Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution by Madame de Staël

First published: 1818

Type of work: History

Time of work: 1770-1815

Locale: France, Switzerland, Germany, England

Principal Personages:

• Madame de Staël
• Baron Eric Magnus Staël von Holstein, her first husband
• Jacques Necker, French Minister of Finance, her father
• Louis XIV of France
• Louis XV
• Louis XVI
• Marie Antoinette, Queen of France
• Napoleon Bonaparte
• Mirabeau
• Robespierre
• Talleyrand
• Benjamin Constant de Rebecque, French statesman
• Louis de Narbonne, father of one of Madame de Staël’s sons
• Albert Jean Michel Rocca, Madame de Staël’s second husband

Analysis

Few people have had a better viewpoint during a period of violence than Anne Louise Germaine Necker during the French Revolution. The daughter of the financier and statesman, Jacques Necker, and the wife of the Swedish Ambassador Baron Eric Magnus Staël von Holstein, she observed her father’s efforts to save France from the financial crisis he saw coming to overturn his country. She also watched the early phases of the Revolution, the storming of the Bastille, and the cruelty practiced against French nobility in the name of liberty. Only because of her ambassadorial status did she escape with her life from the Reign of Terror.

Later she clashed with Napoleon. Exiled by him from France, she barely escaped from his army marching on Moscow. She witnessed his triumphs and his abdications. Writing about it all, she put into her account of these historical events the wit and charm that made her a leading conversationalist of her day.

Swarthy of complexion, with thick lips and a prominent nose, noteworthy for her bad taste in clothes, and—judged by her portrait by the artist Francois Gerard—dumpy and anything but pretty, Madame de Staël held a position at the center of the European stage, at the summit of the political and intellectual elite. She was visited by Schlegel, Schiller, Byron, and Wellington. She had children by four men, only one of them her husband, and affairs with another half dozen of the important men of her time.

Besides a few frothy novels, and essays on phases of French literature, Madame de Staël was the author of GERMANY, which introduced German Romanticism into French culture, and of the autobiographical CONSIDERATIONS ON THE PRINCIPAL EVENTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, published posthumously. It was the Bible of French liberals during the Restoration.

Toward the end of her life, saddened by the death of her second son, Albert, the sickly Germaine Necker, Madame de Staël, began a patriotic essay to refute the idea that Louis XVI and the French regime overthrown by the Revolution were truly representative of French traditions. To her, the Revolution culminated a long struggle for liberty by the real France, the bourgeoisie or Third Estate, against the nobility and the clergy. Though held in check by centuries of oppression, the bourgeoisie had remained true to its traditional ideals. Madame de Staël takes pains to separate her defense of liberty from any apology for atrocities committed in liberty’s name.

Though she admits at the beginning of her book that she has lived through what she considers one of the great eras of French history and has played her part in it, Madame de Staël announces her determination to regard it as some period of ancient history about which she can write with impartiality. Except for an occasional outburst of emotion, she does indeed display indignation without hatred, and wrath without resentment.

Germaine Necker was the daughter of a wealthy, famous man, and was reared by a mother who followed the precepts of Rousseau’s EMILE. Having learned life through literature, the daughter, though acclaimed as an intelligent woman and a witty conversationalist, possessed little solid learning. But she, who could declare that the pursuit of politics was religion, morality, and poetry, all in one, was a keen observer and had abundant opportunity to learn.

Embarked on her theme of liberty, she begins her book with the statement that Greece and Rome fell because, despite the blessings of a free society for some, they enslaved the many. She comments on the backward state of most of Asia, the result of despotic control. The serfs of more recent civilizations represent a condition nearly as degraded. She considers their emancipation a necessary step in the world’s climb to civilization.

To the author, an absolutist government is the worst political form, while a system that maintains an aristocracy is almost as intolerable in the eyes of the lower classes. To make her point, she reviews France’s history during the eight centuries prior to the Revolution. At least every quarter century, some sort of social clash occurred: peasants against nobles, nobles against sovereigns, Protestants against Catholics, or Parliament against the Court, each struggle arising from resentment against arbitrary assumption of power.

Those who praise the beautiful edifices of Louis XIV, she remarks, forget that the despots of Egypt could erect even more spectacular structures, like the pyramids of Memphis, because of their supply of slave labor. Of the great writers of the Age of Louis XIV, the king persecuted more than he encouraged, and the best did not appear until the end of his reign. His conquests and the expansion of French territory came at the expense of internal disorder. His subjects insulted his funeral procession, and the Parliament canceled his will.

However, this high-spirited woman does not confine her attention to a long-dead king. She continues her thesis by indicating how the weak character of Louis XV and the endless errors resulting from that character sparked a spirit of resentment that remained to trouble Louis XVI, despite his own scrupulous conscientiousness. Madame de Staël calls his wife, Marie Antoinette, “one of the most amiable and gracious persons who ever filled a throne.”

This discussion brings her to the other purpose of her book, a filial vindication of the acts of the French Minister of Finance. Brought into the government in 1776 as head of the treasury by M. de Maurepas, Prime Minister of Louis XVI, Jacques Necker was in and out of power for the next fifteen years, resigning when his suggestions were disregarded, and being reappointed by demand of the populace. He advocated the establishment of provincial assemblies, taxation for everyone, and noninvolvement in the struggle between England and her rebellious American colonies.

Most people today do not even remember the name of Jacques Necker. To such, the chief interest of this book will be the sections concerning the French Revolution and the enmity between Madame de Staël and Napoleon Bonaparte. However, it should be remembered that a warning from her probably saved Napoleon from assassination in Elba.

In 1786, Germaine married a Swedish nobleman, Eric Magnus Staël von Holstein, an opportunist whose quick thinking and loud voice helped make Gustavus III absolute monarch of Sweden in 1772. Eric obtained an assignment to Paris. There he cleverly arranged a marriage to Germaine contingent upon his appointment as Ambassador to France, with the post likewise contingent upon the marriage. He achieved both at the age of thirty-seven, seventeen years older than his wife. The marriage brought him wealth and Germaine an established position and a complaisant husband. Their only child, a daughter, died at the age of two.

In those troubled times, Madame de Staël’s status gave her a measure of security. It also permitted her to sit in the gallery on May 5, 1789, at the meeting of the States General to act on demands of the Third Estate for more power. Her influence enabled her to save some of the nobles. By flirting with one of the committee, she escaped with her own life, to describe from a distance the trial of Louis XVI and, eventually, the fall of Robespierre.

The second part of the book is largely devoted to Madame de Staël’s relationship with Napoleon. She makes evident her opinion of him speaking bluntly of his egotism and his attempts to impose his will on Europe. A lover of literature herself, she sneers at his self-given title “Member of the National Institute.” She portrays him as dextrous in the art of dazzling multitudes and of corrupting individuals. She cites the external pressures, like French fear of the Jacobins, that let him assume power. From personal observation she describes the Revolt of the 18th Brumaire on November 9, 1799, and the establishment of the Consular Constitution, as well as the steps by which Napoleon attained supreme power.

Madame de Staël does not hide the personal and political reasons that made them enemies. The first man of France could not abide one who would be the country’s first woman. He tolerated no greatness but his own. She calls Napoleon’s love of glory “ambition;” he called hers “meddling.” Both of them hated being objects of mockery but both were masters at using it, frequently against each other. Their difference lay in the way she appealed to men’s virtues, while Napoleon appealed to their vanity and greed. Another difference was that he had the power to exile his enemies.

The publication in 1802 of a political study by Germaine’s father, then retired to his estate on Lake Geneva, angered Napoleon because of its statements about him and the prediction of his downfall. Falsely accusing Germaine of providing M. Necker with information, Napoleon banned her again in 1803 as she had been exiled eight years earlier.

Her reaction was to hope she deserved the exile more on account of what she had done than because of her father’s book. For twelve years she was not allowed to return to Paris. Her father and her husband were both dead, but she consoled herself by traveling to Weimar with a French statesman, Benjamin Constant, author of one of the earliest psychological novels, ADOLPHE. She says very little about him or about the other men with whom she was constantly involved.

From a distance she maintained her feud with Napoleon, charging him with profoundly changing the character of her countrymen. He taught them a love of luxury, she claimed, and an ability to dissemble; he ended the traditional French spirit of courtesy. Above all he caused retrogression in their literature.

During her exile from France, Madame de Staël also traveled to England, and her admiration for the English fills the last of the six divisions of her book. She sums up her opinion of them in one sentence: “The history of the political existence of England furnishes us with the noblest monument of moral greatness ever achieved by mankind.”

Napoleon’s banishment permitted Madame de Staël to return to Paris in 1814, to find the city occupied by foreign armies. Now she could see and describe the agonies of the first year of Restoration. She had definite ideas about proper steps to take, but before much could be accomplished, on March 6, 1815, Napoleon once more landed on the French coast. However, before their feud could be resumed, his second abdication came, on June 22, 1815, and with it her book ends.

This fifth section, and the first draft of an essay on English history and character, complete the work. They were written in 1816. Madame de Staël’s illness prevented revision, and the manuscript was left incomplete at her death. Two people worked to put it into publishable form: her oldest surviving son, Auguste Louis de Staël, and her son-in-law, Achille Charles Leonce Victor, Duc de Broglie, the husband of her only daughter Albertine. It was published in 1818. Probably these two men were also responsible for the anonymous English translation of that same year, published in both London and New York. CONSIDERATIONS ON THE PRINCIPAL EVENTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION never had the literary influence of Madame de Staël’s GERMANY, but even today it is worth some study for the insight it gives to one of the most important women of that era.