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