Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France

Although she was famously badly dressed, Germaine never lost the ancien régime custom of receiving visitors during her toilette, all through her life carrying on metaphysical conversations with a horde of people while one maid dressed her hair and another did her nails. Her doctor in England in 1792 was surprised to be greeted by Germaine in her bedroom wearing ‘a short petticoat and a thin shirt’, and astonished by her energy. She talked and wrote all day long, he reported, her green leather portable writing-desk permanently open on her knees, whether she was in bed or at dinner. Even when she gave birth there were fifteen people in her bedroom and within three days she was talking as much as ever.

Before the revolution, every different outfit served a different purpose, and each one minutely indicated the wearer's status. Wearing unsuitable clothes was an implicit rejection of the hierarchy that controlled society. Inelegant Germaine, who always showed too much flesh—even her travelling dresses had plunging necklines—was by these criteria deeply suspect. Riding-habits were worn to ride or drive in the Bois de Boulogne or go out hunting with the court; day dresses were worn to receive guests at home, to go shopping in the Palais Royal or to attend lectures in the thrilling new sciences of electricity and botany; in the evening, to attend the theatre or a court ball, three-inch heels, heavy makeup and elaborate, pomaded headdresses, snowy-white with powder and sprinkled with jewels, flowers and feathers were de rigueur. Their hair arrangements were often so tall that women had to travel crouching on the floor of their carriages.

Fluttering a fan in a certain way or placing a patch near the eye as opposed to on the cheek revealed a person's character without them having to speak. The sociologist Richard Sennett observes of this period that it is hard to imagine how people so governed by ‘impersonal and abstract convention [can] be so spontaneous, so free to express themselves…their spontaneity rebukes the notion that you must lay yourself bare in order to be expressive’. Contemporaries were fully aware of this dichotomy between word and action. ‘A man who placed his hand on the arm of a chair occupied by a lady would have been considered extremely rude,’ wrote the comtesse de Boigne, looking back on the pre-revolutionary period of her youth, and yet language ‘was free to the point of licentiousness’.

But by the mid-1780s contemporary medical and philosophical views were transforming women's fashions and habits. In 1772 one doctor described corsets as barbarous, impeding women's breathing and deforming their chests, and especially dangerous during pregnancy; he was also concerned about the moral effects they produced by displaying the bosom so prominently. His advice was echoed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, prophet of naturalness and sensibility in Émile and La Nouvelle Héloïse, who recommended that children wear loose clothes that would not constrict their growing bodies.

For the first time, women's clothes allowed them to breathe and eat freely: the new fashions quite literally liberated their bodies from an armour of stays, panniers and hoops at the same time as the ideological implications of the change in fashion began to liberate their behaviour. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman written in 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft declared that stiff, uncomfortable clothes, like the ‘fiction’ of beauty itself, were a means by which society kept women submissive and dependent. Shedding these restrictions would empower them. By this definition Germaine, who rose above her plainness (Gouverneur Morris thought she looked like a chambermaid) and paid scant attention to her dress, was already halfway to emancipation.

Perhaps the most celebrated proponent of these progressive ideas was the queen, Marie-Antoinette, who was painted by Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun in 1783 in a simple white chemise dress tied at the waist with a satin sash. This seemingly innocent act raised eyebrows for a number of reasons. Chemises were muslin shifts, previously worn only in the intimacy of a toilette (or by prostitutes), so to eighteenth-century eyes Vigée-Lebrun had painted the queen in a shocking state of undress. Furthermore, for the queen herself to reject the formality of court custom—she was traditionally portrayed in carapace-like court dress—carried seditious undertones of disrespect to the traditions she represented. Finally, the chemise de la reine (as it came to be called) was a style anyone could afford. As Mary Robinson, the courtesan who popularized the chemise de la reine in England, commented, ‘the duchess, and her femme de chambre, are dressed exactly alike’. Dress, which had once distinguished between people, was becoming dangerously democratic.

Manners, too, were changing. As with clothing, the fashion for informality initially came from the top down: in the artificial world of the salon, being able to give the impression of naturalness and ease had long been considered the highest of the social arts. ‘Do not people talk in society of a man being a great actor?’ asked the philosopher Denis Diderot. Just as the cut flowers in her headdress were kept fresh with tiny glass vases hidden in her hair, the salonnière achieved the sparkling effect of spontaneity in conversation through study and discipline. Every day, Mme Geoffrin, celebrated pre-revolutionary hostess to the great Enlightenment philosophers, wrote two letters (in those days an art form) to keep her brain sharp.

Germaine de Staël's favourite game was called the Boat, in which everyone present was asked who they would save from a sinking ship. She asked her first lover, Talleyrand, who he would rescue, her or his other mistress Adèle de Flauhaut. He replied that she was so talented she could extricate herself from any predicament; gentility would oblige him to save the resourceless Adèle. Another version of this story has Germaine and Talleyrand actually in a boat, talking about devotion and courage. To her question as to what he would do if she fell in, he reportedly replied, ‘Ah, Madame, you must be such a good swimmer.’

Word games, jokes, debates, making up poems and proverbs and amateur theatricals were salon pastimes designed to stimulate and heighten conversation, which Germaine described as an instrument the French above all other nations liked to play, producing a sublime ‘intellectual melody’. Conversation, she said, was

a certain way in which people act upon one another, a quick give-and-take of pleasure, a way of speaking as soon as one thinks, of rejoicing in oneself in the immediate present, of being applauded without making an effort, of displaying one's intelligence by every nuance of intonation, gesture and look—in short, the ability to produce at will a kind of electricity.

Naturally, Germaine herself excelled at this art: ‘If I was queen,’ said a friend, ‘I should order Mme de Staël to talk to me always.’ When she spoke, constantly fiddling with a small twig or twist of paper which the unkind said was a way of drawing attention to her fine hands, her captivated listeners forgot her scruffy clothes, red face and large frame, noticing only the beautiful expression in her eyes.

These showers of sparks, as Staël defined the words and ideas that brought a salon to life, showed the importance to French society of writers and philosophers. Salonnières acted as confidantes, editors, muses and patrons to their talented guests, corresponding with them, intriguing to have them elected to the Academy or appointed to political office and erecting statues in their honour. Women were, according to a 1788 pamphlet entitled Advice to the Ladies, ‘the arbiters of all things…Business, honours, everything is in your hands.’ These roles set a dangerous precedent by giving women powerful identities outside marriage and motherhood.

Another dangerous precedent set by the salons was the relatively open access to them. Women who wanted to have the best thinkers in Europe at their feet were unconcerned about their breeding, and willing to run the moral and political risks of being exposed to their exciting new philosophies. It was at Versailles and in the most exclusive salons in Paris that the ‘bourgeois’ works of Diderot, Rousseau and the artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze were celebrated.

Contemporary opinion was divided over the wisdom of women occupying such a prominent place in society. On the whole, the philosophers who frequented salons and benefited from their hostesses' efforts on their behalf were liberal-thinking, although many believed that trying to impose uniformity on men and women was to challenge nature's own distinctions. To equalize men and women, wrote the novelist Restif de la Bretonne in 1776, ‘is to denature them.’ Implicit in all this was the understanding that of the two sexes, the masculine was undoubtedly the superior. Diderot held that ‘beauty, talents and wit’ would in any circumstances captivate a man, ‘but these advantages peculiar to a few women will not establish anywhere a general tyranny of the weaker sex over the robust one’.

Many reformers saw the influence women wielded as evidence of the corruption of the ancien régime. Boudoir politics, as it was called, when women manipulated their family, friends and, still worse, their lovers, to gain personal influence in the political world from which they were theoretically excluded, was held up before the revolution as one of the chief problems with the French system. Thomas Jefferson told Washington in 1788 that women's solicitations ‘bid defiance to [natural] laws and regulation’ and had reduced France to a ‘desperate state’. The fact that women could play a role in politics at all was, for reformers of all stripes, one of the essential justifications for change.

‘The influence of women, the ascendant of good company, gilded salons, appeared very terrible to those who were not admitted themselves,’ conceded Germaine de Staël. While she acknowledged that ancien régime women ‘were involved in everything’ on behalf of their husbands, brothers and sons, she maintained they had no effect on ‘enlightened and natural intelligence’ like that her father possessed; in this as in everything, she believed herself an exception.

The prevailing view, propounded by the great naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, was that women, inherently more gentle and loving than men, played a valuable social role by moderating masculine energies. Germaine agreed, arguing that French women were accustomed to take the lead in conversation in their homes, which elevated and softened discussions on public affairs. This more temperate view did allow that wives and mothers were essential elements of a civilized society, and some radical thinkers went so far as to suggest that if women were educated they would make their husbands happier and their sons more successful. Mankind would enter into ‘all its vigour, all its splendour’, wrote Philibert Riballier in 1779, if women could be made ‘strong, robust, courageous, educated and even learned’.

Riballier's ‘even learned’ is crucial, because it reveals, even in works that were outwardly sympathetic to women, a belittling tone beneath the praise. The duchesse d'Abrantes commented that before the revolution women seemed to be esteemed but in fact had only the appearance of influence. In 1785 Mme de Coicy said that although France was called ‘the paradise of women’ its female subjects were ‘unworthily scorned and mistreated’, despite their superiority to all other European women. The privileged few who became powerful, like Mme de Pompadour, Louis XV's mistress, generally acquired that power at the cost of their reputations.

Although strong women had been tolerated and even appreciated through French history, there was an equally potent strain of misogyny to which Germaine de Staël, as gauche as she was eloquent, frequently fell victim. In her writings, throughout her life, she railed against the double standards that permitted women to be judged by different standards than men. Women, as she put it in her novel Corinne, were fettered by a thousand bonds from which men were free. Every man of her acquaintance might, as she did, take lovers, neglect his spouse, write books or involve himself in politics; they were not criticized for doing those things at all, but for doing them well or badly, while she would always be castigated for her looks or her private life. In On Literature she wrote feelingly of the ‘injustice of men towards distinguished women’, their inability to forgive ‘genuine superiority in a woman of the most perfect integrity’. The knowledge that she was as intelligent as any man of her generation but could never truly have a public life tortured her, and only at her salon was she consoled.

But Germaine was extraordinary, and her contemporaries did recognize it. ‘The feelings to which she gives rise are different from those that any woman can inspire,’ observed one, unwittingly providing a list of the feminine qualities her age considered ideal. ‘Such words as sweetness, gracefulness, modesty, desire to please, deportment, manners, cannot be used when speaking of her; but one is carried away, subjugated by the force of her genius…Wherever she goes, most people are changed into spectators.’

Her friends (and enemies) were united in praise of her ability to talk, but also of her skill in drawing out whomever she was talking to. One left Germaine ‘in admiration’, spellbound by her knowledge and persuasiveness, but also ‘entirely pleased with oneself’. She could be overpowering, egotistical and embarrassingly unselfconscious, and she preferred ‘to dazzle rather than to please’, but she was good-natured and generous to those she loved.

This group did not include her husband, whom she charitably described as being, ‘of all the men I could never love…the one I like best’. Éric Magnus de Staël was an affable Swedish diplomat seventeen years Germaine's senior who had begun pursuing the greatest heiress in Europe when she was twelve. Her parents made it a condition of their betrothal that Staël be appointed ambassador to France for life; King Gustavus of Sweden conveniently made his betrothal to Germaine a condition of his appointment as ambassador. The wedding took place in Paris on 14 January 1786, the contract signed the day before by the king and queen.

Staël married Germaine for her money, and she married him for her freedom. As Claire says to Julie in Rousseau's Nouvelle Héloïse, ‘If it had depended on me, I would never have married, but our sex buys liberty only by slavery and it is necessary to begin as a servant in order to be a mistress someday.’ After their wedding day her husband was a virtual nonentity to her although for the first few years, almost surprised to be wooed by him, she did try to treat him kindly.

Germaine's first lover was probably Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. A refined, cynical libertine, thirty-four-year-old Talleyrand was so amoral that his own mother opposed his appointment as Bishop of Autun in 1788. Like Germaine, Talleyrand skilfully deployed his abundant charm and subtle wit to make people forget his appearance; this was quite a feat, since he had been crippled since childhood and was described in 1805 as having the complexion of a decomposed corpse. Their relationship did not deepen into passion—besides, Talleyrand already had an ‘official’ mistress—but the love and the friendship endured.

In 1788 Germaine fell deeply in love with a friend of Talleyrand's, Louis de Narbonne, the man she called her magician. The sophisticated Narbonne, illegitimate son of Louis XV (and, it was whispered, of his own sister, Mme Adélaïde), united, according to Fanny Burney, ‘the most courtly refinement and elegance to the quickest repartee’. Narbonne was as celebrated for his wit as for his looks—‘the inexhaustible treasures of grace, absurdity, gaiety, and all the seductions of his conversation’—and, at thirty-three, had already run through three fortunes (those of his mother, the comtesse de Narbonne; his godmother, Mme Adélaïde; and his wife) and fathered at least two illegitimate children.

‘He is a miracle,’ wrote a young German acquaintance, some time later, marvelling at Narbonne's sparkling intelligence, courtesy, courage and modesty. ‘It is no surprise that Madame de Staël should be so attached to this friend, even more so, as she was lumbered with a husband incapable of creating a recipe for potatoes, let alone gunpowder.’ Her uninspiring husband was the man tradition and society had dictated that she marry, but Narbonne was her choice, her heart's partner, her soulmate, and Germaine dedicated herself to him and to their love with all the ardour and idealism of youth. The strength and purity of her feelings for Narbonne were all the justification she needed for a crime (infidelity) she considered society's, not her own.

A constant interchange of notes between Germaine and her husband, to and from her parents' lodgings in Versailles (where she stayed when she was called upon, as she often was, to play hostess for her father) and their house in the rue du Bac, indicates how rarely they were together during this period, and how often she would have been able to entertain Narbonne alone. When Staël accused her of doing so, she did not hesitate flatly to deny it: ‘stop your famous jealousy,’ she insisted. ‘You will lose me if you continue [to make demands on me],’ Germaine wrote in another letter, ‘and it will only be your fault.’Personal freedom was evidently as important to her as abstract political liberties.

To outside eyes, the union between Staël's wife and the elegant courtier, Narbonne, was a strange one: ‘her intellectual endowments must be with him her sole attraction,’ wrote the naïve Fanny Burney, on being told that Germaine and Narbonne were lovers. ‘She loves him even tenderly, but so openly, so simply, so unaffectedly, and with such utter freedom from coquetry, that, if they were two men, or two women, the affection could not, I think, be more obviously undesigning.’

By July 1789, the month the Bastille fell, their relationship was public enough for Gouverneur Morris—who was chasing Talleyrand's mistress, Adèle de Flauhaut, with some success—to refer to Narbonne in his diary as ‘the friend of Mme de Staël’. Another suitor, Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre, was not deterred from declaring his love for Germaine that autumn, but her relationship with Narbonne did allow her to reject him gently, telling him how much she loved ‘le comte Louis’ who had ‘changed his destiny’ for her the moment he saw her, breaking off his other attachments and consecrating his life to her.

By this she meant politically as much as emotionally. The aristocratic but relatively liberal Narbonne told Morris that July that he feared a civil war was inevitable; he was considering rejoining his regiment. He felt trapped between his duty to the king—his godfather and probably his nephew—and his political principles, urged upon him by Germaine. The American Morris, safe in his self-righteous republicanism, could smugly reply that he knew ‘of no duty but that which conscience dictates’, and speculate that Narbonne's conscience would ‘dictate to join the strongest side’; but he was underestimating both the conviction that lay behind the progressive views of Germaine and her friends and the genuine conflict of interest they faced as they watched the revolution gather momentum. Narbonne allowed himself to be convinced by his mistress's eloquence, and remained in Paris with her to pursue glory through, rather than against, reform.

Germaine welcomed the early changes of the revolution with all the passion of her nature. Her upbringing had been a strange one. The only child of cool, ambitious, rather selfish parents, worshipping her father and jealous of her beautiful prig of a mother, she had lived among adults all her life. She was taught elocution by the greatest actress of the day, Mademoiselle Clairon (who later became her husband's mistress). Instead of playing, she watched Diderot, Gibbon, Voltaire, Grimm and Buffon spar in her mother's Friday salons; she did not have a friend her own age until she was twelve.

Germaine's intellectual brilliance, like her emotional intensity, was evident early on, and at twenty-two she published her first important book, Letters on Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Her passion for Rousseau was an indication both of her personal veneration of romantic love and of the philosophical atmosphere of the times. He was the most popular author of the second half of the eighteenth century, and probably the most important ideological inspiration to a generation of revolutionaries from Germaine herself to Robespierre. Even Marie-Antoinette had made a pilgrimage to his grave.

Rousseau's most celebrated and incendiary phrase comes from his treatise The Social Contract—‘Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains’—but his influence was far more than just political. He created a cult of sentimentality, exalting love not as a fashionable diversion indulged in outside marriage but as a noble, all-consuming calling: as Julie, the gentle but ardent heroine of La Nouvelle Héloïse, says, love became ‘the great business of our lives’. In Julie, Rousseau gave Frenchwomen a new role model; her lover, sensitive, introspective Saint-Preux, provided a new romantic ideal.

Implicit in Rousseau's ideas about love was a rejection of conventional ideas about society's constraints, about status and about individual worth. ‘I am not speaking of rank and fortune,’ the commoner Saint-Preux tells his noble mistress Julie proudly, ‘honour and love suffice for want of all that.’ Germaine knew only too well that the bonds imposed by society meant nothing beside the bonds imposed by the heart.

Because of Rousseau, wrote the English traveller Mary Berry, ‘maternal love became as much the fashion as soon afterwards balloons and animal magnetism’. Rousseau called motherhood a woman's highest responsibility. His works reunited a generation of mothers with their children, encouraging them to breast-feed (hitherto rare; middle-and upper-class babies had usually been handed almost immediately after birth to wet-nurses) and take an interest in their children's education. Before Rousseau, children had been treated as miniature adults. They were not allowed to run around or ask questions, and were dressed in stiff adult clothes. Rousseau recommended that they be allowed to play outside, that their curiosity be encouraged and their innocence nurtured. The exquisitely intimate, informal mother-and-child portraits of the late eighteenth century were direct responses to this new philosophy.

Rousseau, in glorifying women as wives and mothers, denied them any role outside the home. ‘There are no good morals for women outside of a withdrawn and domestic life,’ he wrote. ‘A woman outside her home loses her greatest radiance, and is shorn of her true adornments, shows herself indecently. If she has a husband, what is she out seeking among men?’ For him, as for so many of his generation, sexual inequality created an ideal equilibrium: men were dominant, active and reasoning, and their role was public; women were emotional, modest and loving, and their role was private. ‘A taller stature, a stronger voice, and features more strongly marked seem to have no necessary bearing on one's sex, but these exterior modifications indicate the intentions of the creator in the modifications of the spirit,’ he reasoned in La Nouvelle Héloïse. ‘The souls of a perfect woman and a perfect man must not resemble each other more than their appearances.’ According to this argument, the complementary differences between the sexes were essential to maintaining social harmony.

Despite the fact that her own ambitions were thwarted by his way of thinking, Germaine was typical of Rousseau's female readers in disregarding his prejudices because the vision he offered of love as redemption was so powerful, and the importance he attached to the domestic role so flattering. She conceded that ‘Rousseau has endeavoured to prevent women from interfering in public affairs, and acting a brilliant part in the theatre of politics,’ but while he attempted ‘to diminish their influence over the deliberations of men, how sacredly has he established the empire they have over their happiness!’ Even the committed campaigner for women's rights, Mary Wollstonecraft, famously described by Horace Walpole as a ‘hyena in petticoats’, was not immune to Rousseau's allure: she admitted she had ‘always been half in love with him’.