Read an Excerpt

Germaine de Staël

A Political Portrait

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Interpreting the Opinion of the Majority of the Nation (1789–91)

THE ARTICLE "A quels signes peut-on connoître quelle est l'opinion de la majorité de la nation?" (From what signs can we tell which is the opinion of the majority of the nation?) appeared in the Journal des indépendants — a short-lived periodical edited by Jean-Baptiste Suard and Pierre Louis Lacretelle — on 16 August 1791. This was, as far as we know, Staël's first published intervention in the revolutionary debate. She may of course have published other articles at the time that have not been identified, and she did on various occasions help to draft the writings and speeches of some of her political friends, though the extent of these interventions remains conjectural. "From What Signs" is, however, the only text from that period to be included in the posthumous edition of her collected works published by her son Auguste de Staël in 1820–21, the only one therefore to be acknowledged as her own.

Seen from the vantage point of the author's later writings, the article seems a very sketchy, tentative contribution to political analysis, and as such it is generally referred to only en passant (if at all) by commentators. Yet, set against the views expressed by Staël since the beginning of the Revolution, the article shows how far the twenty-five-year-old ambassadress had traveled, politically speaking, in the two years that elapsed between the opening of the Estates-General, in May 1789, and the death of the charismatic leader of the constitutional monarchists, the marquis de Mirabeau, in April 1791. In between she had witnessed a bewildering sequence of events: from Necker's triumphant return to power after 14 July to the struggle in the assembly over the royal veto in September that broke up the moderates' camp into rival groups; from the people's march on Versailles on 5–6 October to the increasing deterioration of royal authority and of Necker's own position within the government.

"From What Signs" did not address any of the major constitutional issues that feature prominently in Staël's later writings. Instead it focused upon a question of immediate practical relevance: after two years of profound political upheaval, what did French public opinion really want? What were the expectations of the majority of the nation? It was a question with far-reaching implications, since it pointed at the fragmentation of the revolutionary project into rival and opposed strategies; it also exposed the growing gap between the sentiments of large sections of the French population and those political factions that claimed to speak for them, both inside and outside the Constituent Assembly.

Staël had returned to Paris early in January 1791, after an absence of a few months. Early in September 1790 Necker had finally resigned his ministerial post — marking his disagreement over French government's issue of a new type of paper money, the assignats — and obtained the assembly's permission to retire to Switzerland. Though much concerned for her father's state of mind, Staël had not accompanied her parents, as she was still recovering from the birth of Auguste, the first of the two sons born of her relationship with Louis, comte de Narbonne-Lara, a grand aristocrat from her political entourage. When she finally joined them in October, she found the atmosphere at the château of Coppet — a place she disliked at the best of times — unbearably gloomy, while the social events she duly attended in Geneva and Lausanne proved a poor compensation for the loss of her Parisian friends and activities, spurring her to return to the French capital. She remained in Paris only four months before further complications in her personal circumstances — this time connected with her husband's diplomatic position — forced her to return to Switzerland at the beginning of May. "From What Signs" was probably written during this period of residence in Paris: the article evokes in dramatic terms the sudden disappearance of Mirabeau — who died on 2 April — but makes no reference to the critical turning point represented by the royal family's flight to Varennes on 20–21 June.

On her return to Paris Staël had found a murky and unstable situation, marked by growing unrest in the provinces and by increasingly volatile, ever-shifting political allegiances. She had also rapidly become the object of vicious attacks in the press, emanating principally, at this stage, from royalist circles: in Necker's absence the attacks focused upon her association with some prominent constitutional monarchists, in particular Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord who, as a former bishop, attracted special blame for promoting the civil constitution of the clergy. While the loss of her father's position deprived Staël of some political clout, she was free at last to act independently of him, and to develop her own position. The article reflects the preoccupations that dominated this particular phase in her public engagement: the ambition to persuade the scattered constitutional monarchists to pursue a single, coherent policy; the aspiration to see the same divided, quarrelsome factions turn into something resembling an organized party; the search for a credible leadership, capable of overruling personal rivalries and of expressing the position of the moderate majority in the assembly.

THE ECLIPSE OF PUBLIC OPINION

The title of the article, with the interrogation it raises about "signs," is the first indication that something had changed very drastically in the author's perception of the nature of public opinion. Before the Revolution, Staël's scattered references to the subject echoed a set of commonplace views widely shared by eighteenth-century writers, regardless of their political or philosophical differences: while popular passions were naturally unstable, public opinion was the expression of the true interests and aspirations of the majority of the people; taken over a reasonably long period of time, it proved both clear and reliable in assessing public issues and in judging the conduct of governments. Wise, enlightened rulers should encourage and guide, rather than repress, the development of an independent opinion within the nation.

This positive notion of popular judgment appeared in an enhanced form in Necker's own writings, where opinion was described as an irresistible force, a power comparable to royal authority, indeed invested with near-sovereign prerogatives. If the former minister's use of terms like "public opinion," "public spirit," or "public voice" was not always very consistent and rigorous, his practical attitude toward what he regarded as a novel phenomenon of paramount importance was clear enough. While in power, since his early experiences in government in the late 1770s, he had placed opinion at the center of his political strategy, giving a maximum of publicity to his initiatives, and adjusting his policies to popular responses. Predictably, this keen attention to public expectations and reactions — more common among today's politicians than under the Old Regime — was readily stigmatized by his critics as mere opportunism, the product of an obsessive quest for popularity. For Staël it was of course the proof of her father's superior dedication to the general will and the public good: from him she had learned to regard opinion as the true source of political legitimacy, as the inspiration and the driving force behind any process of political change. In her Lettres sur les écrits et le caractère de J.-J. Rousseau (Letters on the writings and character of Jean-Jacques Rousseau), published for the benefit of a small circle of family and friends in 1788, she explained how, with the opening of the Estates-General that had just been summoned, France was about to obtain "by the mere progress of enlightenment" the kind of advantages that nations generally gain only "by floods of blood," that is to say, through civil violence. But now, less than three years later, the leading light of opinion, guiding the nation toward progress, had turned into an opaque, uncertain force, to be watched and interpreted by its mysterious "signs," like a menacing oracle.

In the opening paragraph of "From What Signs" Staël outlined the difficulties that, in the particular context of contemporary France, stood in the way of an adequate understanding of opinion: the question of what was the opinion of the majority of the nation

in quiet times would be easy to answer; but during an insurrection, which seems to show the emergence of a dominant opinion, things need to be considered with particular attention. It is in fact necessary to distinguish between what belongs to the moment, and what will last; what is dictated by fear, and what is inspired by reason; finally what stems from hatred of the Old Regime, and what comes from attachment to the new.

In pointing at the differences between long-term and short-term reactions, Staël identified as a major obstacle to any reliable analysis the unprecedented acceleration of the process of political change. Before the Revolution, those writers who addressed the question of public opinion — Necker among them — had generally stressed the necessity of distinguishing between the durable beliefs and aspirations of society, and the immediate reactions of the public in particular circumstances. While the values and expectations of any society were bound to prove relatively stable through time, or at least to change very slowly, popular responses to particular, noteworthy events would often be extreme and passionate, while proving ephemeral and inconsequential.

The few years Staël herself had spent at the French court, after her marriage to the Swedish ambassador in 1786, had offered her ample evidence of how readily the public voice might embrace a particular cause, only to abandon it the next day, how rapidly it could make, or destroy, someone's reputation. In one of the long missives she regularly addressed to the king of Sweden Gustav III, reporting the incidents and gossip that occupied French society, she observed, "What is really cruel in this country is the fact that opinion serves only for a short time; it supports you in a fight, provided it lasts only twenty-four hours, but it deserts you, if you should need it for longer." Victims of miscarriages of justice newly liberated from the Bastille, protagonists of society scandals, authors of controversial works, disgraced ministers — all suffered the same quick transition from fame to oblivion. In principle such fitful responses of the "public voice" should not be confused with the steady trend of opinion; but in practice, since the beginning of the Revolution, everything "belonged to the moment," and the only relevant time span was the short term. In another letter to Gustav III, written shortly after the events of 14 July, the young ambassadress described how "a thousand years" seemed to have gone by in the course of few weeks. On another occasion, she confided despairingly to her husband that living in such uncertain and troubled times felt like "walking on quicksand." Inevitably public life came to be dominated by the impressions and emotions of the moment: how could people be expected to form considered, rational judgments about anything, when every day confronted them with new upheaval and turmoil? The rapid succession of events, and the constant shifting of circumstances, turned the very notion of a united and stable "public opinion" into an ever-vanishing mirage.

The instability of French opinion was not, however, merely the consequence of the accelerated process of change, a change long overdue, and now realized too hastily; it was above all the product of widespread conflicts within French society, of divisions as deep as they were opaque and difficult to define. As Jacques Necker had explained in 1784 in his De l'Administration des finances de la France (On the administration of finances of France), at times of civil discord and conflict (for example, during the religious wars) public opinion, in the proper sense of the term, did not exist, since it could not come into being. Public opinion was transparent and infallible only insofar as it represented a broad consensus, uniting the nation under its "peaceful standards." For all his professed admiration for the English constitution, Necker did not think that the existence of opposed parties, characteristic of the English political system, could ever be compatible with French traditions and French temperament. In France the role of opinion must be confined to stimulating and correcting the action of the monarchy, but only on those issues that already constituted the object of a large popular consensus. Any situation where public opinion gave voice to rival political ideologies or interests could only result in disorder and instability.

However influenced by her father's views she might originally have been, by the beginning of 1789 Staël had clearly set aside any illusion of a consensual opinion. Writing to the Swedish diplomat Nils von Rosenstein in January 1789, a few months before the opening of the Estates-General, she expressed her skepticism and anxiety about the French expectation that the nation, divided as it was into a multitude of particular interests, could naturally achieve, by some unknown process, a unity of sentiment and intent: "As to the French, they are in a state of great agitation. They think public spirit can be created out of a thousand particular interests. They believe that a constitution will emerge from the shock of opposed parties. I do wish it could be so, but I tremble for the pilot [Necker], who is expected to guide them in navigating so many obstacles." In such difficult circumstances, imagining opinion as a harmonious agreement could only reduce the chances of interpreting it. Bringing to light the exact nature of the divisions within the nation, acknowledging the differences that separated beliefs and interests, began to appear as the only means of identifying a viable political strategy for the future.

OUR PARTY

Having moved on from this notion of "consensual" public opinion, Staël was inclined to adopt the view that the revolutionary transformation of French society resulted from the confrontation of two main parties: "those who are for what exists already, and those who desire what would be best." The idea of two "natural" parties, supporting, respectively, stability and innovation, conservation and improvement, had its roots in those eighteenth-century moral doctrines that identified "rest" and "movement" as the two main springs of human happiness. Reacting against the classical Stoic ideal of happiness as dispassionate quietude, French writers such as Montaigne, Diderot, D'Holbach, Mably, Voltaire, and Montesquieu had variously argued that, given the instability of human passions, tranquillity and excitement were equally necessary to personal fulfillment. Human happiness derived less from the persistence of a particular emotional state than from the contrast and alternation of different ones.

The original context of those arguments had been the prescription of moral and existential guidelines for individual conduct. However, as the pioneering analysis of Michel de Montaigne's Essais demonstrated, the perception of man's passions as fluid and unstable had obvious implications for the understanding of collective movements at times of political unrest. The stability of regimes was bound to be directly affected by "waves" of favor or hatred, enthusiasm or indifference, tranquillity or fear, that reflected, on a large scale, the impact of changing individual emotions. In the Esprit des lois Montesquieu offered a direct application of this condition of emotional fluctuation to political analysis. In a chapter of book 19 entitled "Comment les lois peuvent contribuer à former les moeurs, les manières et le caractère d'une nation" (How laws can contribute to forming the mores, manners and character of a nation), where he returned to the model of free government set forth in book 6, he argued that the experience of political liberty was bound to unleash and excite all popular passions. Without these a free state would be "like a man who, laid low by disease, has no passions because he has no strength." Normally these unbridled passions may result in a state of confused and permanent agitation; luckily, however, people were led by their interest to attach themselves either to the executive power (if they hoped for favor and advancement) or to the legislative (if the government in place had nothing to offer them). Even though such allegiances were seldom stable through time, the convergence of passions on two main forces ensured a certain balance, as each party would naturally react against the excessive influence of the other. It is true that the people's representatives — the legislative body — were prone to excite popular passions (for example, by spreading fears of what the executive might do) whenever they thought it expedient; but as they were more enlightened than the mass of the people and enjoyed their confidence, they were able, if necessary, to dispel the people's anxieties and "to calm their movements."

---

Excerpted from Germaine de Staël by Biancamaria Fontana. Copyright © 2016 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---