Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France

by Moore, Lucy

  Germaine returned to Switzerland and to Monsieur de Staëlin the early summer of 1793, each brought back to their marriage by necessity rather than affection. Germaine, her reputation destroyed by her public devotion to Narbonne, needed the respectability of a husband; Éric Magnus, ruinously bankrupt and incapable of economy, needed his father-in-law’s millions.

  Reluctantly reconciled to their rapprochement and excruciatingly aware that Narbonne no longer loved her, Germaine comforted herself by gathering together a group of friends at the house she rented near Coppet. ‘Talking seemed everybody’s first duty,’ observed a visitor, describing the way Germaine and her endless stream of house-guests followed no daily routine, instead meeting at meals to discuss, argue, debate and be dazzled by their hostess. ‘The only thing she feared was solitude, and boredom was the scourge of her life.’

  For a long time she mourned Narbonne, her first adult love, and poured the pain she felt at the failure of their relationship into her work. On the Influence of Passions on the Happiness of Individuals and of Nations, begun in 1792 and published four years later, meditates with agonizing poignancy on the connection between passion and suffering and the impossibility for women–especially exceptional women–of achieving true happiness in both love and work. After Narbonne, as she put it, she had ‘to begin life anew, but minus hope’.

  Throughout the autumn and winter of 1793 Germaine embarked on an expensive programme of expatriation, helping more than twenty friends and friends of friends escape from Terror-struck France. She paid Swiss men and women, specially selected to resemble the people they were rescuing, to travel to Paris, where they would hand their passports over to the person waiting for them who would then cross the border into Switzerland with legitimate, but wrong, papers. The rescuers would leave France either on forged passports or claiming that they had lost their papers. If there was a problem the Swiss border guard could confirm their identities. ‘There is, in the short span of existence, no greater chance of happiness than to save the life of an innocent man,’ wrote Germaine at this time. It was a sentiment with which Thérésia Tallien would have wholeheartedly agreed.

  Mathieu de Montmorency, one of the most distinguished liberals of Germaine’s 1789 salon, was just one of the friends she rescued in this way. In the spring of 1794 he heard news from Paris that his brother had been guillotined; his wife and mother were still in prison. Gradually, Montmorency’s views changed. The former duke who had fought under Lafayette in the United States and demanded the abolition of aristocratic distinctions in France had become a committed monarchist, finding refuge from his political regrets in devout Catholicism. Montmorency’s wife and mother, saved by Robespierre’s fall, joined Germaine’s colony after their release from prison, soon after Narbonne’s long-awaited arrival there. Her heartbreak healing, Germaine had recently embarked on a liaison with a dashing Swedish count. Narbonne’s pique did not prevent him resuming his former affair with Mathieu de Montmorency’s mother. And so, notwithstanding the unusual circumstances, a strange harmony was restored to Germaine’s unconventional household.

  This harmony was upset with the arrival on the scene of the gangling, red-haired Swiss Benjamin Constant, who called at Coppet late one autumn evening in 1794 hoping to meet the celebrated Germaine. On hearing that she had just left, he galloped after her carriage. When he caught up with her, she invited him to continue his journey inside. Thus began a conversation that would last for fifteen years.

  Brilliant, precocious, eccentric and unstable, Constant found in Germaine his intellectual match and fell in love with her at once. In his unfinished roman à clef, Cécile, he described her when they met–she was twenty-eight, he a year younger–as being neither tall nor slender, with an unattractive complexion and strong, irregular features, but ‘the most beautiful eyes in the world, very beautiful arms, her hands a little too big but dazzlingly white, a superb bosom’. Despite her physical flaws, in animation she became ‘irresistibly seductive’, her ‘very sweet voice’ breaking endearingly when she was moved. ‘Her gaiety had an indefinable charm, a kind of childlike goodwill which captivated the heart, establishing between her and those she was talking to a complete intimacy, which broke down all reserve, all mistrust, all those secret restrictions, those invisible barriers which nature puts up between all people’.

  Disinclined to relinquish her Swedish count, Germaine admired Constant but was unimpressed by his efforts to make her love him. Benjamin, she wrote to her lover, was dying of love for her ‘and inflicts his unhappiness on me in a way which removes his only charm–a very superior intelligence–and makes me in turn pity him, which in turn tires me’. If Count Ribbing heard that Constant

  had killed himself in the woods of Cèry, which he has just rented so that he can spend his life in my garden and in my courtyard, do not in truth think it to be my fault [she continued]. I have praised him sincerely for his work entitled L’Esprit des religions, in which he shows a talent like Montesquieu’s, but [he] forgets that his looks are an invincible obstacle, even for a heart that did not belong to you.

  This was harsh from a woman who was so insecure about her own looks that she could not bear to hear other women described as ugly.

  When Constant was not tormenting Germaine with staged suicide bids (much as she herself had pushed Narbonne away with letters declaring her own desire to die two years earlier), their extended, impassioned conversations led to a productive working partnership. She and Constant, by this stage both convinced republicans, influenced and edited one another’s thoughts as they debated France’s future.

  His influence on her thinking is evident in her December 1794 Reflections on Peace Addressed to Mr Pitt and to the French, in which she argued for an acceptance of the Republic as a fait accompli and urged its new rulers to create a constitution which would unite ‘the possible with the desirable’. Above all, she declared, peace must be achieved so that France–and Europe–could be saved. ‘If France crumbles, Europe must crumble,’ she wrote. ‘As long as one persists in pitting foreigners against them [the French] they will fight, they will win’, and French victories would spread revolution and unrest across the globe. She was delighted to discover that Pitt’s opponent, Charles Fox, twice quoted from her pamphlet in the House of Commons in March 1795 when he called for peace with France and stressed the need for morality in international relations.

  Given her obsession with French politics, and the changed situation in Paris since 9 Thermidor, it is perhaps surprising that Germaine had not rushed back to re-establish her salon there. Certainly she had hopes of playing what her father worriedly called an ‘honourable and unexpected role’ in public life, and had ‘a secret plan to make yourself talked about’. But in May 1794 her mother had died, unregretted by Germaine but profoundly mourned by her father, and she was reluctant to leave him behind alone and grieving.

  Instructed by the Swedish government to open communications with the new French regime, M. de Staël returned to Paris in January 1795. Against all his advice his wife, accompanied by her elder son Auguste and Benjamin Constant, finally joined him there five months later. On hearing the news that she had crossed the French border, Staël staggered into his secretary’s room, gasping, ‘Damnation! My wife is arriving!’

  Germaine and Benjamin arrived in Paris five days after the Prairial risings to find the streets full of troops and the people sullen, resentful and starving. It was a strange, dislocated time. The fervour and focus of the Terror had been replaced by a strange lassitude, in which idealism had been replaced by bitter cynicism.

  With both of their assets safely held abroad, for Germaine and Constant as for Thérésia, living was cheap. ‘What things a man could do here with 200,000 francs in cash!’ marvelled Benjamin. He took a large suite of rooms near the rue du Bac on the rue du Colombier, for which he paid one silver écu a month, while Germaine reinstalled herself at the Swedish embassy. They were the lucky ones. The once desirable neighbourhood of Saint-Germain was
desolate and empty, its grand hôtels vacant, vandalized, pillaged, boarded up, posted with signs reading ‘propriété nationale’ and daubed with revolutionary slogans.

  Almost immediately Germaine’s salon became a meeting-place for moderate political opinion, attracting many of the same people as La Chaumiére but there to talk politics rather than do business. ‘What do they do at Mme de Staël’s?’ asked a newspaper. ‘On s’arrange’–they place themselves, they improve themselves, they sort things out. Without disowning the friends of her caste, the royalist aristocracy, said Antoine Thibaudeau, Germaine was ‘frankly republican’. Her salon in the rue du Bac was ‘open to all parties’ and its hostess was forgiven this impartiality ‘by virtue of her sex, her wit, her talent, her principles’.

  Germaine threw herself back into the social whirl. ‘Like the muse of history beside a dancing-girl of Herculaneum’, she visited her old friend Thérésia Tallien at La Chaumiére, thanking her husband for escorting her out of Paris in September 1792. She was horrified by the bals des victimes, but enthusiastically embraced the merveilleuses’ fashions: the following winter, having returned ahead of the new styles to Lausanne, she appeared in front of astonished guests at a ball in her honour clad in ‘flesh-coloured pantaloons that clung very tightly to her skin, and covered only with gauze, like the ballerinas at the opera’. The Grecian look Thérésia had popularized did not suit everyone as well as it did her.

  ‘We hear about nothing but Mme de Staël’s dinners,’ noted the Gazette de France. ‘We have even noticed that as a result of those charming evenings some of the men of the day are better turned out.’ Germaine had been compared to Circe, it continued, but unfairly. ‘Circe transformed Ulysses’s courtiers into bears [in fact pigs], whereas here Mme de Staël has almost managed to do the opposite.’

  Bears had indeed changed into courtiers and courtiers into bears in her absence; Germaine found society much changed. Impoverished former aristocrats and returned exiles stood out despite the new plainness of their dress because of their innate elegance. Many of them were trying to recover lost fortunes, confiscated by the revolutionary government during the Terror. Germaine had her own case to pursue. Not only was Necker on the government’s proscribed list of émigrés, but when he had resigned from the ministry and left France in 1790, as a gesture of confidence he left behind the two million francs–more than half his own fortune–that he had personally deposited in the state treasury; this she hoped to recover.

  Surviving Jacobins, over-sensitive to the nuances of polite society and unsuccessfully emulating the manners of the old regime, were often surrounded by aristocratic women hoping to obtain their help on behalf of ruined sons, brothers and husbands, pouring ‘graceful flattery’ into their ‘rough ears’. Those implicated in the Terror–like Tallien and Barras–excused themselves with inconceivable sophistry, arguing that they had sacrificed themselves for the public good or somehow been compelled to act as they did. Many admitted that they had failed to stand up against the horrors of the time simply out of fear. Little by little the new leaders of Thermidorian society were recreating a court with all its abuses, ‘only taking great care to appropriate them [the abuses] to themselves’.

  The new constitution was submitted to the Convention in June 1795, the month after Germaine’s return; it was discussed as much in her drawing-room as in the halls of the Convention. All anybody on the streets wanted was a fresh start, free from the cursed legacies of both the ancien régime and the Terror, but the Convention decreed that two-thirds of the new Councils of Five Hundred and of the Elders would be chosen from among their number, rather than by general election. As Thibaudeau explained to Germaine, ‘the principles of the revolution must be abandoned, but power must stay in the hands of the men who made it’. Their hopes of succeeding to government by legitimate channels dashed, the constitutional monarchists began to consider seizing power by force.

  As the remaining Jacobin deputies mustered their opposition to the proposed Directory which they feared would be dominated by counterrevolutionaries, Tallien (by this time openly associated with the right wing but distrusted by them for his revolutionary past) was publicly called a Septembrist and Germaine was accused of politicking and royalism as well as cuckolding her husband, and asked to leave Paris. Although she agreed to leave the capital, she did not go far, staying at Mathieu de Montmorency’s nearby château and continuing to involve herself in politics.

  Knowing that the Jacobins would respond with brutal savagery to a monarchist rising, she warned her aristocratic friends to be careful. ‘They hate you more [than the Convention] and have hated you for a longer time…I foresee only bloodshed and the blood of my friends shed in vain.’ She counselled them not to try to force political change, but to wait until they could use legitimate channels to promote their interests. ‘To speak of the sovereignty of the people is something quite new for you,’ she told Thérésia’s friend, the royalist journalist Charles de Lacretelle. ‘You are fumbling with a language which they know better than you and which they created for their own use.’

  Some listened to her advice, but others did not. In early October, after the election’s unpopular results had been announced, with the incoming councillors heavily weighted to former deputies of the Convention, several moderate Paris wards declared themselves in a state of insurrection and sounded the call to arms. On 4 October, as the rain poured down outside, the Convention granted Paul Barras emergency command of the army, making him responsible for turning back the muscadin-dominated insurgents preparing to march on the Tuileries.

  Barras’s young protégé, Napoléon, was at the theatre when the note arrived commanding him to report for duty at once. According to Napoleonic legend, the unemployed general took his time to decide whether to join Barras or the forces opposing him. The day before he had told his friend Jean-Andoche Junot that if the rebels would make him their chief, he ‘would see to it that the Tuileries would be invaded within two hours, and we would chase those miserable deputies out of there’.

  By the next afternoon (13 Vendémiaire Year III), when the rain had finally stopped and the fair-weather rebels prepared themselves to attack, Bonaparte was ready for them. For the first time in revolutionary experience, a popular offensive was met with gunfire–Napoléon’s celebrated ‘whiff of grapeshot’ that killed about three hundred rebels, dispersed the rest within a matter of minutes and confirmed the imminent ascendancy of Barras and the Directory.

  Benjamin Constant and François de Pange, an old friend of Germaine’s with whom she was at this time unrequitedly in love, were arrested on the day of the attempted coup and only released after Germaine appealed directly to Barras. Despite her efforts to warn her royalist friends against challenging the Convention and despite her avowedly republican opinions, so many of Germaine’s friends were implicated in the Vendémiaire rising that she was labelled dangerous, ‘a corrupter of all those deputies she invites to dinner’ and ordered to leave France.

  M. de Staël managed to obtain a suspension of the decree on condition he could persuade his wife to leave Paris voluntarily. She spent the autumn at a spa in Normandy and in early 1796, once her exile had been officially confirmed–M. de Staël may not have been entirely assiduous in his efforts to have it overturned–she went back to Switzerland after less than six months in her beloved Paris. She would not return for over a year.

  On 3 November 1795 the Directory officially began and Paul Barras–the Don Juan of Jacobinism, as one of his many enemies dubbed him–became the most powerful man in France. He had informed the Convention before it dissolved that the man responsible for their deliverance was Napoléon Bonaparte, and requested that the young officer popularly known as General Vendémiaire replace him as Commander in Chief of the Army of the Interior.

  The love affair engineered by Barras between Bonaparte and his mistress Rose de Beauharnais began at about the time of Vendémiaire. Rejected by Thérésia, Barras wrote, Napoléon began to pursue her friend, sen
ding her cashmere shawls and diamonds purchased with his generous new salary as head of the French army. Each believed the other to have expectations of a fortune–expectations Barras, as confidant to both, did nothing to quell. Thirty-two-year-old Rose’s past did not deter Napoléon; as he said to Barras, he preferred love ‘ready-made’.

  Napolèon had his own brusque methods of courtship. During the winter of 1795–6, magicians and fortune-tellers were all the rage. Thèrèsia and Rose both loved having their fortunes told, and Thèrèsia read the cards. One night at La Chaumière, Napolèon pretended to be a palm-reader. He took first Thèrèsia’s and then several other people’s hands, ‘inventing a thousand follies’. When he came to Lazare Hoche, an ex-lover of Rose’s and a military rival, his mood changed and he said curtly, ‘General, you will die in your bed.’ Less than two years later, his prediction had come true: Hoche, at only twenty-nine and one of the most talented and charismatic soldiers of his generation, had died of pneumonia.

  Rose allowed Napoléon to seduce her, but, not in love, she was more wary about marriage. Eventually, counselled by Barras, she consented. The Scottish courtesan Grace Dalrymple Elliott, who also claimed to have rejected Napoléon, visited Rose while she was engaged, admiring an expensive blue and silver dress from England lying on her bed. ‘How could you marry a man with such a horrid name?’ asked Grace. ‘Why, I thought that he might be of service to my children,’ replied Rose. ‘I am going to dine at the Directory by-and-by, and shall go part of the way with Bonaparte.’

  Barras wanted to use Rose–or Joséphine, as Napoléon called her, and as she would become known to history–to manage his impetuous, besotted friend. He waited until they were engaged before arranging for the French army in Italy to be handed over to Napoléon’s control. As Frénilly observed, Barras ‘got rid of her by giving her the Italian army as a dowry’.