Madam de Staël

Youth

The Protestantisme which had been taught to him was a form spontaneously rousseauist, so much it reflected the mentality of time, teaching conceived like religion of the heart allied to the virtue, relation of the man with God as much as social institution where the Lights and the religion were not contradictory. From this point of view, that which was still Miss Necker belonged to the French-speaking Switzerland. The taste of the Parisian social life and the interest of its family for the policy however more bound it to France. Very young person, at fourteen years hardly, it held its circle and could converse with the hosts of the living room of his mother. She had learned English and Latin, the art of the dance and the music, the recitation and diction, had often gone to the theater. Did everything of it an young girl different by her scholarship and its culture from the young girls of its medium, high in a more traditional way, which astonished its contemporaries by promptness by his intelligence.

The prestige of his/her father opened the doors of to him what Europe counted at the same time of aristocrat and enlightened. His/her parents did not want a son-in-law catholic, but there were only few Protestants in the French nobility. And the Swiss friends that they attended were held for too provincial. Applicants with the prestigious names were advanced: Axel de Fersen, ambassador of Sweden, Mister de Mecklembourg, Louis de Narbonne which became one of his/her lovers thereafter, and even William Pitt (but she did not want any), was among most known. It was finally the baron de Staël-Holstein, ambassador of Sweden, seventeen years its elder, who carried it. Being carried candidate whereas it was only thirteen years old, he had known to wait, and their marriage was celebrated in the vault Lutheran of the embassy of Sweden. Of him it had four children: Gustavine (1787 - 1789), Auguste (1790 - 1827), Albert (1792 - 1813) and Albertine, future duchess of Broglie (1797 - 1838).

Young woman

This arranged marriage was not a love match, not even a happy marriage, and the young woman sought elsewhere a happiness which it did not have. Its life will be besides a perpetual search of a happiness which it will hardly find.

Following her mother, it opened a living room where it received the representatives of a new generation professing the new ideas which were them his, contemporaries of the war of Independence in America, which took part in it sometimes besides - Fayette, Noailles, Clermont-Thunder, Condorcet, and the three men whom it liked at that time: Louis de Narbonne, his first great passion, Mathieu de Montmorency, the friend of all his life, Talleyrand, the traitor with the friendship.

The Revolution

Seeing in England the best expression of the democracy, impassioned reader of Rousseau, marked by the ideas of the Lights, it accommodated the Revolution favorably and, on May 5th, 1789, it attended the opening of the General states. However, as from 1792, its situation became difficult. Supporting the idea of the constitutional monarchy, it cut republicans as well as aristocrats and had soon to be exiled in England, in 1793, where it remained a few months with the friends who attended his living room. Its life thereafter will be often marked by the exile.

Returned to France after Thermidor, it published in September Réflexions on the lawsuit of the Queen , taking the defense of Marie Antoinette, the expression of its ideas on miseries of a Female condition denounced in the circumstance, of which it is not separated any more; the Réflexions on the lawsuit of the Queen was more a plea for the women, it was with them that she addressed herself. From now on, it made publish itself its literary works, rejecting on the one hand the marvellous one and allegorical Conte use of antan, as well as the historical novel and the ancient decoration, putting in scene, in a modern way for the time, the characters and the social conditions of its time.

Napoleon

It met the January 3rd 1798 the general Bonaparte, at the time of an interview spared by Talleyrand. She saw in him a liberal who would make triumph the true ideal over the Revolution; she met it thereafter several times; impressed, it attacked it questions: “- General, which is the first of the women for you? - That which makes the most children, Madam” it had answered him.

Madam de Staël lost her illusions after the Coup d'etat of the 18 Brumaire and the promulgation of the An VII. It was in a semi-clandestinity that much had to start to live, and it was in the interdict that it continued its work of political philosophy. Rather than to take refuge in silence, it published the novels which were to be worth a large celebrity to him, but for it an exile started which would nothing but do be accentuated.

The exile

In 1803, the example of Madam de Staël, distant from Paris from which it was not to approach less “forty miles”, is representative of the unequal combat, which the absolute capacity and the individuality of a writer could deliver. With the publication of Delphine , novel where were interfered the political questions and social its time, the anglophilia of the time, the superiority of Protestantism on Catholicism, the divorce, which openly denounced the regression from all points of view of the female condition, in spite of the Revolution, misfortunes of the women to which their position in the patriarchal family condemned. That was obviously not to like Napoleon become emperor, with which one owed a Civil code French repressive with regard to the women, who were put there in supervision, there lost the rights and the assets of the Revolution that they should put more than one century to be recovered.

That was worth to him on the other hand an immense success in all Europe - also of criticisms, virulent poked by the hostility of the emperor in his opposition. Widow in 1802, it maintained a long relation with Benjamin Constant which it had met in 1794, and which will join it in its exile. Of Vaud like it, it resulted ultimately from the same area and protesting like it, but he liked to live only in Paris. He will manage to fix himself neither near her nor elsewhere. This connection, long and stormy, will be one of more surprising which the history of the literary world left us. “I had not seen anything of similar in the world” wrote it, “I as soothsayers passionately in love”. But the will of all régenter Madam de Staël, her influence tyrannical will not be long in weighing to him; it will find its freedom when it is remariera in 1811, with Albert de Rocca, young Swiss officer much younger than it, but he will éprendra himself of Mrs Récamier, it will be an unhappy passion, and its old amante will write of him: “A man who likes only the impossible one”.

End of the year 1803 in spring 1804, Madam de Staël went on a journey several months in Germany, with Benjamin Constant, where it was accepted in the courses princely like a Head of State. She there learned German and met Schiller, Goethe, and all that Germany then counted of artists. She discovered there an unknown literature in France, which she made known with the French thereafter with her work Of Germany , and if the French hardly had other idea of this country that his, until 1914, it is that they were informed of it only through what she said while launching the legend of sentimental and ingenuous Germany, leaving place to the Italian influences however. Besides she undertook a voyage in Italy at the end of the same year. It is necessary, said she, to have “the European spirit”.

Of return to the castle of Coppet, the only place where it could live in Napoleonean Europe, it began there Corinne or Italy , novel in which heroin, in the search of its independence, dies of this research.

It after the publication of Of Germany , printed in 1810, was seized on order of Napoleon and who appeared in France only in 1814, that began truly for Madam de Staël the Ten years of exile , ten years of exile caused by the publication of his violent one lampoon against the emperor, which pursued it and espionner without truce did it, prohibiting any publication to him. She still flees with her two children in life and her husband, Albert de Rocca. Hoping to rejoin England, it was forced to pass by Russia and remained in Saint-Pétersbourg where it was accommodated by Pouchkine. There, it took notes for the future Of Russia and the kingdoms of the North - which will appear only after its death. She finally managed to take refuge in Stockholm, near Bernadotte, become crown prince to the throne of Sweden, where she became the inspirer of an alliance antinapoléonienne, thus acquiring a political stature. She joined England in 1813, met in London the future Louis XVIII in which she wished to see a sovereign able to carry out the constitutional monarchy. It returned to France with spring 1814, after published On the other side of the channel Sapho , where reappears the topic of the brilliant and misunderstood woman who ends up dying of pain and love, like her Réflexions on the suicide .

The posterity

From return to Paris, it accepted kings, ministers and generals. Europe had then known only some sovereign and much of courtesans (having had to be able sometimes more that the king himself, like Pompadour), but Madam de Staël had had a real political ambition, it had hoped to play the part of adviser of Napoleon. Combative and last with the opposition, it was an activist and a propagandist. During the first exile of Napoleon, although it was allied with caution with the Bourbons, it will make warn the emperor of an attempted murder, and this one, to rejoin it with its cause, will make him promise the refunding of a sum formerly lent by his/her father to the treasure . It went to see Joséphine, however very sick, with the castle of Malmaison to ask him what had been its life with the emperor.

The literary history left us of it the image of a woman stuck-up woman, excessively sentimental, or tyrannical in friendship and love. It was before a a whole pionnière in many fields; in literature, it launched the “Romantisme”, word which is of it; in its novels it introduced the women like the victims of the social constraints preventing them from affirming their personality and to be entitled to happiness, and it asserted this right for all and itself. This claim of right to the happiness which merged with the right to like was taken again by George Sand. Madam de Staël was a modern woman in Europe which she traversed and described in all directions.

Works

Newspaper of Youth (1785)
Sophie or secret feelings
Zulma
Jane Gray
Letters on the works and the character of J. - J. Rousseau
Eloge of Mr. de Guibert
which signs can there are recognize which is the opinion of the majority of the nation?
Reflections on the lawsuit of the Queen
Reflections on peace
Reflections on interior peace
Mirza or letter of a traveller
Adelaide and Theodore
Of the influence of passions on the happiness of the individuals and the nations
History of Pauline
Of the current circumstances which can finish the Revolution and of the principles which must base the Republic in France
Of the literature in its relationship with the social institutions
Delphine
Epitres on Naples
Corinne or Italy
Agar in the desert
Genevieve of the Brabant
Sunamite
the captain Kernadec
will signora It Fantastici
the mannequin
Sapho
Of Germany
Réflexions on the suicide
Of the spirit of the translations
Considérations on the principal events of the French revolution

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