Germaine de Staël

GENERAL BERNADOTTE

JACQUES, fatter than ever, was pressed immediately into service and bidden prepare his “swan song,” a call to Frenchmen to defend their liberties.  Germaine herself had a new literary venture in mind, a novel which should defend the individual against the herd and uphold, in the face of Society, a woman’s right to love.  Not only that ;  she would show that the claims of the State on men’s lives and goods can be justified only if the conscript and the taxpayer have themselves consented to be conscripted and taxed.  Her mind leaped forward to the wedding of these two ideas in the immemorial challenge to tyrants of wives and sisters and mothers :  “By what right do you take our men-folk away from us ? ”

While she was writing and superintending her father’s writing, Bonaparte, whose industry was of the same feverish quality as her own, was teaching Frenchmen that there are no rights which are not founded upon duties.  This man had received an upbringing at the hands of his mother which was in every respect puritanical.  His mother’s influence had been supplemented by that of the Jesuits in Ajaccio and that of the King’s soldiers who conducted the Military School of Brienne.  Bonaparte, from his childhood, had talked much about “soldier’s bread”;¹ he proposed now that Frenchmen, and Frenchwomen too, should eat it, in preparation for the task ahead of them.  Josephine, in pursuance of this design, was presented with a list of women whom she was forbidden to receive in the Tuileries ;  the first name on this list was that of her old friend Thérèse Tallien.  Young officers who devoted their attention to married women were apt to find themselves, very soon, in the forefront of the battle.  Meanwhile peace was the First Consul’s aim, because, without it, France could not recuperate enough to struggle against England.  England dominated this man’s thoughts as completely as she had dominated those of Louis XVI and Vergennes.  When he invited the Vendéans to send representatives to Paris he suggested that these might be priests and went out of his way to declare that he liked priests who were the natural enemies of those “rascally heretics, the English.”  The idea grew in his mind.  He had decided already that he needed priests to discipline the common people, and especially the women, and to afford to the French their accustomed spiritual anchorage.  His gesture had set the church bells ringing in every village in the land and had opened the frontiers to the shepherds whose sheep for the most part eagerly awaited them.  But now a more excellent vision shaped itself--namely, a league of Catholic peoples against the citadel of heresy.  The Church throughout the Revolution had been France’s enemy, and therefore England’s friend ;  he would change all that ;  by the same act he would unite the French and give a new orientation to Catholic policy.  The importance of Italy and Spain in the coming conflict was present already to his mind.

The Concordat was the expression of these views.  It was not by accident that on Easter Sunday, 1802, Bonaparte celebrated the conclusion of peace with England, and with all England’s allies, by attending a Te Deum in Notre Dame as head of the State and compelling the officers of his household, military as well as civil, to accompany him.  By that act of worship England was deprived of one of her greatest advantages, a fact noted with uneasiness by the British Cabinet.

Germaine understood nothing of the motives underlying the Concordat.  Like the Comte de Provence, she was aware of no objection to advertising her admiration of England and the English.  Bonaparte’s churchgoing seemed to her, therefore, only a modern instance of the immemorial alliance of tyrant with priest for the enslaving of men and the bringing of women into subjection.  She saw in the Catholic Church the natural enemy of individual freedom and more especially her own enemy.

“ What do you think of all these treaties of peace,” she wrote to Meister on October 23, 1801,² “and of the indifference of Paris as compared with the transports of London ?  Peace was much more necessary to France than to England.  Don’t you think the real explanation is that liberty counts for something in the interest which people take in their destinies ? . . . Bonaparte, furious at the unresponsiveness of Paris, demanded of his assembled courtiers ;  ‘ What do they want then ?  What do they want then ? ’  And nobody dared to rise (or, if he was standing, to sit down) and answer him :  ‘Liberty, Citizen Consul, liberty.’

“ Don’t you think that the secret clauses of the treaty with Russia probably deal with Piedmont ?  They would never make a treaty merely to tell one another that they were going to respect each other’s Constitutions.  As both (the French and Russian Constitutions) are based on the same principle (of tyranny) that goes without saying.  You see, I can’t resist following my natural bent.  But I’m going back into chains, back to the amusement which wearies my soul.  I’ll be away six months.  I leave (for Paris) on November 10. . . .

“ What do you think of Switzerland ?  When are you going to send me your ‘ novel with a moral ’ ?  It ought not to be less passionate in tone than any other novel.  One ought never to explain the triumph of virtue by the weakness of passion.  Paint me, then, a Betty who can resist.”

Her information was inexact.  England’s reason for making peace was not Bonaparte’s victories nor yet love of France, but hunger.  The closing of the Baltic by Paul I of Russia, “Mad Paul,” Bonaparte’s ally, had so seriously interfered with the importation of wheat that bread in London was selling at famine prices.³  The peace of Amiens, it is true, followed the assassination of Paul, but it was looked upon by the English people, nevertheless, as an earnest of better times.  Pitt and his King were much less enthusiastic.

“ Do you know what I call this peace ? ” said George III.  “An experimental peace ;  for it is nothing else.  But it was unavoidable.”

Germaine reopened her salon in the rue de Grenelle, but behaved with great circumspection.  The atmosphere of Paris was so favourable to Bonaparte that she judged any other course impossible.  She played a waiting game, nursing her anger, meanwhile, with sleepless devotion and keeping in touch with everyone hostile to the Government.

“ The coming of peace,” she wrote to Joseph Bonaparte on December 8, 1801,⁴ “will have the effect of setting public opinion free.  So much so, indeed, that important concessions will soon have to be made to it (i.e. public opinion) to reassure it that the future will bring a more lasting and better guaranteed liberty.  But that moment has not yet arrived. . . . Lebrun spoke well of me, the other day, to Bonaparte, who remarked :  ‘Quite so, I agree.  I hear nobody speaking about her now.’  So you see that, by being careful, I’ve got what I want.”

Benjamin, for all his splutterings and protests, fell under her influence again as soon as she appeared.  These two knew how to excite each other and excitement was what they both valued most in life and found it most difficult to obtain.  Both were egoists and therefore prone to boredom and melancholy.  Both resented the slightest interference.  Both possessed the same itch of destruction, the same hatred of organised effort, any kind of team work--unless, indeed, they could captain the teams.  “Liberty is good,” said Benjamin, “except that men desire it ;  and it is necessary always to oppose men.”  But whereas Benjamin was weak, Germaine was strong.  That abounding maternity of which Narbonne, Talleyrand and Mathieu had availed themselves attracted him irresistibly.  In her presence he was child first, lover and philosopher afterwards.  Like a child he protested screaming ;  but like a child he obeyed in the end.  And she accepted obedience not as a favour but as a right.  Had she not his best interests at heart ?

Soon after his return, he began a guerilla warfare against Bonaparte in the Tribunate.  It did not last long.  By a process which the First Consul called “purification” and Germaine called “creaming,” some dozen members of the Tribunate were deprived of their posts.  Benjamin was one of these.  Germaine, really alarmed, began to practise a still more rigid discretion.

“ The other day,” wrote Mathieu⁵ to Albertine Adrienne, “I was at a most charming evening party at your cousin’s.  Our talk was interspersed by pieces admirably rendered on flute and harp, which exerted a most delightful effect.  Usually, however, her social life consists of intimate talks with friends which give relief to feelings hidden with difficulty or swallowed during several days.  Her behaviour has been simple and clever enough :  her position is fairly good, much better than I dared to hope.”

She wrote her novel, stiffened her neck and tried to behave as if nothing had happened.  And people still gathered to her house.

“ We used to see there,” wrote Chenedolle, “Chateaubriand in all the éclat of his first glory, Madame Récamier in all the delicate flower of her grace and her youth, Madame Visconti with her majestic Roman beauty, the Chevalier de Boufflers in the négligé of a country vicar but with all the exquisite air and all the arts of a courtier . . . and among the politicians Benjamin Constant, tall, erect, good-looking, his long hair falling in curls on his neck.  He had an extraordinary expression of mockery and malice in his smile and especially in his eyes.  Nothing could be wittier than his conversation.  Always epigrammatic, he discussed the deepest political questions with lucid, concise and forcible logic, his argument tinged with sarcasm.  When, with marvellous but subtle skill, he led his adversary into the snare he had laid for him, he left him there confounded and helpless under the blow of an epigram from which there was no recovery.  No one ever understood so well the art of overthrowing an opponent in conversation in a style quite worthy of Madame de Staël.”

Benjamin had effected some changes in his personal appearance, for he was sensitive about his reddish hair.

“ I like,” he wrote to his aunt at this time, “to find in novels heroes with red hair who inspire great passions.  Red hair, in my opinion, ought to be an indispensable attribute of such heroes ;  it is, I feel sure, a great mark of esprit and sensibility.  I’ve been wearing a blond wig this winter, but I have given it up. . . .”

“ I am condemned,” he wrote wearily to a friend, “to society . . . and of all the many hells of Dante, I believe that to be the most painful in the long run.”

Bonaparte’s going to Notre Dame aroused so much opposition that Germaine and her lover could not resist the temptation to turn it to account.  The means offered themselves in the person of General Bernadotte.  Jean Baptiste Jules Bernadotte was a handsome, dark-skinned fellow, who tempered his Gascon blood with a caution which kept him perpetually on the hop between two opinions.  He had been Jacobin of the Jacobins, and remained a bitter anti-clerical ;  but his opinions had much less influence on his conduct than his hatred of Bonaparte.  Bernadotte could not forgive Bonaparte for having been the first love of his wife, Désirée Clary, Joseph Bonaparte’s sister-in-law.  The fact that Désirée had been jilted in favour of Josephine did not help matters, for the girl remained fonder of Bonaparte than of her husband.  Like Germaine, Bernadotte saw his chance in the business with the Church.  They became friendly.  A conspiracy, in which a number of distinguished soldiers, including Macdonald, were involved, was hatched.  There was to be a mutiny of the troops under Bernadotte and Bonaparte was to be killed.

“ During all this time,” Germaine wrote,⁶ “I saw General Bernadotte and his friends at frequent intervals ;  that was more than enough to have ruined me if their plans had been discovered.”

When the plotters hesitated, she stung them to action by telling them that they had only a minute in which to act, seeing that, on the morrow, the tyrant would have 40,000 priests enrolled in his service.  The conspiracy was discovered.  Bonaparte hushed it up, telling Bernadotte, by the mouth of Bernadotte’s brother-in-law Joseph, that if he moved he would be shot out of hand.  Germaine heard nothing.  She was in Paris while the negotiations with the Church were in progress.

“ Finding the French clergy still devoted to Rome,” she wrote,⁷ “Bonaparte began to make overtures to them.  One day he told some bishops that, in his opinion, the Catholic religion alone was founded on the teaching of the Fathers (sur les traditions anciennes) ;  he displayed on this occasion an erudition which he had worked up the night before.  Later, among the philosophers, he told Cabanis :  ‘ Do you understand the true character of this Concordat which I’m going to sign ?  It is a vaccination against religion.  In fifty years there won’t be anymore religion in France. . . .’  In April 1802 he commanded a great ceremony in Notre Dame.  There he was himself, with all the trappings of royalty.  And who, can it be guessed, was told off to preach the sermon ?  No other than the Archbishop of Aix, the same who had preached at the coronation of Louis XVI in the Cathedral of Rheims. . . . Bonaparte and his suite journeyed to the Cathedral in the King’s old carriages, which were driven by their former coachmen and surrounded by the footmen who had attended them (at Versailles). . . . Nothing, I confess it, has ever caused me such acute exasperation.  I shut myself up in my house so as not to behold the odious spectacle ;  but I couldn’t help hearing the firing of the guns which celebrated the passing of the French people into slavery.  On the way back from Notre Dame, the First Consul, finding himself surrounded by generals, said to them :  “ ‘ It’s like old times, again, eh ? ’

“ ‘ Yes,’ said one of these generals nobly, ‘ except for the two million Frenchmen who died for Liberty and can’t be brought back to life.’ ”

A few days after this event a message reached the great house in the rue de Grenelle that Eric Magnus was lying seriously ill in his lodgings.  With Bonaparte’s eye upon her, Germaine went in search of her husband and constituted herself his nurse.  The poor man was in evil state, sunk again under the weight of his debts, shabby, hungry, broken.  She decided to remove this thorn from her flesh ;  she told the invalid, for his comfort, that if he came with her to Coppet and proceeded from there to Sweden, all would be forgiven.  He accepted gratefully ;  he had never known how to refuse her.  She paid his debts, and then, in spite of his appeals for mercy, sent his library of valuable first editions to the auction room to reimburse herself.  The big berline was ordered.  At the beginning of May, after having made Benjamin promise that he would follow within a day or two, she bestowed her husband in the carriage and drove out of Paris.  They reached Poligny on the 6th and put up at the inn.

Eric Magnus had a stroke and became unconscious.  He died three days later.  Benjamin had caught them up.  Germaine and he carried the body to Coppet and buried it in the parish cemetery.

1 Witness his famous letter on the luxury of the École Militaire at Paris when he went there.

2 Madame de Staël à Henri Meister, p. 173.

3 See on this subject Holland Rose’s Life of Napoleon and his Napoleonic Studies.

4 An unpublished letter quoted by Paul Gautier :  Madame de Staël et Napoléon, p. 70.

5 Mathieu de Montmorency et Madame de Staël, p. 145.

6 Dix Années d’Exil, Chap. 9.

7 Considerations, Part IV, Chap. 6.