A reformation to end the revolution: Germaine de Staël and the struggle for republican mores under directory France

Abstract

ABSTRACT Between 1797 and 1798, Germaine de Staël argued that France needed a reformation to end the Revolution, proposing the adoption Protestantism as a religion of state. This proposal has been explained away as an obvious and uninteresting consequence of her Calvinist upbringing. While obviously relevant, Staël’s religious background is not a sufficient explanation for a proposal that would have upended the constitutional principles of the Directorial republic as well as centuries of tradition in France. I argue instead that Staël’s proposal is better understood in framework of the Directory’s plans to breach the state’s neutrality in religious matters, established in the 1795 Constitution, in order to promote love of the republic via a new religion, theophilanthropy. Thus, Staël identified a political opportunity for constitutional change in matters of religion and sought to steer the course towards an existing religion that, as she argued, had all the benefits that the Directory saw in theophilanthropy, but none of the pitfalls, especially the theophilanthropists’ association with the Terror. This re-interpretation of Staël’s proposal, made in Circonstances actuelles, has implications for our broader understanding of this work, hailed as her ‘most substantial contribution to political and constitutional theory’, and the Thermidorian republic.