Germaine de Staël

THE KINDERGARTEN

BECAUSE of Dumouriez’s victories, the Commune of Paris had been able to put the King on his trial and send him to the scaffold.  Louis died with an excellent courage, in Christian resignation and with forgiveness for his murderers on his lips.  A reaction followed.  The Girondists, become now, in the kaleidoscope of Revolution, the party of the Right, regained some popularity and were able to hold “The Mountaineers,” Danton, Marat, Robespierre, in check.  For a moment France had become stronger than Paris.

This moment, in which the nation tasted glory once again, revealed the jealousy of a host of enemies.  England and Holland, alarmed at the march of French troops into Belgium and horrified by the King’s death, joined the Coalition of Austria and Prussia.  Spain followed their example.  When, therefore, victory was turned to defeat, and Dumouriez’s treason was made known, there was fresh panic.  The Commune, architect of salvation in the previous autumn, recovered its authority in a night.  Danton, returned to his former methods, transmuted fear into action with potent alchemy.  The tocsin, rung by Marat, called the Sections to the Hôtel de Ville.  Hanriot, at the head of the Army of Paris, surrounded the Convention now sitting in the Tuileries.  On May 31, 1793, and again on June 2, attacks like those made on the palace in the previous year intimidated Parliament.  The whole Girondist party was swept away, its members being put under arrest in their houses.  Danton, acting through the “ Committee of General Security” of the Convention, the real strength of which resided in the Commune of Paris, was master of France.

The usual proscriptions followed.  The Girondists, those who had managed to escape arrest, were hunted through the streets as they themselves had helped to hunt the Feuillants nine months before.  As further massacres seemed certain, the few remaining members of the diplomatic corps judged it wise to leave France.  Eric Magnus travelled to Switzerland and became the guest of his father-in-law.  He met Germaine, but only casually.  She had taken a place of her own at Nyon, on the Lake of Geneva, and let it be known that she belonged now, exclusively, to Narbonne.  Eric Magnus was bidden use his ambassadorial influence to transport the Kindergarten from Juniper Hall to Switzerland at the earliest possible moment.  Obliging as ever, he set to work.

Meanwhile, in Paris, Danton was disappointing the hopes which had been reposed in him.  The formidable demagogue, who had leaped into the saddle at the beginning of June, after striking down the Girondists, had proved but an indifferent horseman.  He had not managed to pull the armies together nor known how to prevent the disruption of the nation.  Lyons, Marseilles, Bordeaux, the great naval base of Toulon and many of the cities had revolted against the Central Government.  Enemies were attacking in the Alps and Pyrenees as well as on the Northern frontiers.  In this extremity the authentic Spirit of Richelieu was breathed once more on France.  Early in July, a month after Danton’s coming to power, the Committee of General Security was reconditioned.  He was left out.  Carnot and Robespierre gathered up the reins.  The wheel of the Revolution had turned full cycle.  Parliament had become completely subservient, once again, to the ruling power which happened to be the guillotine instead of the throne, and that ruling power, from its seat in Paris, exerted an absolute control of all the armies, sent its proconsuls into every province and held over all citizens the power of life and death.  A policy of “Thorough” was outlined and executed.  Carnot went to the front ;  Robespierre crushed opposition at home.  Terror lashed the nation to action.

It was now certain that the Queen would follow the King to the guillotine.  A thrill of horror ran through Europe.  In August (1793) Germaine published anonymously an appeal for mercy which, in the circumstances, had much better have been left unwritten.  Everybody recognised the authorship and remembered the relations in which the two women had stood to one another.  The Swiss, it seemed, could not leave Marie Antoinette in possession even of her tears.

Robespierre and Carnot achieved in a few months what nobody had achieved in France for a century.  By the end of August the siege of Dunkirk was raised.  On October 15 and 16 was fought the battle of Wattignies, whereby Coburg and his Austrians were forced to retreat from Maubeuge.  The same month witnessed the surrender of Lyons and the massacre by Fouché and Collot d’Herbois of those of its inhabitants, with their children, who had opposed the Central Government, the trials and executions of Marie Antoinette, of Madame Elizabeth, the late King’s sister, and of twenty-one Girondist leaders.  In November Manon Roland suffered.  She was followed to the scaffold by the due d’Orleans, “Philippe Egalité” as he had called himself, the King’s cousin who had voted for the King’s death.  Marseilles and Bordeaux submitted to Paris ;  Freron, a middle-aged dandy, who occupied his leisure making love to thirteen-year-old Paolina Buonaparte, was master of massacres in Marseilles.  Tallien filled that post in Bordeaux, where he found and spared the beautiful Thérèse de Fontenay.  In December, thanks largely to the genius of Captain-Commandant Napoleon Bonaparte, the English and Spanish fleets were driven from the harbour of Toulon and that port forced to capitulate.  Barras superintended the massacres here.  Thus was France, bemused a little while by Liberty, whipped back into obedience to authority, and thereby raised again to her ancient place among the nations.  Two facts well known to Richelieu, to Louis XIV, to Colbert, to Louis XV, to Louis XVI, to Vergennes, to Mirabeau, emerged now for all men to see—namely, that France’s strength depended upon centralisation of authority and that such centralisation required glory for its maintenance.  The affair with Liberty had postponed but had not avoided the inevitable settlement with England.  In other words, only he who should be master of the armies could be master of France.

The armies obeyed Carnot now and Robespierre, “the Committee,” which owed its power over the Convention to the Jacobin Club on the one hand and the Commune of Paris on the other.  Could the Commune overthrow the Committee as, before, it had overthrown the King, the Assembly, the Feuillants, the Girondists ?  Not, certainly, so long as the Committee remained the architect of victory.

Germaine, by her native lake, with her gates closed against husband and father and mother and her eyes fixed on England, understood nothing of what was passing in Paris.  Where was Liberty in this new France ?

“ One doesn’t know,”¹ she wrote, “if these twelve members of the Committee of Public Safety had any conception of any kind of government at all in their heads.  With the single exception of the conduct of the War, the ordering of affairs was nothing but a mixture of stupidity and ferociousness in which no plan is discernible but that of compelling one half of the nation to murder the other half. . . .

“ How did the government of 1793 and 1794 triumph over so many enemies ?  The Coalition of Austria, Prussia, Spain and England, the civil war, the hatred of the Convention felt by all the honest men who were still out of prison, none of these diminished the resistance against which the foreigners saw their efforts broken.  One can only explain this prodigy by pointing to the devotion of the nation to its own cause.  A million men armed themselves to repulse the Coalition ;  the People was inspired by a frenzy which was as disastrous within the country as it was invincible without.”

Only once has she a partial glimpse of the truth.

“ The political and military conditions of the great monarchies which surround France threaten her independence if the power which binds her together is weakened.”

“ The Power which binds her together”—The Throne :  the Guillotine.  Versailles :  the Commune :  the Committee.  The King :  Mirabeau :  Danton :  Carnot :  Robespierre.  The institutions and the men against which Necker and his daughter and their friends have always been ranged.  And yet, in these autumn days of 1793, she cannot understand why her young men have been thrust out of France, nor why Royalists and Jacobins hold them in equal detestation.

“ They were proscribed by France,” she wrote,² “and looked at askance by the governments of Europe, whose knowledge of them was derived from their most inveterate enemies, the French aristocrats. . . . These friends of Liberty found themselves almost without a refuge on earth.”

Thanks to Eric Magnus, succour was brought to those of them in whom his wife was interested.  The Ambassador had gone to Schaffhouse near Zurich, because French Switzerland was less favourably situated for the diplomatic work, arising out of the Revolution, on which he was engaged.  He obtained a number of Swedish passports and sent them to Germaine, who bestowed them, along with the names they bore, on the Kindergarten.  Even so, the position of these young men was difficult.  The patrician rulers of Berne, far from welcoming the change to a Republic in France, were terrified.  During centuries these old Swiss families had had things all their own way not only in Berne itself but also in Geneva and on the shores of the Lake of Geneva, for the Pays de Vaud, their conquest in the sixteenth century, remained their dependency.  The Bernese Oligarchy had no love of French Liberals and no wish to shelter them in its dominions at a moment when it felt the liveliest anxiety lest its own Liberals, especially those in Geneva, might revolt.  The Kindergarten was soon made aware of this dislike, and Germaine had to look about for a new refuge in case orders of expulsion should be served on her friends.  She turned to Zurich partly because German Switzerland was less under the influence of ruling families than French Switzerland, partly because Eric Magnus could afford at least a measure of protection, and partly because her father’s old friend Meister, who had succeeded Grimm as editor of the Correspondance Littéraire, of which Necker was the chief financial support, possessed influence in that city.  On December 21, 1793, she wrote to Meister from Nyon.³

“ You are at Zurich ;  you are having dealings with M. de Staël, and you write only to my mother !  I’m not pleased with you for this want of confidence in my friendship, and I hope M. de Staël will convince you that we delight to dwell on our association with you.  As a rebuke to you, I’m going to write to you direly and with perfect candour, for I want you to do something for me.

“ There’s only one good thing left in this frightful upset of the universe, only one thing worth living for, and that is to give happiness to one’s friends and get happiness from them.  You are aware of the position of my friends ;  my house remains their only refuge.  And I am almost totally ruined by the confiscation of my father’s property in France.  Two gentlemen, de Montmorency and de Jaucourt, have been living, under Swedish names, in my house for the last two months ;  M. de Narbonne, under a Spanish name, has just arrived.  Berne knows ;  Berne tolerates, because I live absolutely alone in the depths of the country and because our wish to be hidden away is recognised.  But the Bishop of Autun, whom I love so tenderly, has been refused admission (to this Canton) because of his erstwhile democratic opinions.  Your Canton is more liberal-minded.  That body of emigrants which desired the Revolution, but whose revolutionary activities stopped at the point where sacrifice ended and oppression began, that body, so small in respect at any rate of its noble members, ought to be specially acceptable to the wise and moderate spirit of your Canton.  These emigrants feel that they should avoid the places where emigrants of a less desirable type are assembled, for, situated as they are between two extremes, they know the price of that moderation which the two opposing factions are pleased to regard as a crime.

“ You know all this a thousand times better than I do.  But the fact is that, as the wife of a Swede, and of a Swede, moreover, who has a high position in his native land, and whom the High Chancellor of Sweden has recommended as Ambassador to the Avoyer de Berne, I can rent a country house on the Lake of Zurich next spring.  But if it suspected that the two Swedes who are living with me, who never go out, who never enjoy any social intercourse, and never, indeed, leave my garden—if it is suspected that these Swedes are two ‘ Constitutionals,’ two friends of the limited Monarchy, of liberty with order, shall I not be subjected to all sorts of troubles ?  Who is going to believe the Swedish Ambassadress when she declares that she has nobody in her house but Swedes ?

“ Things are all right here, but I haven’t got permission for the Bishop to come, and I won’t stay anywhere without him.  Do tell me, therefore, if I can, with some hope of being unmolested, rent a house this spring in the country and invite M. de Talleyrand there.  Tell me if Zurich is ready to advertise the moderation of its views by affording shelter to men who are being persecuted for the exhibition of a similar moderation.

“ Tell me, finally, if I can have the joy of spending the summer with you as well as with my friends.  If that is impossible, will you make some inquiries for me about Schaffhouse ?  That place wouldn’t suit me nearly so well, but, after all, what I want is a house to shelter me from the elements and a retreat to protect me from the passions of men.  I won’t continue ;  so many feelings surge in my heart that I would need to give them all vent if I began to describe them, and neither life nor spirit nor word not thought could suffice for that.

“ Believe only that I both esteem and love you and ask nothing better than to pass some time with you.”

Germaine’s little ark was making heavy weather.  Her father and mother, shocked, ashamed, not knowing how to face their respectable friends and sorely afflicted by their financial losses, kept protesting that they could not, any longer, finance both the Kindergarten and Eric Magnus.

¹ Considerations, Part III, p. 127, 134. et seq.

² Considerations, Part III, p. 136.

³ Madame de Staël à Henri Meister, p. 96.