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’.
Part of the reason for this is the hidden currents lying beneath the surface of Rousseau's work. Although he told women they should be subservient to men, his heroines were in fact often more capable and passionate than the men in their lives. In Émile, ou De l'éducation, Sophie ‘sought a man and…found monkeys’. When Émile falls in love with her, he recognizes that she must be his guide, just as in La Nouvelle Héloïse Julie tells Saint-Preux that she will direct their common destinies. For all its melancholia and high-mindedness—Germaine said that he had made ‘a passion of virtue’—Rousseau's writing was also thrillingly erotic. He himself said his books ‘can only be read with one hand’.
The duality in his books echoed that in his life. Although he idealized motherhood, Rousseau abandoned his own children; although he wrote about pure, innocent love he openly admitted to masochism and masturbation; although he praised submissive women his own first mistress, with whom he lived in a ménage à trois alongside her herbalist, was a speculator, adventuress and sometime spy. His Confessions, published posthumously, revealed vanity, vices and frailties but only added to his appeal.
While he explicitly excluded women from political life, Rousseau's writings inadvertently made women political creatures. They may have read his works for pleasure, but they also found in them rejections of tyranny and pleas for justice so persuasive that they came to believe the inequalities and constraints