Germaine de Staël

COUP DE GRÂCE

FRANCE did not like Necker’s paper, the notes issued by the Caisse d’Escomptes.  So the stockings in the chimneys were charged with every coin on which thrift or greed or fear could lay its hands, and metallic money (numéraire) disappeared from the land.  Paralysis seized upon the national life.

“ If Necker remains another month,” wrote Mirabeau to La Marck on January 20, 1790, “the écu (3f. and 6f. pieces) will entirely disappear and you will know the mistake of the sublime invention of paper money.”

Jacques was in despair.  The stockings, he saw too late, were foes more dangerous than Mirabeau.  People wanted coin and would have it, his paper fell in value till so much of it was needed for every purchase that there was not enough to go round.  On March 6, beaten to his knees, he confessed dismally that it would be necessary to put some of the assignats in circulation.  His heart was wrung.  For what was he saying but that a better paper than his was needed to win the confidence of Frenchmen ?  Mirabeau’s spirits leaped up.  Necker would learn very soon what Paris thought of him.  Three weeks later, crisis arrived.  The Finance Committee of the Assembly demanded in alarm that the bank’s notes should be withdrawn and replaced wholly by national notes, assignats.  There was a short, sharp scuffle, and then in April Mirabeau’s original plan was approved—the assignats were to be legal tender ;  an additional issue of £16,000,000 worth of them was to replace the notes of the Caisse d’Escomptes.

Jacques went down to his house, on that Spring day, with death in his heart.  What a fate, to have triumphed over the King’s Majesty and the passion of Mirabeau and to be brought low by miser’s pence !  The worst, too, was to come.  He had lent the Government £100,000.  Would he get it back ?  Would the Caisse d’Escomptes be able to weather this hurricane ?  Would he himself be able to hold his office now that the spell of his financial wizardry was broken ?  If Mirabeau pressed his advantage and insisted that the Government should pay its debts in the new currency, where was he ?  He glanced to right and left and beheld ruin.

Germaine was frightened out of her wits, for nobody had a shrewder knowledge than she of the foundations on which her life reposed.  All were shaking ;  power, money, prestige, love even.  Could she count now on Eric Magnus ?  On Narbonne ?  On Talleyrand ?  Gouverneur Morris had assured her that her husband was “madly in love” with her, and been told, in reply, that she was only too well aware of it.  But her father was master then.  Would love live on if greatness withered ?  After all, Eric Magnus had his grievances.

A fury of energy seized her.  All their troubles, she assured herself, were due to the King, who did not support his Minister.  Very well, then, why not work to put a new King on the throne, Orleans, for example ;  or, better still, to set Wisdom in the place of kings ?  She lived in a fever, spending herself with unmerciful haste, social occasion added to social occasion, adventure to adventure.  She was gay, reckless, drunken with words, careless of appearances, unsparing of feelings.  In the blaze of her prodigal candle-light she spoke treasons jestingly, demanding “a great alliance of literary and business abilities” to rule the State, writers and bankers, herself and her father.  She was Royalist, Constitutionalist, Republican, by turns—all things to all parties, with a sharp eye open for the highest bidder.

“ Anyone who lived through these days,” she wrote, “will admit that there has never been so much vitality, mind and wit gathered together before or since.”

Guibert died in May.  She snatched her pen to extol the darling of her girlhood, and in a moment was belabouring her own and her father’s enemies.  The Eloge de Guibert, like the letters on Rousseau, is all about Necker and herself ;  amid the din of lamentation and invective the voice of praise is never silent.  Guibert, in short, is to rise from his ashes, he too, and give Jacques a helping hand.  Jacques needed it.  In pleasant days in June his popularity vanished away like his paper.  The quintal of wheat stood so high that suspicion sat upon his threshold, side by side with scorn.  What had he done for France ?  This year the trees in the Tuileries gardens stood in no danger of spoliation whatever treatment the King might give.  Louis gave the same kindly treatment as before, but, on July 3, he and the Queen received Mirabeau in private audience.

Less than a fortnight later the first anniversary of the taking of the Bastille came round, the anniversary of Jacques’ triumph.  There was great celebration on the Champ de Mars, where an altar of the nation had been run up hurriedly by pious hands.  The King and Queen were there, surprised to find how popular they were, and Lafayette, on his white horse, at the head of representatives of all the National Guards in France.  Talleyrand, too, to say Mass at the national altar, and Mirabeau.  But where was Necker ?

“ Patriotic enthusiasm,” wrote Germaine,* “was so lively that Paris poured out to (the spectacle) in just the same way as it had rushed, a year before, to the destruction of the Bastille.  The spectators were drunk with excitement ;  King and Liberty seemed to them to have been indissolubly joined together. . . . Meanwhile thinking people were far from sharing the general delight.  I saw deep anxiety on my father’s face.  At the moment when it was believed that he was celebrating his triumph, he felt, perhaps, that he had exhausted all his resources.  M. Necker having sacrificed every shred of his popularity to the defence of a constitutional monarchy, M. de Lafayette inspired the most tremendous devotion in the National Guard.”

This was Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark.  There were bitter moments for Germaine when the crowd cheered King and Queen, fell on its knees at the summons of Talleyrand and kissed Lafayette’s stirrup-leathers as he remounted after laying his sword on the altar.  France was accepting, in anticipation, the new constitution on which her wise men were still at work, but it was not the constitution which Necker had wished to give her.  In a single year, as it seemed, a new generation, which knew not Jacques, had sprung into life.  That uneasy man did now what he had so often done before, namely, rush into print.  Though King and Assembly would not listen to his opinions, the people, he conceived, might hear them gladly.  He delivered a vigorous attack against a recent proposal to abolish titles, declaring :

“ By wiping out all distinctions between man and man, a risk is run of bewildering the popular mind about the true meaning of the word ‘ Equality.’  That word, in a civilised country, possessed of an established social system, can never mean equality of rank or of possessions.  Different occupations, professions, fortunes, educations, ambitions, working-powers, different natural abilities, different knowledge, all these stimulants of social flux, inevitably lead to inequalities of circumstance.  The sole end of the legislator must be to reunite, as is the way of nature, these different units, in a well-being which, no matter how diversified are its forms and evolutions, will partake of the true nature of equality.”†

It had been well spoken if its author had possessed the slightest knowledge of the effect it was likely to produce.  That he possessed none at all is certain.  Certain, too, that when the effect was manifest, he was overwhelmed with regret.  Paris rubbed her eyes.  Was this the man at whose trumpet-blast the walls of Jericho had fallen ?  Doubts, packed like a murmuration of starlings, came home to roost.  So he was worried about his money, was he ?  And the titles of his noble friends ?  Away with the old snob !

In that atmosphere the Assembly came to the discussion of the manner in which the Government ought to pay its debts.  Necker urged that the assignats should not be used for this purpose.  He proposed Quittances de Finance, a new interest-bearing paper of a non-monetary nature, that is, a loan.  Mirabeau rose, on August 27, to administer the coup de grâce.  The payments of interest on a loan, he declared, would ruin the State ;  he was, therefore, for payment by assignats.  Was their land-money not good enough ?  He turned to the political side of the subject :  an extension of the use of the assignats would add to the numbers of the defenders of the Constitution.  In other words, money was made for the people, not the people for money.  Politics rampant drove its fists into the face of Finance.

Necker staggered, beaten, from the encounter.  He sent his resignation to the King and asked, humbly, for the return of some of the money he had lent.  He got £6,000 of his £100,000.  A few days later, on September 8, he and Suzanne set out from Paris amid hootings, to return home.  They left Germaine behind because, on August 25, she had been delivered of a boy, Auguste.

* Considerations, Part II, pp. 380 et seq.

† Considerations, Part II, p. 371.