biography lucy moore

Front Row at the Revolution

Germaine de Staël: A Political Portrait

By Biancamaria Fontana (Princeton University Press 296pp £24.95)

I can think of no other period that rivals the French Revolution and its aftermath for sheer historical thrills. It was a time in which hope was mingled with despair and ambition with brutality – when what you thought or simply who you were could mean the difference between life and death. Germaine de Staël was one of the very few women who could be described not just as occupying a front-row seat at this drama but having a starring role in it. She was brought up at court as the only child of Jacques Necker, finance minister to Louis XVI. Celebrated for her sparkling intelligence, she published her first work under her own name in 1788 at the age of twenty-two, two years after her marriage to the Swedish ambassador to the French court, a nondescript man largely chosen as a husband because he would allow her to shine.

Over the next years, as friend or mistress to a host of ministers and men of power, she watched the Revolution unfold with an almost palpable sense of frustration at her inability to influence it directly. One of the recurrent themes of her political writing is the inadequacy of the men who often almost by default found themselves in positions of power and failed to use them effectively. Staël was forced to learn to content herself with persuading her friends to act or writing out her analyses of events and her vision of how things might be changed for the better.

It is with these writings that Biancamaria Fontana is concerned in Germaine de Staël: A Political Portrait. She outlines the progression of Staël’s ideas with considerable scholarship, tracing the development of her thinking on glory, public opinion and the difference between momentary fame and lasting reputation, the various merits of constitutional monarchy or a republic, and the thorny question of how to balance liberty and security. Staël is wonderfully modern in her style and ideas, insisting, for example, on compassion being at the heart of good governance. Fontana communicates well the vitality of her writing.

According to Fontana, Staël was always concerned with the ‘“liquid” elements in representative regimes’ – the parts that can’t be contained in a constitutional framework. It was these aspects of the French Revolution that made it truly modern. Staël’s fascination with ‘the shifting nature of social and national identities, the popularization of culture, the intensified scrutiny of the media, the personalization of politics, the emergence of celebrity as a dimension of leadership’ are what make her writings so fresh and relevant.

But by arguing that Staël has been illserved by posterity, which has insisted on recounting her ‘dramatic, scandalous, adventurous’ personal history at the expense of appreciating her political legacy, Fontana has restricted herself to a very narrow focus. I sympathise with her approach, especially because few male political writers and thinkers have their underwear drawers sifted though in books about their ideas, but I can’t help feeling that Staël’s life and personality deserve a little more space. Fontana succeeds in demonstrating the originality and independence of Staël’s contribution to political thought in the years between 1789 and 1800 but the portrait she paints lacks essential background.

It was Staël’s personal qualities, both positive and negative, as much as her political and literary talents, that made her such an inspiring and controversial figure. Her conversation was so dazzling that one friend said that if she were queen, she ‘would order Madame de Staël to talk to me all day long’. Another described her as being entirely convinced of her own intellectual superiority, but also tortured by self-doubt. Brains and notoriety aside, she was a woman of passion, her emotional life dominated by the desire to love and be loved.

Fontana never addresses the question of why, despite her acknowledged brilliance, Staël was the object of contempt, derision and abuse throughout her life. Although she refers to Staël being repeatedly banned from returning to France during the Directory and the Consulate, Fontana gives the reader little indication of the reasons for this. The closest she gets to Staël’s views on gender – a potent political issue at the time and one to which Staël often returned in her work – is Staël’s essay defending Marie Antoinette. On the whole, she follows Staël’s lead, considering her persona ‘so deliberately self-fashioned, that it does not lend itself to any stereotyped classification and must therefore be taken on its own terms’. For me this, more than anything else, demonstrates Staël’s persuasive charm: from two centuries’ distance, she has convinced Fontana to present her as she always wished to be presented – as an exception.

The interaction between Staël and Napoleon, which Fontana barely touches on, was as vitally important to Staël’s politics as it was to her personal life, even though it does not always show her in a flattering light. Initially Staël admired Napoleon and pinned her hopes for the end of the Revolution upon him. Repeatedly he insulted and belittled her, preventing her from returning to Paris when that was the one thing she hoped to do. But she needled him in ways other critics couldn’t. Napoleon was said to have complained that although everyone claimed ‘she talks about neither politics nor myself … somehow it happens that everyone comes away [from her salons] liking me less.’

Fontana’s book allows Staël to be judged as she may perhaps have hoped to be judged: by her polished, honed ideas rather than by her real life looked at in conjunction with her thought. It’s the equivalent of trying to assess what someone really looked like from a tactfully lit portrait by Mme Vigée Le Brun, or writing someone’s biography from their Facebook feed: enormously interesting, but limited. To order this book from our partner bookshop, Heywood Hill, see page 19.

Literary Review | june 2016 10