirable as the courage with which, in this period of the Revolution,
she devoted herself to saving the lives of the proscribed. Her purse
was always open, and she often risked not only her fortune, but her
life. The royal family had always disliked her; but she was filled
with horror at the fate that was impending over them, and she herself
organised a plan for their escape, in which, if it had been accepted,
she would have borne a leading part, at the imminent risk of her head;
and she afterward wrote an earnest and eloquent pamphlet in the hope
of saving the life of the Queen. Sometimes by interceding with those
in power, sometimes by concealing fugitives in the Swedish Embassy,
very often by large and timely gifts of money, she saved many. Her own
life, at the time of the September massacres, was in extreme danger,
and she at last fled to Switzerland. Coppet then became a great centre
of refugees, and many of them owed their lives to her help. Among
others, Narbonne appears to have owed his escape, in part at least, to
her assistance, and she chiefly managed the escape of his daughter.
She was for a long time completely under his charm; but he is said to
have been irritated by her often tactless impetuosity, and especially
by the manner in which public opinion regarded him as her creature,
and he seems to have treated her with much ingratitude. There was no
violent breach, but there was a separation, and a wound which was long
and bitterly felt. Many years later, Madame de Stael, when praising
the Prince de Ligne, said of him: 'He had the manners of Monsieur de
Narbonne--and a heart.'

A short visit to England, in 1793, the death of her mother in May
1794, and the publication of her first purely political work,
'Reflections on Peace, addressed to Mr. Pitt and to the French,' were
the chief events of her life during the next few months. In this work
she dwelt with much force on the absurdity of supposing that any
foreign intervention could restore what the Revolution had destroyed,
and she predicted that the inevitable effect of the prolongation or
extension of the war would be to strengthen that militant Jacobinism
which was now the greatest danger to Europe. In this year, too, she
first came in contact with Benjamin Constant, and her acquaintance
soon developed into a connection which gave her a new and powerful
instrument for acting on French politics, but which also brought with
it much suffering, many reproaches, and long and lasting discredit. In
May 1795 we find her again in Paris, with her husband, who had once
more been sent on a mission to France; again eagerly engaged in French
politics; again largely occupied in defending the interests of her
proscribed friends. Among others, Talleyrand appears to have owed his
recall to her influence. As usual, she excited many antipathies, she
was denounced in the Convention by Legendre for her political
intrigues and especially for her efforts in favour of the emigrants,
and she was obliged to leave Paris for about eighteen months. Her pen
was at this time very active, and to this period belong her 'Essay on
Novels' and her 'Treatise on the Passions.'

The star of Bonaparte was now rapidly rising, and it profoundly
affected the last years of her life. The pages in her 'Considerations
on the French Revolution' in which she describes her first interview
with him, after the peace of Campo Formio, are among the most graphic
she ever wrote, though something of the shadow of the picture was, no
doubt, drawn from later experience and antipathy. She was at first
dazzled; she was at all times profoundly impressed by his genius, but
she soon came to perceive that his nature was wholly unlike that of
other men. She had seen, she said, men worthy of all respect, and she
had seen men noted for their ferocity; but the impression produced on
her by Bonaparte was generically different from that produced by
either of these classes. She found that such epithets as 'good,'
'violent,' 'gentle,' and 'cruel' could not be applied to him in their
ordinary senses. He was in truth a being who stood self-centred, and
apart from the sympathies, passions, and enthusiasms of his kind,
habitually regarding men, not as fellow-creatures, but as mere
counters in a game; a will of colossal strength; an intellect of
clear, cold, transcendent power, solely governed by the imperturbable
calculation of the strictest egotism, and never drawn aside by love or
hatred, by pity or religion, or by attachment to any cause. It was
impossible, she found, to exaggerate his contempt for human nature and
his disbelief in the reality of human virtue. A perfectly honest man
was the only kind of man he never could understand. Such a man
perplexed and baffled his calculations, acting on them as the sign of
the cross acts on the machinations of a demon. The superiority which
so clearly shone in his conversation was not that of a mind cultivated
by study and by society; it was the supreme insight into the
circumstances of life possessed by a mighty hunter of men. There was
something in him, she said, like a cold and trenchant sword, which at
the same moment could wound and chill.

Such was the estimate she formed of the man who, nearly at the same
time, was presented by Talleyrand to the Directory as 'the pacificator
of Europe,' as a hero 'who despised luxury and pomp--the wretched
ambition of common souls--and who loved the poems of Ossian,
especially because they detach men from the earth'! That two such
different natures should come into collision was very natural.
Bonaparte always hated superior women, and especially women who
meddled in politics. He well knew that the circle of Madame de Stael
was the centre of ideas about freedom and constitutional government
irreconcilably opposed to his ambition, and that the world of good
society and good taste, of independent thought and independent
characters, in which she played so great a part, remained unsubdued
and undazzled by his power. Benjamin Constant had been placed in 'the
Tribunate,' and in the beginning of 1800 he made a speech there,
indicating a desire to establish in that body an opposition like the
opposition in the English Parliament. Bonaparte was furious at his
attitude, and at once ascribed it to the inspiration of Madame de
Stael. A year later the last work of her father appeared, and it
contained an earnest warning against growing despotism in France and a
strong argument for the establishment of a republican constitution.
The sayings of Madame de Stael that were repeated from lip to lip, and
the atmosphere of thought that grew up around her, irritated and
disquieted Bonaparte. 'She is moving the minds of men,' he said, 'in a
direction that does not suit me.' 'They pretend that she does not
speak of politics or of me, but somehow it always happens that those
who have been with her become less attached to me.' Soon her salon was
emptied by an emphatic intimation that those who entered it would
incur the displeasure of the First Consul. Official scribes were
busily employed in depreciating her, and these measures were speedily
followed by the long exile which darkened the later years of her life.

It is impossible for me in this article to relate, even in outline,
the story of this exile, and of her travels in England, Italy,
Austria, Russia, and, above all, in Germany. Madame de Stael has
herself described this period of her life in her 'Ten Years of Exile,'
and all the details have been collected by Lady Blennerhassett with an
industry that leaves nothing to be desired. A woman of a more heroic
type would have borne with less repining an exclusion from Paris life
which was mitigated by wealth, and fame, and abundant occupation, and
a family that adored her, and troops of admiring friends. A woman who
was less essentially noble would have assuredly accepted the overtures
that were more than once made to her, and would have purchased her
peace with Napoleon by burning a few grains of literary incense on his
altar. But though, in a life of more than common vicissitude and
temptation, Madame de Stael was betrayed into great weaknesses and
into some serious faults, she never lost her sense of the dignity and
integrity of literature, and her works are singularly free from
unworthy flattery as well as from unworthy resentments and jealousies.
The homage which Napoleon desired was never received, and in her great
work on Italy and her still greater one on Germany there was no trace
of his victories, influence, or animosities. 'In France,' he once
said, 'there is a small literature and a great literature; the small
literature is on my side, but the great literature is not for me.'

The disfavour which thrust Madame de Stael out of political
influence, and then drove her into exile, proved a blessing in
disguise, for it turned her mind decisively from political intrigues
to those forms of literature in which she was most fitted to excel.
Her treatise on 'Literature,' which was published in 1800, was
conceived upon a scale too large for her own knowledge, and though she
herself attributed to it the great and general favour that she enjoyed
for a time in Paris society, it has not taken an enduring place in
French literature. 'Delphine,' the most personal, and also the most
censured, of her novels, had a still wider success, and made a deeper
and more lasting impression. It appeared in 1802, and it was followed
by a long interval, during which she appears to have published nothing
except a short but admirable notice of her father, who died in the
spring of 1804; but in 1807 'Corinne' burst upon the world, and at
once obtained a European fame equalled by that of no French novel
since 'La Nouvelle Heloise.' In this great work of imagination she
embodied, in a highly poetic form, the impressions she had derived
from her journeys in England and Italy, and its immense and
instantaneous success placed her on the very pinnacle of fame. It is
worthy of notice that a bitter attack upon 'Corinne' appeared in 'Le
Moniteur,' based chiefly upon the fact that its hero was an
Englishman; and there is good reason to believe that this attack was
from the pen of Napoleon himself.

A book of larger scope and of more serious influence soon followed.
Germany at this time presented the singular spectacle of a people who
had been reduced to the lowest depths of political depression, but
who, at the same time, could boast of a contemporary literature that
was the first in the world. In France a translation of 'Werther' had
attained great popularity; some of the plays of Schiller, the idylls
of Gessner, and a few other German works were well known; but scarcely
any Frenchman had a conception of the magnitude and importance of the
intellectual activity which was growing up beyond the Rhine, or of the
vast place which Goethe, Schiller, and Kant were destined to take in
European thought. It was one of the chief pleasures and occupations of
Madame de Stael, during her exile, to explore this almost unknown
field. It would scarcely have been thought that she was well fitted
for the task. She learned the language late in life, and her
characteristically French mind seemed very little in harmony with
either the strength or the weakness of the Teutonic intellect. There
was nothing very profound, or very subtle, or very poetical in her
nature, and she had all that instinctive dislike to the vague, the
disproportioned, the exaggerated, and the ambiguous, to fantastic and
far-fetched conjecture, and to imposing edifices of speculation based
upon scanty or shadowy materials, that pre-eminently distinguishes the
best French thought. Very wisely, however, she placed herself in
direct communication with the great writers of Germany, and a wholly
new world of thought and sentiment gradually opened upon her mind. It
is not too much to say that it was her pen that first revealed to the
Latin world the intellectual greatness of Germany. In England,
Coleridge had already laboured in the same field, and his admirable
translation of 'Wallenstein' had appeared as early as 1800; but it had
been completely still-born, and in England also it was reserved for
the great Frenchwoman to give the first considerable impulse to the
study of German literature. For the history, the merits, and the
defects of her work on Germany, I cannot do better than to refer to
the admirable pages which Lady Blennerhassett has devoted to the
subject. With the doubtful exception of 'Le Genie du Christianisme,'
it was by far the most important French work which appeared during the
reign of Napoleon. It is a characteristic fact that the whole of the
first edition was confiscated by order of his Government. Happily the
manuscript was saved, and about three years later it was printed in
England.

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