Germaine de Staël, by Marie-Éléonore Godefroid, after François Gérard, c. 1818. Wikimedia Commons.
For the rest of the year, Lapham’s Quarterly is running a series on the subject of history and the pleasures, pain, and knowledge that can be found from studying it. For more than fifty issues, contributors from antiquity to the present day have participated in millennia-spanning conversations on themes including friendship, happiness, death, and the future. But what did they make of the idea of studying the past in the first place? Check back every Thursday from now until the end of the year to read the latest.
In October 1803, a year after winning a plebiscite to become the permanent sole ruler of France, Napoleon Bonaparte exiled the French-Swiss novelist and political theorist Germaine de Staël. She was not permitted to come within forty leagues (approximately 120 miles) of Paris for the next decade. Napoleon suspected her of fomenting dissent among the ex-Jacobins and returned émigrés who attended her salons in Paris and the Swiss town of Coppet. Madame de Rémusat, a lady-in-waiting to Joséphine Bonaparte, included Napoleon’s expression of displeasure with Staël in her 1880 memoir (published nearly sixty years after her death): “This woman teaches people to think who never thought before, or who had forgotten how to think.” Rémusat suspected that his hatred for Staël owed less to her being a bona fide political threat than “that jealousy with which he was inspired by any superiority which he could not control.”
Staël spent much of her exile traveling through the European nations not ruled by Napoleon. When she arrived in London in 1813, Britain’s preeminent intellectuals and political figures flocked to meet her, including a young Lord Byron and George, the Prince of Wales, then ruling on behalf of his incapacitated father. Writing about Staël four years after her death, in a note posthumously published in Murray’s Magazine in 1887, Byron recalled her relish in talking politics at a dinner held in her honor, where she did not refrain from commenting on Britain’s war with the United States. “She interrupted Whitbread; she declaimed to Lord Lansdowne; she misunderstood Sheridan’s jokes for assent,” he remembered. “As Napoleon had been lectured on the destinies of France, the Prince Regent of England was asked what he meant to do with America.”
While in London, Staël gathered material for a study of England’s constitutional monarchy, which she thought might be a model for France. The following year the Bourbon dynasty was restored in France and Staël returned to Paris, only to flee again to Coppet when Napoleon briefly escaped from exile. She died in 1817 at the age of fifty-one. At the time she had been working on expanding her political treatise on England into a multivolume history of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era. Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution was posthumously published in Paris in 1818; an English edition appeared the same year.
Staël disagreed with the standard argument, promulgated by Joseph de Maistre and Edmund Burke, that the National Assembly’s radical reforms were destined to lead to political chaos and bloodshed. She saw the Revolution as part of a centuries-old popular movement to limit monarchical power in France. This movement, not the political and social hierarchies of the ancien régime, was France’s true political heritage, she argued. For proof that a stable representative government could still be founded on the principles of the Revolution, she turned to English history:
Who could have believed, two centuries ago, that a regular government could ever have been established among these factious islanders?...They have deposed, killed, overturned more kings, more princes, and more governments than the rest of Europe together; and yet they have at last obtained the most noble, the most brilliant, and most religious order of society that exists in the ancient hemisphere. Every country, every people, every man are fit for liberty by their different qualities; all attain or will attain it in their own way.
In an earlier passage that precedes the Bourbon restoration in her history, Staël considers how the French government might reestablish the monarchy’s political legitimacy without reverting to the “absurd doctrine” that a monarch’s right to rule is derived from God.
A change of dynasty, even when legally pronounced, has never taken place except in countries where the overturned government was arbitrary; for the personal character of the sovereign, being then decisive of the fate of the people, it became necessary, as we have often seen in history, to dispossess those who were unfit to govern; while, in our own day, the respectable sovereign of England was accounted the ruler for a considerable time after his faculties were gone, because the responsibility of ministers admitted of postponing the act for a regency.
Legitimacy, such as it has been recently proclaimed, is then altogether inseparable from constitutional limitation. Whether the limitation that formerly existed in France was insufficient to oppose an effectual barrier to the encroachments of power, or whether it was gradually infringed and obliterated, is a point of no importance: it ought to commence from this time forward, even if the antiquity of its origin could not be proved.
One is ashamed to go back to the evidence of history to prove that a thing equally absurd and unjust ought neither to be adopted nor maintained. It has not been argued in favor of slavery that it has lasted four thousand years, nor did the state of servitude that succeeded it appear more equitable for having subsisted above ten centuries; the slave trade has never been defended as an ancient institution of our fathers. The inquisition and torture, which are of older date, have, I confess, been reestablished in one country in Europe, but this did not, I imagine, take place with the approbation even of the defenders of all ancient usages. It would be curious to know to which generation among our fathers the gift of infallibility was granted. Which is that past age which ought to serve as a model to the present and from which one cannot make the slightest departure without falling into pernicious innovation? If every change, whatever be its influence on the general good and progress of mankind, be censurable merely because it is a change, it will not be difficult to oppose to the ancient order of things invoked by you another order of things still more ancient to which it has succeeded. At that rate, the fathers of those of your ancestors whom you wish to take as guides, and the fathers of those fathers, would be entitled to complain of their sons and grandsons as of a turbulent youth impatient to overthrow their wise institutions.
What human being, gifted with good sense, can pretend that a change in manners and opinion ought not to be productive of a corresponding change in our institutions? Must government then be always three hundred years in arrears? Or shall a new Joshua command the sun to stand still in his course? “No,” it will be said, “there are things that ought to be changed, but the government ought to be immutable.” There could not be a more effectual way of reducing revolutions to a system; for if the government of a country refused to participate in any degree in the progressive advance of men and things, it will necessarily be overthrown by them. Can men coolly discuss whether the form of the governments of the present time ought to be in correspondence with the wants of the existing generation or of those which are no more? Whether it is in the dark and disputed antiquity of history that a statesman ought to look for his rule of conduct? Or whether that statesman should possess the talents and firmness of a Pitt, should know where power resides, whither opinion tends, and where he is to fix his point of support to act on the national feeling? For without the national wish, nothing is to be done—with it, everything except that which would tend to degrade it: bayonets are the only instruments for that disastrous purpose.
In recurring to the history of the past, as to the law and the prophets, the same thing that happened to the latter happens to history: it becomes the subject of a war of endless controversy. Shall we at present aim at ascertaining from the documents of the age whether a perverse king, Philip IV, or a mad king, Charles VI had ministers who, in their name, allowed the nation to be of some account? Besides, the facts in French history, far from supporting the doctrine that we combat, confirm the existence of a primitive compact between the nation and the king as fully as human reason demonstrates its necessity. I have, I believe, proved that in Europe, as in France, it is liberty that is ancient and despotism that is modern: also that those defenders of the rights of nations who are stigmatized as innovators have perpetually appealed to the past. Even were this truth not evident, the result would be only a more pressing demand on us as a duty to introduce the reign of that justice which may not as yet have commenced. But the principles of liberty are so deeply engraved on the heart of man that, if the history of every government presents a picture of the efforts of power to encroach, it exhibits likewise a picture of popular struggles against these efforts.
Read the other entries in this series: Polybius, Michel de Montaigne, Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hardy, Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto, Voltaire, Charles Lamb, al-Biruni, Ibn Khaldun, and Agnes Strickland and Elizabeth Strickland.