Germaine de Staël

HAIL TO THE KING

WHEN Sieyès was asked, in his old age, what he had done during the Terror, he replied :  “ I lived.”  In fact, this fecund mother of constitutions had discovered in the reign of Robespierre a new impulse to gestation.  His first-born, that to which King Louis stood sponsor, had perished, in its earliest infancy, with the throne upon which it relied.  His second, of which, however, he denied maternity, went to the guillotine with Robespierre unlamented even by himself, for he had never liked the child.¹  His third, coming to birth, promised better than either of its predecessors if only because it was assured of a gentler cradling.  But he had already, conformably to his habit, washed his hands of it, on the ground that all his ideas had not been incorporated whereas other people’s ideas had been.  There was substance in the complaint.  Something, for example, had been borrowed from the United States, something from England, something from Necker, something from the hopes and enthusiasms of the Tennis Court at Versailles.  The finished work provided for a Council of Ancients, 250 strong, every member of which must be 40 years of age or over, a Council of Five Hundred and an Executive of five “Directors” to replace the Committee of Public Safety.

Sieyès’ long nose became a familiar object in Germaine’s salon, and he helped her in her efforts to secure the recall of her friends, Mathieu and the others from Switzerland, Talleyrand (the Bishop) from America.  It was not easy work ;  lip service was necessary still to the Republic, for the sake of the weaker brethren.  A Parisian newspaper had already called attention to Madame de Staël’s visit to the Kindergarten on the eve of her return to France, and she had felt it necessary to make profession, in a letter to that journal, of her sincere attachment to Republican principles.

“ I declare,” she wrote, “that I do not share the prejudice which would adopt a form of constitution for reasons unrelated to the pleasure and will of the nation ;  what I desire sincerely is the establishing of the French Republic on the sacred foundations of justice and humanity, because I am convinced that, in the existing circumstances, only the Republican form of government can give rest and liberty to France.”

Nobody in Paris misunderstood, but the Kindergarten, divorced from events, experienced a lively distress.

“ My first feeling,” wrote Mathieu² to Albertine Adrienne, “was, I admit, one of acute disappointment. . . But, on second thoughts, I have adopted the attitude, the speech and even the view of a friend who, surrounded by critics, wishes to play the part of advocate.  Not that Madame de Staël’s old friends have shown a bad spirit towards her.  M. de Narbonne hasn’t said much ;  he has even remarked with an approval untainted by irony, that, without naming us, she wished probably to make a distinction between himself and the rest of us.  For he has never tried to have his exile revoked, whereas we have definitely cherished projects of return to France.  M. de Jaucourt and Madame de Chatre are interested chiefly in the first part of the letter and are in doubt whether or not the vague disavowals (of us) contained in it will not do their case more harm than would have an absolute silence.  All seem to regret, tacitly at least, that she ever wrote it ;  as for me, I stand between that regret, which in my heart of hearts I share, and the view I am busy trying to uphold.

“ In the end, I had succeeded in persuading myself, to some extent at any rate ;  I began to believe that my first impression was quite wrong and to reproach myself for not having made a worthier defence of our friend, when, on Thursday last, I received three or four letters which have enlightened me cruelly, at least about what other people think.  M. Garnier de Nyon, a man of much sense and truly friendly (to Madame de Staël) has written me in tones of sharp regret heightened, evidently, by memories of an association based on a common faith in the Constitutional Monarchy and by a sincere regard for Madame de Staël’s political good name.  I can to some extent discount M. Garnier’s attitude as snobbery, but Madame d’Arlens, but you, above all, you, the only person with whom I can always think the very best of our friend, either in recalling the precious qualities of her heart and mind, which your sympathy so justly entitles you to appreciate, or, in defending her when, by chance (she does) something we regret and so involves us—you and me—in a common affliction !  Are the strictures of this letter, then, as well founded as I fear ?  Only to you would I let that suspicion escape my lips ;  after what you’ve written me, I no longer know how to find reasons in favour of our friend.

“ Meanwhile, though, more than one reason has occurred to me ;  she has been compelled to do what she has done by her husband’s position ;  by an excessive fear of queering his pitch, explicable in terms of her tart ;  by circumstances, personal and other, which from this distance we cannot hope to understand.  Perhaps a friendly feeling (for her husband) has made her wish to disavow the charge in the newspapers.  If so, the disavowal would have to be couched in vague terms so as to avoid telling a lie which could easily be proved against her.  At the same time she would desire to make a favourable impression by declaring principles which preclude all idea of a Royalist coalition.  Perhaps, again, she may have thought her letter would put her in possession of more means of being useful to us.  If that is so, I am too much an accomplice, though an unwitting one, in her apparent fault, not to try to justify it.  In short, enervated, as you put it so well, by the contagious atmosphere of France, carried away by her exasperation at that article (in the newspapers) and by her need, in such circumstances, of snatching up her pen, she won’t have considered that there was much occasion to express her true opinions since all her friends, recalling her talks with them, would know that these were not her true opinions.  It seems to me, as to you, that this is how we ought to defend her, and it is in this sense that I am writing to Garnier, with whom she has often argued from the Republican point of view.

“ But when we have told each other our first impressions and the excuses we can think of, doesn’t there remain to us in these views (of hers) a glimpse of the party spirit, of jealousy and even of indifference (to principle) ?  I am very much distressed about it.  You are in a better position than me to know what is being said at Lausanne ;  do please let me know, when you write again, giving me the names of the people worth mentioning.  Have you no idea what her father thinks ?  I am full of curiosity to learn his opinion without daring to ask it or to tell him mine.  I owe him a letter but have delayed to write because of this business.”

There were, as Mathieu suspected, wheels within wheels.  Eric Magnus had been accredited by his Government to the French Republic ;  could his wife allow to pass the accusation that she was a Royalist ?  She was busy trying to get her father’s name removed from the list of emigrants, which means that she was busy trying to recover the £100,000 he had lent to the French Government.  That Government might be Monarchist to-morrow ;  to-day it was Republican.  Experience had taught her the folly of counting unhatched chickens.

Barras’s plot, to restore the monarchy, nevertheless, went well, and everybody was hopeful.  On June 10 hope was quickened by the news that the son of Louis XVI had died in his prison ;  nor did the accusation, made at once by the Royalists, that the boy was not really dead³—an accusation since proved to be true—serve to damp the general enthusiasm.  What a son could scarcely have forgiven, a brother might very well forgive.  Every eye was turned towards Verona, to the Comte de Provence, who now called himself Louis XVIII.  Let him only declare a general pardon for regicides and a readiness to accept the new Constitution, and he might have the throne for the asking.  It was an anxious moment, especially for Barras and Tallien, but they had baited the ground carefully and were confident of success.  After all, the great majority of the nation was Royalist at heart, just as it was Catholic at heart.

The “King” did not keep his subjects waiting long for his decision.  Perhaps he believed the accusation about the abduction of his little nephew from the Temple.  If so, he must have recognised that those who were offering him the throne had a card up their sleeves for use if he gave them trouble.  Perhaps it was just that his honest stomach turned at the thought of receiving St. Louis’ crown from hands reeking with innocent blood.  He declared that if he came back to France he would do so as an absolute monarch, would restore property, including that of the Church, to its rightful owners, and would make it his business to hang every murderer on whom he could lay his hands.

That did him honour.  But the postscript remains a blunder, singular in history.  In it, the heir of Louis XIV and Louis XVI revealed a complete ignorance of the cause for which the one had laboured most of his days and the other had laid down his life—namely, France’s struggle with England for world power.  Experience had proved that that struggle could be carried on by France only if she was in possession of her “natural frontiers,” the Alps and the Rhine, and so might count herself safe from attack by Austria or Prussia acting in concert with England.  The natural frontiers had been Louis XIV’s dream ;  Louis XVI and Vergennes had based all their hopes on acquiring these frontiers indirectly by offering protection to the Rhenish states.  Now the armies of the Republic had won the Rhine.  For the first time in more than a century, France was in a favourable position to challenge England.  If “Louis XVIII” had spoken that challenge and called his fellow-countrymen to follow up their astounding victories on land by disputing the English claim to sovereignty on the seas, echoes would have been awakened in every heart.  Frenchmen, weary of politics, were athirst for glory and saw already, in the success of their arms, the promise of the recovery of lost sources of wealth in India, and the isles of the ocean.  This was the moment, however, chosen by the man who aspired to be her King to warn France that he was about to ally himself with the King of England for the purpose of curing her rebelliousness.  Louis spoke threateningly of an invasion which, from the coast, would carry him quickly to Paris.

For a moment there was consternation ;  then Paris girded herself.  No more Royalism.  Tallien ascended again into the Mountain, full of threatenings.  Off came the sheep’s clothing.  Out, from a million throats, burst the Marseillaise.  Hoche was despatched to La Vendée, while the draftsmen were bidden insert fresh clauses in the new Constitution binding the electors to find two-thirds of the men chosen by them among the members of that Convention which had sent Louis XVI to the guillotine and making a vote for the late King’s death an essential qualification for a Directorship.  Was a new Terror in preparation ?  The moderate men joined with the Royalists in attacking the “law of the two-thirds,” as it was called, and Benjamin, at Germaine’s bidding, wrote violently against it.  He was denounced by Louvet as an “impudent, silly Royalist” ;  she was invited, through Eric Magnus, to seek a change of air.  But she lingered in Paris.  The threatened invasion took place.  A number of emigrants were landed at Quiberon from English ships and instantly overpowered by Hoche, who promised them their lives if they surrendered.  Tallien, in spite of this, ordered them to be shot.  Seven hundred perished.  The Bourbons, shouted Barras and his crew, are in English pay ;  they will sell you to your worst enemy if you have any truck with them.  These were anxious days for Germaine and her lover ;  both spent their time trying to convince people that they were Republicans, in her case without success.  Mathieu, meanwhile, was about to avail himself of the permission granted him to return to France.

“ Surely,” he wrote to Albertine Adrienne,⁴ “you don’t believe there is anything but friendship for her (in my heart) where that feeling remains alone, lively, unchangeable, the inheritor of my life.  I don’t deny that its origins were otherwise ;  of these some pleasant traces necessarily remain.  But be sure that I don’t deceive myself about my real feelings.  I have proof of the change which has been brought about in me by an element of character similar to those you have so finely noted in your own case.  It has been necessary for me, too, to accomplish, painfully, the reconciliation of certain details (of recent knowledge) with the complete picture of your amazing cousin which I had formed in my mind.  In doing that I reached the certainty that I was no longer in love with her.

“ But what does that matter, if my friendship, if yours, can secure the happiness of her life ?  Allow me to love her just enough to make common cause with you.  I tell myself that we two wish exactly the same things for her, and that we will be of the same opinion about all that concerns her.  We will be allies, whether together or separated, to rescue her from those first impulses, of love-making or of politics, which cannot but endanger her happiness. . . Here (at the Lake of Bienne) we are all very much distressed about the death of that unhappy little King, who was a centre of common interest for Royalists of all shades of opinion.  Our friend has not told us a word about it.  She believes that the new Constitution will be bearable and says nothing further about going to the country for a month.  That seems to me a bad sign.  It can’t be a question of the handsome Swede (Ribbing) because I find he is safely in Denmark.”

Mathieu left for Paris on August 6, 1795.  Immediately after his arrival in the capital, one of the members of the Convention, Legendre, delivered from the Tribune a fierce attack on Madame de Staël, whom he accused of being a Royalist agent and the friend of emigrants.  Eric Magnus was in the House at the time.  He rose and left, but uttered no protest.  Mathieu at once retired to his estate Saint Gratien ;  she followed him there, with Benjamin, and set to work on a new pamphlet, Réflexions sur la paix intérieure, the object of which was to induce the Royalists to give their support, temporarily, to the Republic.

“ The ignorant shout for Liberty,” she commented, “only the enlightened can give it them.”

But Mathieu and Benjamin did not become friends.  The pamphlet was not published.  Very unseasonably, at the height of the elections of the new Councils, she rushed back to Paris with her friends and reopened her salon, determined, at this eleventh hour, to induce the lambs and lions to lie down together.  Royalists and Jacobins were actually winning seats in Paris, especially in the poorer quarters where hungry people resented Barras’s parade of luxury.  Visions of the Constitutional Monarchy, which her heart desired because she saw herself its Egeria, haunted her anew.  She was in every intrigue, privy to every secret, an object of everybody’s suspicion and, in the end, of most people’s dislike.  The inevitable crash came.  On October 15, 1795, the mob, organised in part by Jacobins, in part by Royalists—for all would fish in the troubled waters—but really maddened by want and by the spectacle of the riotous living of the men in power, advanced to attack the Convention, now holding its last sittings.  Barras was given command of the troops.  He knew his limitations.  The effective control must be in professional hands.  He pitched on General Napoleon Bonaparte, a needy fellow, now on half pay, whom he had met at the siege of Toulon.  “He is a Corsican,” said Barras to his friends, “who will not stand upon ceremony.”

General Bonaparte fired cannon at the Parisian mob, and that “whiff of grapeshot,” as he called it, put an end to the trouble.  A few days later the Convention was dissolved and the Directory established.  Barras was appointed one of the five Directors ;  he ordered Madame de Staël to leave France.  She had Mathieu, now like herself under grave suspicion, tucked away once more in the Embassy.  Eric Magnus was sent off to plead with the Directors, and managed, because of his official position, to secure a respite.  But the salon was not to be reopened.  She tarried miserably till December 21.  Then, having failed to influence anybody of importance in her favour, and being sorely afflicted by police supervision, she packed up and departed, with Benjamin, for Coppet.

¹ Sieyès’ exact share in the making of each Constitution is hard to determine.  He was always behind the scenes, but he had a way of quarrelling with other constitution-makers and then declaring that the finished work was none of his doing.  The Second Constitution, “Constitution of the Year II,” as it was called, probably owed less to his efforts than any of the others.

² Mathieu de Montmorency et Madame de Staël, by Paul Gautier, p. 43.

³ An immense literature about Louis XVII is now in existence.  False dauphins kept cropping up for many years, but the fate of the young prince remains doubtful.

⁴ Mathieu de Montmorency et Madame de Staël, p. 50.