SOURCE: “Forging a Vocation: Germaine de Staël on Fiction, Power, and Passion,” in Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, Vol. 86, No. 3, 1983-1985, pp. 242-54.

Quelle époque ai-je choisie pour faire un traité sur le bonheur des individus et des nations! (What an age I have chosen to write a treatise on the happiness of individuals and nations!)

—Staël De l’influence des passions … Introduction

“Marat,” wrote Germaine de Staël in her account of the French Revolution, “was using his newspaper day after day [in the summer of 1792] to threaten the royal family and its defenders with the most atrocious of tortures. Never had one witnessed a human tongue so denatured; the roaring of wild beasts could have been translated into the language he used.”¹

Daughter of Jacques Necker, the ill-starred last pre-revolutionary prime minister of Louis XVI, Germaine Necker had made her entry into society both at Versailles—under the sway of courtly manners and traditions—and at home in the salon of her mother Suzanne Necker—under the aegis of the Enlightenment's radical if sometimes archly ornamented interrogation of those traditions. Her eager and precocious intelligence had first fed principally upon literature, but her father's earlier spell as Finance Minister and her subsequent marriage to the Swedish ambassador to Louis' court had awakened her increasingly to questions of government. Already a deeply engaged observer of the Revolution from its earliest stages, by 1792, at twenty-six years of age, she was also the author of several fictions and of an ambitious volume of essays on Rousseau. Now she maintained a distinguished and political salon where people of diverse tendencies gathered for conversation, and most of the guests professed to admire their hostess's sagacity, wit—and advocacy of rational political policies. In her emotional life, however, reason had not prevailed: she had suffered great affective upheaval as she pursued an ostentatious liaison with her lover the Comte de Narbonne, an affair which made her an object both of public ridicule and of maternal censure.

The omens, like Marat's summonses to slaughter, that preceded the Reign of Terror were therefore deeply disquieting to Germaine de Staël. If the lives of the monarchs, whose right to exist she still defended, were so clearly menaced, so was the possibility for rational discourse or for any pacific constitutional resolution. So, too, was the very world where she had loved and struggled threatened with extinction by the unleashing of a typhoon of human passion.

If she had already conceived the idea of writing her essays Concerning the Influence of the Passions upon the Happiness of Individuals and of Nations, in the Paris of 1792 the daily threats of exile, imprisonment, summary trial, and execution—to her friends and acquaintances as well as to herself—would have prevented her from concentrating on such meditative labors. After narrowly escaping assassination in the Place de Grève, she fled to her father's home in Coppet, Switzerland, in September of that year, and in November she gave birth to her second son. By December she would be restlessly off again, eventually stopping in England where she joined Narbonne. It was there, at Juniper Hall in Surrey early in 1793, that she began to concentrate in earnest upon her interrupted treatise; after her return to Coppet in May her work was again pre-empted by sentimental and political events, as the full force of the Reign of Terror battered and tore at France and a new lover presented her with a conflict between loyalty and desire. She understandably turned her back on both politics and passion to write her Essay on Fiction (Essai sur les fictions), published in 1795, a work which exhibits some striking contrasts in tone with the Passions, even as it skirts some of the same themes. Only after she had finished this essay did she return to the Passions, completing that labored and tortured work in 1795. It in turn would be published in 1796, her thirtieth year.²

Written in exile, these two texts bear the marks of her personal disarray as well as that of her nation: the political rejection of the father she idolized; her abandonment by Narbonne, the lover whose career she had so shamelessly fostered and who had fathered her two sons; her brief but intense love affair, in the wake of Narbonne's defection, with the Swedish political exile Adolph Ribbing von Leuven; the collapse of the ideal of constitutional monarchy to which she had been so passionately committed; the disintegration not merely of civic order but of all the civilized forms of discourse and manners that had given structure to the values sustaining that order.

These are works that intuit rather than fully grasp the measure of this collapse, and that seek, picking among the cinders, those few glowing brands out of which to light the new fires needed to sustain life. They illustrate, page by page, a nostalgic hearkening back to past certainties and a candid sense of being unmoored, rudderless before the tide of human unreason. Emerging throughout, not unexpectedly, are the themes of power and its uses, of the just allocation of energies to public and private spheres, of the avoidance of pain, and, always, of the problematics of woman's love and ambition. The fascination of these texts lies in their daringly open, exhibitionistic probing of the female self and its responses to the range of the passions. Amidst the flow of apparent endorsement of conventional positions, it is in the places where Staël unmoors herself that she displays her courageous mobility and shows us shafts of keen brightness. To paraphrase the words of Luce Irigaray, she dares here to let us see what she is becoming, even as she clings to “what she could have been, might be.”³ For like her contemporary Rahel Varnhagen, whose complex attitudes concerning her identity have been so probingly explored by Hannah Arendt, Germaine de Staël in these works exhibits the stages of triumph over her “eternal dissembling,” her “being reasonable,” her “yielding … and swallowing her own insights.”⁴ Staël adopts the first person, speaking, as a woman, with candid openness of the love which overwhelms her and of the power for which she longs but to which she is denied access. An autobiographical, perhaps even a self-therapeutic project is in progress here.

In its very structure, the Passions is an exceedingly ambitious work, one in which Staël sought to establish the voice of a serious thinker, a moraliste in the tradition of Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, or Chamfort. Yet she opens on a confessional note closer to Rousseau's than to any of theirs: “condemned to celebrity but without being truly known, I find the need to allow the public to judge me through my writings. Ceaselessly slandered, I have given in to the hope that in publishing this fruit of my mediations I should be giving some genuine notion … of my character” (Introduction).⁵ The work is, then, a réplique to a fantasized jury, an act of defense, and a counterattack. Here is displayed that quality of apologia which distinguishes Staël's writing posture. Her concomitant pose of victim, warranted though it was, since slander against her descended to depths and rose to paroxysms of intensity normally reserved for statesmen and crowned heads,⁶ gives her prose a bitter flavor. So undone is she by her plight that she cannot forbear making this explicit plea for understanding which, by virtue of its importunate insistency, has the ironic effect of raising the very barrier between herself and the reader that she is trying to eliminate.

Riddled with intimations of the betrayal of her personal ambition and of her loves as well as deep moral dismay at the parlous times, the Passions was originally designed to be presented in two parts, the first an abstract treatment of the effects of passionate impulses on the individual, the second a practical application of her observations to political theory and actual government; but the second part was never published, if indeed it was ever written.⁷ Part one, our actual text, is far more extensive than may be suggested by my isolation of the few issues which center on love and ambition.⁸ There are three sections: the first consisting of reflections upon glory, ambition, vanity, love, gambling, avarice, drunkenness, envy and vengeance, partisanship, and criminality; the second devoted to those feelings intermediate between passion and self-containment which involve another as well as the self—friendship, filial and conjugal tenderness, and religiosity; the third moving on to the true inner resources that Staël believed could provide a bulwark against the ravages of the passions: philosophy, study, and generosity. It is clear that the trajectory was intended to move one away from the horror and confusion of passionate obsession, toward calm, rational joys. Thus the structure of the work is rationalistic, though its execution continually betrays this rational scheme and falls into passionate defense or postures of advocacy for the passions that can only be termed Romantic.

The Passions might best be termed the Staëlian “psychology.” In her analyses, however, indifferent to consistency she will come full circle: after proclaiming that the passions are a force for sorrow alone, she will end up nonetheless by restoring them (in sorrow) to preeminence. In the process she has managed to set forth her notions concerning human failings and to elaborate her conception of motivation.

Her inner struggle can be glimpsed at once in the fine early Romantic dualism she proposes near the opening of her essay, between the passionate and the unimpassioned. The latter enjoy a tranquility, she writes, whose base is “the certainty of never being agitated or dominated by any feeling stronger than self-love” (Introduction). She cannot really find much to admire in such people; for her rising Rousseauist generation these were the cold and soulless non-engagés. Yet revolted as she is by such anomie as theirs, she balks at the notion that passion is essential. Although compelled to concede that there is something sublime in passion, the motor in us, she admits, of much that is generous and inspired, she nonetheless insists that it is unfavorable to the commonweal, hence basically to be feared. Defining it as an “impulsive force that draws man on independent of his will,” she sees passion as a natural impediment both to individual and to social happiness. If a rationalist were to ask her, “Why not direct the passions rather than destroy them?” she would reply, “I am unable to understand how one can direct that which thrives only on domination; there are but two states in man: either he is certain of being master of himself, and in that case he has no passion; or he feels he is ruled by a force within him stronger than himself, in which case he is entirely dependent upon it. …” She concludes, “all these treaties one makes with passion are purely imaginary: like all true tyrants, it is either enthroned or in chains” (Introduction).

This all-or-nothing formulation reflects the nascent Romantic ethos as well as Germaine de Staël's personal truth. Although she will often encourage sanity and moderation in her arguments, she can be no true apostle of any cult of sobriety. As she wrote this essay she was well aware to what extent those passions that had dominated her could be destructive to herself and to others. The passions, however alluring, had themselves to be destroyed—by writing them out of existence. Such is the overt design. The passions, however, are not so easily read out of court.

A detailed discussion of the passions follows this curiously disorienting prelude. Dominating the first section is Staël's treatment of the quest for gloire.⁹ So high is it on her own pyramid of value that she will revert to it several times. The search for glory, she tells us, can never be appeased by ephemeral celebrity: it is rather to “the world and to posterity” that we look “to ratify the gift of so august a crown; it must therefore be bestowed only for genius or for virtue” (I i). Of the literary genius for which she later professes so much admiration, in the Fictions, she speaks here but disparagingly: for it will never, like the gloire of the active life, yield that unique sense of physical and moral strength combined that “insures the exercise of all the faculties” and “inebriates with the certainty of one's powers of being.” Literature being the mode of her enterprise, we read this as a deliberate devaluation of the writer's own ambition, to exalt another kind beyond her grasp. In this passage she identifies completely with the splendor of fully realized potential and affirms the realm of action as supreme.

By way of contrast with the purity of the love of gloire, ambition is decried as “the passion that has no object save power, that is, the possession of status, of wealth and those honors that accompany these.” In its perfection the love of gloire “comes out of true talent and aspires to nothing but the aura of fame” (I ii). Yet even the pursuit of such perfection, she is troubled to acknowledge, is often achieved at society's expense. She is struck, too, by the degree to which reverses of fame bring in their wake “a sense of defeat and of mortality; no one,” she points out, “has ever descended painlessly from a rank which placed him higher than other men” (II ii). This empathy of hers for the plight of the high fallen low is a preoccupation that stays with her, an echo of her father's fall from power, she tumbling after him.¹⁰

To follow the vicissitudes of Staël's idea of gloire, I digress here to consider her Fictions. A defense and illustration of the importance of imaginative literature, this essay appears to be a precise attempt to explore the capacity of this terrain as a fulfilling alternative to the glory of the active life of politics or war. Unlike the Passions, which backs and fills meanderingly, offering digressive personal judgments on her own formulations, the Fictions is brief, brisk, and tightly organized. In it she reviews three types of fiction: the allegorical, the historical, and that which imitates life. She demonstrates little appreciation of the first two categories.¹¹ The meat of her argument appears in the last section, where she presents an unexpectedly elevated image of fiction in answer to its detractors:¹² it is “one of the fairest of all the products of the human spirit, one of the most influential upon the mores of individuals and that which, in the end, gives shape to social customs” (III). Novels, then, must be useful, but in order to be so they must expand our understanding of the emotions. The art in the novel she sees as essential to its power to act upon us, to improve us, making us better able to contend with our complex of passions, better armed to combat them. Notice the vigor of her language (my emphasis added): “We must animate virtue, so that it may win the battle with the passions; we must bring into being a kind of exaltation that will lend an attraction to sacrifice.” We rediscover here with a shock of recognition some of that enthusiasm we perceived earlier in her description of gloire.

A great reforming zeal remains visible here, inadequately covering her underlying political goal: literature simply replaces politics as the theatre of action. She writes of the Revolution that is still in process, “Dante's Hell was less extreme than the crimes to which we have been witness.” In our own times, following the Hitlerian and other terrors, we have been driven to ask, as was Germaine de Staël, whence they could arise and how they might be prevented. The answer she proffered to her own time was that such a deficiency in the human soul (somewhat akin to the “banality” that Hannah Arendt saw in Adolph Eichmann) could only be cured by the soul's intensive development. It is her hope to preserve from crime those in whom all sense of obligation is simply absent—by “developing in them the capacity to be moved.” This it is that makes her newly reverent of the role of the artist, the mission of the novelist. Approving this mission, she consents too to what she regards as a soothing power, that of fiction, and concludes: “In this life through which we pass rather than truly live, anyone who distracts man from himself and from his fellows, who suspends the action of the passions and substitutes for them independent pleasures is the dispenser of the only true happiness human nature can enjoy …” (III). Here we have the link with the interrupted work on the Passions: fiction can be their antidote, or at least their sedative.

The intriguing, frequently quoted passage from the Fictions in which she suggests a future course for the novel is concerned precisely with its treatment of the passions.

The destiny of those women, the happiness of those men who are not called upon to govern empires often depends for the rest of their lives on the share they have given in youth to the importunity of love; but they forget completely at a certain age the impression it originally made upon them; they take on another nature; they are entirely given over to other objects, other passions; and it is to these new interests that novels should be devoted. A new career would then open up … for those authors with the talent to portray all the phases of the human heart and to convince us by their intimate knowledge of it. Ambition, pride, avarice, vanity might be the principal object of novels whose incidents would then be fresher and whose situations might prove more varied than those that have love as their subject. (III)

This view was not altogether new. The theatre had already undergone a similar critique of its subject matter, and d’Alembert, for example, had proposed the exploration of an expanded panorama of fictional and dramatic passions.¹³ Yet an anomaly it was indeed for a woman to call, as did Germaine de Staël, for the other passions of humankind, so long subordinated to the tyrant love in fiction though not necessarily in life, to be given their full share in the novelist's art. She herself was never wholly freed from the chase after love, and all of her fictions are suffused with its aura. It is not merely a concern that equal time be allotted to the other passions that motivates her wish to dethrone love from its pedestal. I would hold that she arrived at this position because she subliminally perceived that the fictional dominance of love, through those very moral effects of the novel of which she had shown herself so conscious, was an instrument in maintaining women in a state of subservience and in that permanent latency that had baffled her own development.

Her stand here is an implicit rejection of such subservience by a subtle undermining of the love mystique. She would appear to be trying to pry the novel loose from the sentimental trap into which it had so completely fallen.¹⁴ Her challenge does not lack a spark of rebellion: here is a woman writer resolutely rising above the cliché of her time that love, as Voltaire had put it, was all a woman ever took any interest in. Expressing her hope of one day seeing “the Lovelace of the ambitious,” Staël illustrated the truth of what d’Alembert had affirmed: that it was not “natural” that all women should dwell eternally and exclusively on sexual conquest.

To be worthy of Germaine de Staël's attention, then, as a substitute for the worldly powers to which she felt herself equal, fiction could be no mere pastime but a serious, even elevated, enterprise. We see her theory pointing in the direction she believed Rousseau's Nouvelle Héloise had indicated: fiction must become a vehicle of exploration of the individual mind and soul in the torment of self discovery, a search undertaken for the sake of a higher morality. There is an underground layer of rationalization in this very work on fiction, as well as in the Passions, for the turn of her own aspirations away from politics and toward letters. As we sense her personal struggle to validate and lend authority to her evolving decision, we return with interest to those parts of the work she will now complete that deal with women and power.

In one such passage, significantly the chapter devoted not to ambition but to vanity, her inner struggle becomes apparent in literally every line of the text. She begins as she so often felt impelled to do in speaking of her sex, by making a ritual concession to the conventional view of woman's nature.¹⁵ “The origin of all women,” she intones, “is heavenly, for it is to nature's gifts that they owe their powers; in preoccupying themselves with pride and ambition, they cause all that is magical in their charms to be dissipated.” She states this proposition, so puzzlingly relevant to her own case, first in its most negatively monitory form, as if attempting to bring its implications to full consciousness. Her consciousness, however, is in fact quite lucid. She remarks that no respect or esteem can follow a woman who makes a display of ambition, for women thereby “animate against themselves the passions of those who wish to think of them in no other way than to love them.” Seeing so clearly the weight of male mentality against her project, she seems to abandon it, for her very next statement is despairing, full of disparagement of women's (that is, her own) aspirations. “The only real absurdity, that which arises from a discord with the essence of things, attaches to their efforts: when they set themselves against the plans and ambitions of men, they excite the lively resentment that all unexpected obstacles produce” (I iii). Necker's own strictures on his daughter's ambitions had been magnified a thousandfold by the nature of the public censure of her: consequently, she has learned to censure herself. Yet, since she cannot help chafing under these strictures, she goes on to try out a softened version of the traditional line: “These reflections are not at all intended to deflect women from all serious occupation, but from the misfortune of ever taking themselves to be the end of their own efforts.” We now perceive that while giving the impression of criticizing female ambition, she has given the subject the twist needed for her to find some egress. In casting about to uncover something more basic about the taboo on ambition in women, she has hit on a fresh way of characterizing it. It is the absurd fate of precisely the woman who, like herself, desires to be an end in herself, subject rather than object, that perplexes her. Even as she declares her revulsion against herself, pacifying her public, making a show of agreement with the traditions that condemn her, she cannot help turning the matter round and about. Women, she writes, can participate in ambition by guiding the destinies of those they love, but only if their lovers should happen to be leaders of affairs would it be acceptable for them to act through them, for in that case, “they love, they are women; but,” she cautions prescriptively, “when they give themselves over to being active personalities, when they try to have all events center around them … then they are scarcely worthy of that ephemeral applause that rewards dignified victories” (I iii, emphasis added).

Given Germaine de Staël's restive, ambitious, egocentric, yet generous nature, these passages are a patent form of propitiatory self-flagellation, calculated to challenge the very laws she claims to accept. Men, she continues, pursuing her picture of the ravages of ambition to women's lives, whether iniquitously or justly, find no utility in encouraging success in women, and “any praise not founded in utility is neither deep, durable, nor universal.” Unreasonably, however, she adds this quite unexpected note: “Chance sometimes makes for exceptions: if there are a few souls driven either by their talent or character, they may perhaps depart from the common rule, and some palms of glory may one day crown their efforts; but they will not escape the inevitable misfortune that is linked with their destiny” (I iii). Thus she provides a personal escape hatch for persisting, as she cannot help doing, in her own ambitious project. She will try, despite all the disclaimers, to be one of that handful of female exceptions to the rule who may be granted the right to succeed, provided only that they expressly renounce happiness and resolve to suffer for their transgression.

As we might have predicted from the previous evidences of conflict in the text, when Staël comes to the point of juxtaposing woman with that most powerful of passions, the desire for gloire, she can imagine no means whatever of reconciling the two. This time, however, in her rethinking of the problem she adds the social critique that could only be inferred in her earlier statement. She writes: “A woman cannot exist through herself alone; gloire itself would not sufficiently sustain her; and the insurmountable weakness of her nature and her position in the social order have placed her in an eternal dependency such that even immortal genius could not make her immune to it” (emphasis added). In the context of the need for love, then, it is no longer a question of merely lamenting that a woman whose ambition makes her take herself as an end will be resented. That aspiration to gloire, for her so much greater than ambition, would place a woman so thoroughly beyond the pale, would divorce her so thoroughly from all connection with others that it suggests to Germaine de Staël a total disintegration of being as punishment. Cowering emotionally before this terrifying conclusion, she turns all the way back and, at the end of this passage, affirms that it is the status of object—femme aimée—that is the highest good for woman. Acceding to her fear that no woman can be an end in herself, she thus casts self aside and, vindictively embracing her own negation, affirms what she has been taught: few of those who seek fame or glory for themselves, she concludes, have lives “that can rival in worth the most obscure life of one who is a loved woman and happy mother” (I iii).

That this view is not firmly anchored but expresses her guilt and anxiety rather than any fixed conviction appears to be borne out by other passages in which Staël assumes an altogether contrary feminist stance and vigorously, in smooth, strong prose that lacks the tormented parentheses and meanderings of her propitiatory statements, goes on the attack and deplores women's powerlessness. “Nature and society have disinherited half of humankind: strength, courage, genius, and independence all belong to men, and if they cover our youth with flattery, it is so as to give themselves the pleasure of overturning our throne; it is much as it is with children, who are allowed to command, so long as it is understood that they possess no real power of making others obey” (I iv). She does, in fact, perceive how the double standard makes a mockery of women's power, in love and outside it. In this rare direct apostrophe she speaks to women, exhorting them, “O women, you victims in the temple where you are told you are adored, listen to me! … Stay within the bounds of virtue … but if you do let yourselves give way to the need to be loved, men are the masters of public opinion, men have the power over their lives; men will overthrow your existence for the sake of a few moments in their own” (I iv).

Although Germaine de Staël derides the passions on virtually every page of her work, on each page we nevertheless discern how much they still enthrall her, even though she may deplore their hold. In these two texts, the Passions and the Fictions, we find enacted that drama in which her sense of self has begun to assume proportions rivalling those of her awe of love. As her statement concerning the future content of the novel already suggests, she had become conscious that passion, though precious, must not prevail unchallenged; that independent pursuits can yield their own fulfillments, that silence and loneliness often provide a surer sense of self and of the world than can be gained by being perpetually involved with others in the struggle to dominate or to avoid domination. She concludes her tortured meditation with this devastating praise of her subject: “The passions are the striving of man toward some other destiny; they make us feel the disquiet in our faculties, the emptiness in life; they perhaps presage a future existence, but meanwhile they rip this one to shreds.” Her early Rousseauesque ideal of ecstasy in experience having faltered, she strives in this text to reject it, at least intellectually. Passion's violent relentlessness, itself an anti-ideal, somehow suggests to her an ideal life of passion purified that can never be realized on earth. This dual sense of loss and longing will find its fullest expression in her greatest imaginative work, the Romantic novel of the woman as genius, Corinne.¹⁶

Mystified by the collapse of values during the Terror and in her own personal experience, Germaine de Staël was impelled to probe human frailty in a search to uncover what path might remain to her, a woman both passionate and aspiring. Building, in these texts, upon the masochistic energy generated out of her reiterated, reified repression of self in the passages where she overtly rejects the idea of woman's ambition, she yet manages to piece together for herself a new writer's persona: that of accursed exception to the rule of female subservience. In this newly fabricated posture she assumes her oracular role as servant to the newly espoused creative imagination by presaging the Romantic vision. Heaven alone holds promise of redemption, earthly passions having vilified humankind. And in that heaven where passion might at last fulfill rather than destroy us, the powers of women, we divine, would be sacrificed no longer.

Notes

1. Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution française (1818 [posthumous]) III vii (the translation is my own; references are to part and chapter).

2. Staël also wrote two important political tracts during this period: Réflexions sur le procès de la reine (1793) and the Réflexions sur la paix addressées à M. Pitt (1795). See Simone Balayé Madame de Staël, lumières et liberté (Paris: Klincksieck 1979), 51-60 for an overview of the biographical chronology and general content of these works.

3. Luce Irigaray “When Our Lips Speak Together” Signs 6:i (1980) 76.

4. Hannah Arendt Rahel Varnhagen, The Life of a Jewish Woman (NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1956) 13. Arendt never poses Varnhagen's identity problem as a problematic of femaleness, but rather of female Jewishness. Yet some of the parallels in the psychic postures of the two women are striking. The basic point of Arendt's study is that in espousing Christianity as she had striven to do Rahel had also to assimilate the anti-semitism inherent in it, which she finally balked at accepting. An analogous struggle took place for Germaine de Staël with the misogyny inherent in the culture's limitations on women's aspirations.

5. References to the Passions in the text refer to part and chapter only; those to the Fictions to the section, since a standard edition does not exist. All translations from the French are my own.

6. See ch. 3 of my Madame de Staël, Novelist: The Emergence of the Artist as Woman (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press 1978) for a more extensive discussion of the effects of the slander against Staël during the 90s upon her writing.

7. It is quite probable that the recently re-edited text of Des Circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la Révolution en France Lucia Omacini, ed (Geneva: Droz 1980) represents that attempt to formulate a praxis. Half political pamphlet, half notes toward a political theory, this piece was never worked through to completion and remained unpublished until 1902.

8. Mme de Staël also wrote a short and intense work of fiction, Zulma, published in 1794, which she had originally intended to append to this text. I deal with it in my Madame de Staël, Novelist 72-75. In her preface she speaks of her wish to depict the effects of love by a portrayal of “the most dreadful of all misfortunes and the most passionate of all characters.” Such feeling could find its full expression only in a person with the soul of a savage, but whose mind was fully cultivated, since “the power of judgment so greatly augments the experience of pain.”

9. The French conception of gloire inherited from the seventeenth century is, as the career of General De Gaulle reminds us, not easily transposed into English. The scholar Robert Mauzi sees it as the public dimension of the search for personal recognition.

10. Necker's recall from exile on July 15, like his original dismissal from power, was one of the key events of the French Revolution. His triumphant return on July 30 was a day of such gloire that it became virtually the high point of Staël's life. Her father's subsequent loss of popularity was swift: it was never to be recovered.

11. Although I am unable to deal with them in this context, these sections are worthy of scrutiny, for she makes interesting, if debatable, statements in them; for example as she rejects the epic, or the role of the gods in Homer, or demands that fiction “make us hang suspended on every word” as it elaborates the feelings of its characters.

12. See Georges May Le Dilemme du roman au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires Françaises 1963) for its excellent account of the eighteenth century's polemics over the worth of the novel.

13. See Jean d’Alembert “Lettre à Jean-Jacques Rousseau, citoyen de Genève,” Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Belin 1821-22), IV 450.

14. Pierre Fauchery La Destinée féminine dans le roman européen du dix-neuvième siècle (Paris: Armand Colin 1972) gives ample documentation of this phenomenon, more probingly discussed too from the woman's standpoint by Nancy Miller in The Heroine's Text (NY: Columbia Univ. Press 1981).

15. For another example of this concessive, ambivalent behavior, see my article “Madame de Staël, Rousseau and the Woman Question,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 86:i (1971) 100-09.

16. In the aftermath of these treatises she will write all her important works: De la littérature (1800); Delphine (1802); Corinne (1807); De l’Allemagne (1810); and the Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution française (1818 [posthumous]).