Madame de Staël: Europe’s Best-Known Enemy of Napoleon

On Thursday, April 13, Helena Rosenblatt, Professor of History, French, Political Science, and Biography and Memoir graced campus with her presence and brought the first day of spring with her. All of her formal academic appointments aside, Prof. Rosenblatt describes herself as an intellectual historian who focuses on the Enlightenment. Fittingly, then, Rosenblatt was visiting campus to deliver a lecture entitled “Liberalism, Past and Present.”

Prof. Henry Clark, Program Director of the Political Economy Project, set the stage for Rosenblatt’s talk: “Liberalism is on the defensive… How do we defend it—if it’s worth defending?” While the talk was advertised in general terms, the content of Rosenblatt’s presentation was far narrower than its title implied. A more appropriate title might have been something along the lines of “Madame Germaine de Staël’s Role in the Enlightenment” or “Madame de Staël’s Liberal Opposition to Napoleonic Tyranny.” But I’m not complaining. Rosenblatt’s biography of Madame de Staël and her writing, activism, and political philosophy was edifying and, at times, humorous. 

Rosenblatt kicked off her talk by identifying de Staël as, “at one point, Europe’s best-known enemy of Napoleon.” For all I know, this claim and the rest that Rosenblatt made are 100% accurate—I took AP World History in high school, not AP European History, and have not made up for my ignorance in college. What follows is my transcription of notes I took feverishly during Rosenblatt’s exhilarating lecture.

According to Rosenblatt, the very term “liberalism” was first conceived and named by de Staël in 1812. Moreover, de Staël ideated “liberal internationalism” in response to Napoleon’s “brutal wars of conquest.” Haphazard quotations from Rosenblatt aside, who actually was this de Staël woman? Well, she was an early feminist writer who launched literary romanticism, one of the wealthiest women in Europe, the daughter of Jacques Necker—Swiss financier and Minister of Finance for Louis XVI—and, as emphasized by her misogynistic critics during her time, a woman of “two husbands, 15 lovers, and [multiple] children from four different fathers.” 

De Staël attended the sessions of the Estates General in 1789, fled during the Reign of Terror, and returned thereafter to reopen her famous and well-attended salon. It was here that de Staël penned and co-authored speeches and political treatises. De Staël designed liberalism to oppose the illiberal democratic despotism of Napoleon and to advance abolitionism. Curiously, while de Staël was a fierce proponent of individual rights, constrained government, and equality before the law, she was “no democrat” and did not agitate for universal suffrage. Another oddity: De Staël advocated that Protestantism be made the official state religion and made allowances for the censorship of newspapers and pamphlets. So, de Staël was not exactly a libertarian (much to this author’s chagrin). In fact, de Staël was a moderate constitutional monarchist, even appealing to the Jacobins to spare Marie Antoinette’s life. De Staël admired the English constitutional monarchy so much that she was regularly accused of being a foreign agent (despite being born in Paris) sent to destabilize France. 

In December 1797, de Staël met a 28-year-old Napoleon. Accounts of their meeting differ wildly. Critics of de Staël described her as doggedly pursuing Napoleon about the venue, despite his obvious rebuffs. De Staël recalled things quite differently. She recounted feeling fear in Napoleon’s presence after praising him profusely and recovering from her ill-founded admiration. De Staël originally believed Napoleon to be a committed republican who would keep France free from domination by the illiberal left and right. On these grounds, de Staël offered her own salon to the man who would become the chief political opponent of her life. Before they would become nemeses, de Staël did her damndest to recruit Napoleon to the cause of liberalism. She supported his 1799 coup in the hopes that Napoleon would magnanimously give up his yolk over France. She was sorely mistaken. 

De Staël would go on trying to unite moderate loyalists and liberal republicans to install an English-style government and dethrone Napoleon. Bonaparte was outraged by de Staël and her protégé, Benjamin Constant, after Constant spoke against Napoleon’s abuse of executive power. Napoleon’s enmity towards her would only increase as time went on. 

In April 1800, de Staël published De La Littérature, which included thinly veiled arguments against Napoleon’s authoritarianism and defended the notion of liberal perfectibility. In this piece, de Staël warned against the military spirit of Napoleon’s traditionalist, regressive, authoritarian regime. In 1802, de Staël published Del Fin, describing the life of an independent woman during the Revolution, praising England, divorce, and criticizing the Catholic Church, which Napoleon had brought back into France. Unable to stand de Staël’s opposition any longer, Napoleon sent her a letter through his brother—a personal friend of de Staël—asking her what she wanted from him. De Staël’s response was legendary: “The question is not what I want but what I think.” 

After Napoleon’s coronation as emperor in 1804, de Staël wrote Italy, blaming Napoleon for destroying the Republic, and On Germany, condemning France’s imperialism and subjugation of Prussian forces, in 1807. In response to Bonaparte’s military expansionism, de Staël openly rejected revolutionary attempts to impose a universal French monarchy over Europe and urged European powers to commit to something greater than their narrow national interests—peace and progress. To advance these ends, on September 24, 1812, de Staël arrived in Stockholm to persuade the Crown Prince of Sweden to ally with Russia against France. De Staël also succeeded in brokering an alliance between Russia and England, which played a decisive role in Napoleon’s defeat, as Napoleon himself acknowledged.
Prof. Rosenblatt, in the span of an hour, taught me at least a term’s worth of European intellectual and military history. To my fellow historical ignoramuses interested in learning more about the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, I refer you to Rosenblatt’s works (none of which I’ve read; all of which I’m confident are spectacular): The Lost History of Liberalism:From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century (2018); Thinking With Rousseau (2017); French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day (2012); Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (2010); Liberal Values: Benjamin Constant and the Politics of Religion (2008).