Germaine De Research Articles

Peinture et littérature autour de 1800. Le mythe de Phèdre / Hippolyte chez le Baron Pierre Narcisse Guérin, Germaine de Staël et August Wilhelm Schlegel

In her novel Corinne or Italy, Germaine de Staël focuses on relations between painting and literature at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. Among the most striking examples that she takes, there is the famous portrait Phaedra and Hippolytus by David’s pupil, Pierre Narcisse Guérin. When analysed in the light of the comparison between Phaedra by Racine and Euripides’one, written in French by A. W. Schlegel and published in 1807 in Paris by publisher Tourneisen, the opposition between French “high tragedy”, prevailing since the 17th century, and the young German romantic school, is obvious. According to Schlegel, the superiority of ancient Hippolytus is clear. Furthermore, Euripides should no longer be regarded as the apex of the Attic triad but truly as the manifestation of a decline with heavy consequences.This stance clearly diminishes Racine’s importance. From the viewpoint of literary history, it leads to dismissing the French of the Great Century from the history of European drama to the benefit of Shakespeare and Calderón. Above all, it rejects the conception of tragedy held by French playwrights from Corneille to Voltaire in the name of a more recently introduced notion of “tragic”. Oblivious to generic categories, the latter is detrimental to a philosophical conception of human condition based on the unreconcilable conflict between necessity and individual freedom.

L’experience du relatif: le romantisme français et l’idée de culture par Serge Zenkine

Reviews 241 production. In three chapters and a coda, she attempts to rehabilitate his reputation as an author of bad books“in both senses of the term”(1). She aims at demonstrating his contributions to modern knowledge of sexology as well as to the place of human sexuality in psychiatry. She shows how fiction influenced science and psychiatric medicine in the late nineteenth century and beyond and how scientific ideas, prompted through Enlightenment thought and perhaps pure genius, found their way into novels. In chapter 1, Wyngaard examines the difficulty in defining the term pornography, literally meaning writing about prostitutes. Censors were even confounded as to what was considered pornographic/obscene and what was not. Interestingly, one of Rétif’s earliest works, Le pornographe (1769) is not pornographic but constructively addresses the regulation of prostitution. She further details how he doggedly tested censorship boundaries with Le paysan perverti (1775) and eventually La paysanne pervertie (1784), its “semiauthorized soft porn” complement (7). Chapter 2 juxtaposes Le pornographe with Rétif’s single truly pornographic work, L’anti-Justine (1798), a response to the literary excesses of his rival, the Marquis de Sade. Modern pornography owes its invention to these two works. Chapter 3 treats the concept of fetishism, another contribution of Rétif, this time to the catalog of deviant sexual behaviors. Rétif had a special predilection for shoes and tiny feet. The final section concerns La découverte australe (1781), a work of science fiction that foretells sexual behavior through theories of eugenics. From a feminine perspective, Rétif’s major achievements were to make vicarious sex available through the framework of the sentimental novel and to demonstrate that women were capable of enjoying sexual pleasure as much as men. They were not portrayed as victims of Sadean brutality or male privilege. Rétif’s illustrator, Louis Binet, attested to this in several of his images displayed throughout the book, including the one on the cover. Thus, Rétif made pornography available to women and helped prepare the way for the twentieth-century “feminist antipornography movement” (66) as well as its counterpart, the advocacy of porn for women as beneficial for their sexual well-being. Wyngaard draws attention to Rétif’s far-sighted view of female sexuality, though, like Sade, he incorporated incest into the pleasure equation. Independent Scholar Ivy Dyckman Zenkine, Serge. L’expérience du relatif: le romantisme français et l’idée de culture. Paris: Garnier, 2011. ISBN 978-2-8124-0256-2. Pp. 244. 37 a. This intriguing book argues that the notion of one’s culture as a contingent construct, one among others of equal or at least comparable status, first emerged in France during the Romantic period. This idea“est intimement liée à une transformation et une redistribution du sacré,” which the author summarizes in the following way: “L’unité substantielle du sacré s’affaiblit pour céder la place à la pluralité des formes; la destruction sacrificielle est refoulée [...] au profit des objets fabriqués, des artefacts matériels s’opposant aux textes abstraits et spirituels”(50). One might think that the Enlightenment had already fulfilled much of this program, but the author argues that the key step toward cultural relativism or pluralism (terms he employs interchangeably, but are they really synonymous?) is not the critique of religion as such. Rather, it is a radicalization of the sacred, which puts it beyond any definitive instantiation or interpretation, thereby allowing its existence to be affirmed on a different basis: “La littérature romantique relativise des institutions et des pratiques traditionnelles qui semblent servir normalement à affirmer le Même, et les remet en perspective de l’Autre absolu” (113). There are echoes here of Paul Bénichou’s work, and the choice of exemplary authors is similar to his: the Saint-Simonians, Nerval, Gautier, Flaubert, and Mallarmé, though with the interesting addition of a chapter on “Politesse et traduction,” which argues that the understanding of civility and of the dynamic of translation in Germaine de Staël and other early Romantic writers prepared the way for the acceptance of cultural relativism. There are some excellent examples of critical insight here, in...

L’amour à la Werther: Liebeskonzeptionen bei Goethe, Villers, de Staël und Stendhal by Susanne Mildner (review)

Reviewed by: L’amour à la Werther: Liebeskonzeptionen bei Goethe, Villers, de Staël und Stendhal by Susanne Mildner Margaretmary Daley Susanne Mildner, L’amour à la Werther: Liebeskonzeptionen bei Goethe, Villers, de Staël und Stendhal. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012. pp. 326 + bibliography. In 1774 the unknown and unconventional Johann Wolfgang Goethe published a novel that would eventually mark a sea change, a change of such enormity that no reader of the Goethe Yearbook needs to be told its title. Nor did it take long for its significance to be noted and its originality to be admired; for example, it was already translated into French in 1775. Rather than drowning in the enormity and long wake of that cataclysm, Susanne Mildner’s study focuses on specific ideational changes that the novel Werther wrought and traces the reception of those ideas in nineteenth-century French literary texts. The areas of [End Page 292] focus include (1) the novel’s impact and accompanying celebrity for its author both in person and in biographical representations; (2) the international recognition of a new German literary movement (between “the Age of Sensitivity” and “Storm and Stress”) and how such a categorization builds negative national stereotypes (15–19 and 321) while simultaneously promoting comparative criticism and cultural self-awareness (11 and 13); and, finally and most saliently, (3) the literary discourse on the unconventional yet immediately popular presentation of passionate, heterosexual love. As the title makes clear, L’amour à la Werther examines four writers—the household names Goethe (1749–1832) and Stendhal (1783–1842), the academic perennial Germaine de Staël (1766–1817), and the comfortably obscure Charles de Villers (1765–1815). Mildner takes the revolutionary portrait of profound, internalized, and suffering love from the Werther novel as her departure point (l’amour à la Werther) and then traces the trajectory of that Wertherian love in those four writers’ nonfiction, their lives, and, where appropriate, their fiction. Not surprisingly, this German-language study of predominantly French-language texts pays particular attention to the nationalistic pronouncements by those authors on the subject of love. Wertherian love enters the literary discourse as a new concept, but since it arrives in the Hexagon from the German-speaking lands to the east, it is frequently dubbed German. In such a framework, the selection of writers and their works is seen as debating whether and when love is more French (i.e., frivolous, beautiful, delightful, articulate, reiterable, old-fashioned, illusionary) or more German (i.e., profound, painful, all-encompassing, natural, perhaps prelingual, eternal, absolute, and sometimes fatal). The list of adjectives derives from Mildner’s truly thorough citations and skillfully avoids excessive binary opposition, generating instead a recognizable yet never rigid notion of l’amour à la Werther. Entitled “Die Amour à la Werther vor dem Hintergrund von Empfindsamkeit und ‘Sturm und Drang,’” the second chapter is of particular interest. It begins with a concise exposition of theories of love from a Standardwerk der Germanistik, Luhmann’s Liebe als Passion, and from a French de rigueur thinker, Barthes, and then turns to two themes, namely suicide and femininity, within Goethe’s novel and their reception. Mildner carefully teases out the delicate relationship of suicide to love in Werther and interprets Werther’s death not as the end of love but rather as its infinite escalation (49). Without glancing at Werther’s masculinity, Mildner draws a parallel between the surprising appeal of Lotte’s idyllic femininity to the emancipated woman writer de Staël (56) and the idealized reception of La Roche’s character Fräulein von Sternheim by an educated Caroline Flachsland (57); perhaps, a closer parallel exists between de Staël and Flachsland’s equally faulty identification of the authors with their respective literary characters and the ensuing mutual dissatisfaction when confronted with biographical reality. In the three substantial central chapters, which address French responses to l’amour à la Werther, Mildner proposes that love cannot be nationalized, while at the same time she exhaustively and intelligently presents abundant nationalistic utterances by Villers, de Staël, and Stendhal. Villers’s largely self-imposed exile to Göttingen meant choosing the Hanoverian Electorate over the French Republic. His reasons were not merely political disagreement but quickly...

Fathers, daughters, and slaves: women writers and French colonial slavery

Fathers, Daughters, and Slaves brings to life the unique contribution by French women during the early nineteenth century, a key period in the history of colonialism and slavery. The book enriches our understanding of French and Atlantic history in the revolutionary and postrevolutionary years when Haiti was menaced with the re-establishment of slavery and when class, race, and gender identities were being renegotiated. It offers in-depth readings of works by Germaine de Stael, Claire de Duras, and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. In addition to these now canonical French authors, it calls attention to the lives and works of two lesser-known but important figures—Charlotte Dard and Sophie Doin. Approaching these five women through the prism of paternal authority, Fathers, Daughters, and Slaves explores the empathy that daughters show toward blacks as well as their resistance against the oppression exercised by male colonists and other authority figures. The works by these French women antislavery writers bear significant similarities, which the book explores, with twentieth and twenty-first century Francophone texts. These women’s contributions allow us to move beyond the traditional boundaries of exclusively male accounts by missionaries, explorers, functionaries, and military or political figures. They remind us of the imperative for ever-renewed gender research in the colonial archive and the need to expand conceptions of French women’s writing in the nineteenth century as being a small minority corpus. Fathers, Daughters, and Slaves contributes to an understanding of colonial fiction, Caribbean writing, romanticism, and feminism. It undercuts neat distinctions between the cultures of France and its colonies and between nineteenth and twentieth-century Francophone writing.

Romantic Aesthetics and Abolitionist Activism: African Beauty in Germaine de Staël's Mirza ou Lettre d’un voyageur

In 1786, long before the definitive end of slavery in France, a young Germaine de Staël penned Mirza ou Lettre d’un voyageur, an African tale of love and the slave trade recounted by a European narrator. In this novella, Staël boldly challenges neoclassical ideals of beauty through the story of two black Senegambians, Mirza and Ximéo, from warring ethnicities in the Kingdom of Cayor. Through these characters, Staël presents to the European reader a new concept of beauty, a contagious beauty, that she hopes will move her or him to pity and recognition of the basic humanity of slaves. In addition, via this new beauty, Staël hopes to dispose the reader to arguments in favor of abolition, both of the slave trade and slavery. Mirza ou Lettre d’un voyageur, a work heretofore largely ignored, can thus be read as the presentation of Romantic beauty as central to Staël's political views and especially to her abolitionist agenda.

Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman: Painting and the Novel in France and Britain, 1800–1860 by Alexandra K. Wettlaufer (review)

Reviewed by: Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman: Painting and the Novel in France and Britain, 1800–1860 by Alexandra K. Wettlaufer Melissa Percival (bio) Alexandra K. Wettlaufer, Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman: Painting and the Novel in France and Britain, 1800–1860. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011, 338 pp. $59.95 (cloth). Alexandra Wettlaufer’s book explores the figure of the female artist in France and Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century, juxtaposing the careers of actual women with representations of female artists in portraiture and the novel. This task requires an awareness of the different working conditions of artists on both sides of the Channel, and also a sensitivity to the varied inflections of artistic representation in different cultural milieux and artistic genres. To her credit, the author mainly keeps this vast, complex territory well under control. In her Introduction, exceedingly well grounded in previous scholarship, she describes how female artists and writers contended with two distinct issues: firstly the patriarchy of the artistic profession, and secondly the masculinist discourse of Romanticism—so anxious about the male artist’s survival that it ruthlessly quelled any notion of female creativity. Against these obstacles, Wettlaufer tells a largely positive story of the struggle by women artists to forge a creative identity in the public sphere. Their achievements, she argues, are not least down to their collective endeavors in affirming a sisterhood of artists. Moreover, she suggests, through the realism and pragmatism with which they approached their task, nineteenth-century women artists provided a compelling counter-model to the self-aggrandizing, dislocated Romantic male artist. Three thematic sections follow on, each neatly comprising three chapters. Part I examines the artist’s studio (actual and represented) as a charged physical space where women forged their careers and negotiated their entry to the sphere of cultural production. Wettlaufer contrasts an eighteenth-century discourse of exceptionality (foregrounded in Mary Sheriff’s work on Louise Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun) where female artists’ endeavors were constructed in terms of isolation and rivalry, with a collective ideal that emerged in the early nineteenth century where female artists’ groups were formed as alternatives to the homosocial cliques of, for example, Jacques-Louis David or the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. More organized French studio practice is contrasted with the informal support networks of the female art scene in Britain. Also stressed is the sisterhood of the arts themselves—the paragone is here gendered as masculine—where female writers and artists mutually supported one another. With reference to paintings [End Page 164] of the studio by artists such as Amélie Cogniet and Mary Ellen Best, Wettlaufer shows how gendered notions of space, objectification and viewing practice were challenged. Two novels are discussed in subsequent chapters. Firstly Marceline Desbordes-Valmore’s studio novel, L’atelier d’un peintre, which questions and subverts many gendered tropes of the artist, is read as a “corrective” to the “misognynistic fantasies” of Balzac. Then Anna Mary Howitt’s utopian vision of female solidarity, Sisters in Art, is analyzed with reference to campaigns in Britain for women’s education and professional rights. In Part II, “Cosmopolitan Visions,” links between the female artist and the Other are explored. Chapter 4 includes a comparative reading of Germaine de Stael’s Corinne, ou l’Italie and Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale, both novels where hierarchies of cultural difference are mapped onto gender hierarchies. The placing so close together of Stael and Owenson throws up some unexpected complexities—which may be more obvious to this English reviewer than to readers from other shores. Namely, it would have been worth exploring Oswald’s “Scottishness.” As a land-owner of English descent, Oswald represents the colonizer of his native Scotland, a land with an unfettered indigenous culture as compelling as that of Ireland or Italy. Class issues subtend this discussion, and one wants to know more about class in relation to other parts of the book. To what extent did the “sisterhood” of artists enable women of all backgrounds, not just those from artistic or privileged milieux, to participate in the sphere of cultural production? “Cosmopolitan Visions” is...

Germaine de Staël: Forging a Politics of Mediation ed. by Karyna Szmurlo (review)

Germaine de Staël: Forging a Politics of Mediation ed. by Karyna Szmurlo (review)

La Raison exaltee: etudes sur 'De la litterature' de Madame de Stael

De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (1800) is remembered as one of the cornerstones of literary history, exploring the complex relationship between literary expression and its social and historical context. In common with many of her contemporaries, Germaine de Staël believed in human perfectibility. The development of literature was intimately linked to the overall development of humanity, and great writers would interact with their society, combining reason and emotion in words that would be transformed into action. This is the ‘raison exaltée’ of the title of this collection of essays. Although the eight chapters exploring this theme are grouped into three sections (focused on the relationship between literature and politics, on literature and women, and on literature and creativity), it is this concept that lends an overall cohesiveness to the volume and thereby raises its value beyond the sum of its individual contributions. It is also this concept that helps to expose, explore, and nuance the central tension between Staël's often seemingly low-key and conservative utterances on female nature and place in society, and the crucial role she nevertheless accords to women in the process of human perfectibility. Reduced to its simplest expression, this is shown to be a civilizing influence, gradually enhancing the awareness of the significance of the emotions and the imagination to human existence and to the exercise of true reason. Her historicist conception of female influence on the interrelated fields of literature and politics, combined with an emphasis on originality and creativity as key criteria in the evaluation of aesthetic merit, allowed Staël to celebrate the great literatures of the past as expressions of their particular societies, but also to reveal their shortcomings and to emphasize and valorize the differing contributions of subsequent literatures and societies. Staël's optimistic account of human progress met its great crisis in the Revolution. Here too Staël's historicism is shown to be a useful analytical tool, allowing her to account for the contrast between the impassioned rhetoric of the new Republic and the stoicism of its Ancient counterparts, even as Necker's daughter decries the excesses of the Terror and seems to lose some of her faith in the ability of women to exercise a moderating influence through their words, especially their written words. The contributors to the volume offer subtle readings of the text itself, supplemented by frequent references to the various cultural and intellectual traditions on which Staël drew, as well as to her personal experiences as a female intellectual in a period of revolutionary change. Together, they offer an insightful account of a crucial contribution to our understanding of literature in its relation to society, showing both how it emerges from a tradition and how it anticipates subsequent developments. The collection closes with a valuable bibliography of works on De la littérature.

STÉPHANIE-FÉLICITÉ DE GENLIS AND THE FRENCH HISTORICAL NOVEL IN ROMANTIC BRITAIN

Between 1795 and 1830, the French author Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis (1746–1830) published a large number of historical novels that were popular Europe-wide and translated into many languages, including English. Although French historical novels such as Germaine de Staël's Delphine (1802) and Chateaubriand's Atala (1801) have attracted the attention of Anglo-American Romanticists in the twentieth century, Genlis's similar works have been neglected. And yet in her own age, her novels were more widely read in Britain, and thus formed an important part of the Romantic literary landscape. They influenced British writers and readers, and received lengthy reviews in literary journals and periodicals. Using a wide range of sources in both French and English, this article investigates the reception of Genlis's historical novels in England. It rejects the opinion held by other scholars that these works were mere potboilers, written from a position of penury, reliant on the earlier romances of Madeleine de Scudéry and other précieuses of the seventeenth century, and conservative in the extreme. Instead, it argues—through a reading of Genlis's bio-bibliograpical survey De l'influence des femmes sur la littérature française (1811)—that Genlis's studies of “le grand siècle” of Louis XIV (which included Mademoiselle de Clermont [1802], La Duchesse de La Vallière [1804] and Madame de Maintenon [1806]) are about more than simple nostalgia for the Ancien Régime. It demonstrates that Genlis's work engaged directly with Romantic gender politics, implicitly critiqued the position of women under Napoleon, and inspired female readers and writers across Europe.

Des femmes en littérature (review)

Reviewed by: Des femmes en littérature Anne Hajek Reid, Martine . Des femmes en littérature. Paris: Bélin, 2010. Pp. 331. ISBN: 9782701155661. In Des femmes en littérature, Martine Reid seeks to contribute to our scholarly understanding of the gendered nature of literature written by women in France. She reminds us that French women have been both writing and publishing since the Middle Ages. Their existence as producers of literature is not in question. In fact, Reid points to a large body of scholarly work devoted to the study of French women's writing. Nonetheless, she cautions that women's place in overarching descriptions of literary history and in collective memory is still problematic: regardless of the large numbers of texts they produced, relatively few women writers are typically represented today in university curricula or in scholarly reflections on literature. Reid explains this absence by hypothesizing a systematic erasure of women's literary contributions. She argues that during the mid- to late-nineteenth century, male critics capitalized on widely-accepted ideas of gender to marginalize progressively and eventually erase the works of women authors from literary history. Reid adopts a two-fold corrective approach to re-thinking women's place in the literary historical record. She first explores the reception of women authors after the Revolution and then analyzes a variety of post-revolutionary women's novels. Throughout the text, she convincingly argues that women's writing is always "singulière;" each text should be approached as a unique literary creation, not reductively categorized under a monolithic label. The first part of her book, "Discours," aims to sketch a history of the reception of post-revolutionary women authors and to highlight the obstacles facing them as they embarked upon literary careers. In her first chapter, "Défenses et illustrations," Constance Pipelet, Germaine de Staël, and Félicité de Genlis serve as examples of the various ways in which women writers defended their own involvement in literary pursuits given the social constraints of gender. In chapter two, "Bas-bleus," Reid turns her attention to pictorial representations of women writers in the nineteenth century. She examines criticism of the bas-bleu in the illustrations of Jules Janin, Frédéric Soulié, and Honoré Daumier. For her, these images represent commonly held perceptions of women writers as a threat to social order because of their perceived transgression or rejection of socially accepted gender roles, especially those of wife and mother. By creating laughable images of women authors, caricaturists took the first step in what Reid views as a process aimed at erasing women's literary contributions. The third chapter, "À Titre d'hommage," examines works by Sainte-Beuve and Lamartine to illustrate further the nineteenth century's growing hostility toward women's literary involvement. At the end of part one, Reid turns to the field of literary history, to demonstrate definitively the existence of a slow process aimed at expunging women writers from the French literary record. She shows how, by the end of the nineteenth century, [End Page 329] women writers had been successfully relegated to the margins of literary history. For Reid, the effects of the process are felt even today: although a significant number of Anglophone and Francophone scholars have excavated and explored many forgotten works, women authors have been only weakly integrated into the broad scope of literary history and have yet to occupy their true place. In the second half of her book, "Fictions," Reid turns to literary texts, primarily novels, to illustrate the ways in which gender affected women's literary production. By using gender as a critical lens, Reid hopes to begin the process of fully integrating women's writing into the literary historical record. Before beginning her in-depth textual analyses, she explores the implications of publication for women. Then, she examines and questions the common association of women with the novel, suggesting that persistent association of women with the genre was yet another effort to keep women on the margins of literature. In chapters seven through twelve, Reid carefully analyzes novels of varying lengths by a diverse selection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers. Her goal is to reveal the extreme...

Ж. де Местр, Ж. де Сталь и Г. Ф. Фабер : о характере войны 1812 года

J. de Maistre, G. de Staël and G. F. Faber About the Russian Campaign of 1812 The article proposes a comparative study of three different points of view concerning the nature of the Russian Campaign of 1812. We will examine the opinion of the ambassador of the Kingdom of Sardinia to the Russian Court, Joseph de Maistre, that of the French woman of letters, Germaine de Staël, and that of the government civil servant of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, G. F. Faber. In common, they have a European vision of the events in Russia. In their interpretation of the Russian Campaign as a popular [ narodnaja] war, they meet with the unrelevantness of the antithesis of the Century of Enlightement : “ barbarism – civilization” to explain a new reality, provoked by war. J. de Maistre considered a war against France as useless in so far as, according to him, the Restoration of the Bourbons was a domestic policy problem. Mme de Staël, on the contrary, thought that this war and, particularly, Alexander I’s personality, would allow a liberalization of European politics. For Faber, this popular war was the sign of the unchanging character of serfdom.

Et te voici permise à tout homme par Éliette Abécassis

“Constant first labeled his position ‘liberal’ in 1795. He and Germaine de Staël were the first in France to use this term to define a political stance” (76). Vincent’s study correspondingly emphasizes the contributions of Constant (1767–1830)— partly in association with Staël—to the development of political liberalism in France (as opposed to other putative fathers of the liberal tradition, such as Guizot). Vincent also highlights Constant’s influence on, and affinities with, subsequent exponents of liberalism: “There are marked similarities [...] between Constant’s stance and that of his famous successor Alexis de Tocqueville” (63). Throughout his book, Vincent associates close readings of Constant’s voluminous political works (along with his famous novel, Adolphe) with the contextualization of his public and private life. In this perspective, the biographical details are not secondary. As a partial outsider (a Protestant of Swiss origin), Constant was at times a peripheral observer, at others a full participant in French political life. Constant’s pragmatic political stance, originally developed in response to the upheavals of the Revolutionary period, subsequently progressed into more sophisticated theoretical formulations, partly due to the personal influence of those with whom he regularly interacted and corresponded. It therefore comes as no surprise to find that he regularly used, along with Staël, such literary keywords as sensibilité and enthousiasme, or that he emphasized the role and importance of “character” at both the personal and national levels: “Constant was always attentive to how historical context formed character” (206). Increasingly wary of Rousseau’s pronouncements about the fundamental goodness of uncorrupted human nature, Constant sought ways to curb the apparently inexhaustible capacity for fanaticism (whether religious or political). His reiterated calls for moderation , for upholding “the protection of rights, the rule of law, and the division and balance of political sovereignty” (194) required courage during a historical phase marked by rapid and radical institutional shifts. Since Constant’s writings and political activities spanned the Revolutionary, the Napoleonic, and the Restoration periods, during which the governmental and constitutional systems of France underwent several permutations, he often had to defend the basic principles of liberalism (pluralism, separation of powers, civil rights, religious toleration, etc.) against a new and different set of threats. Vincent effectively weaves the details of Constant’s biography into the broader historical background, producing a richly-documented work that will be of interest to literary scholars as well as political scientists. Western Washington University Edward Ousselin Creative Works edited by Nathalie Degroult ABÉCASSIS, ÉLIETTE. Et te voici permise à tout homme. Paris: Albin Michel, 2011. ISBN 978-2-226-22969-4. Pp. 198. 17 a. In Orthodox Judaism, the wife is sacred, hallowed, protected until she no longer wishes to be married. Such a decision may condemn her to an unfair treatment . Anna Attal, the narrator, legally divorced from Simon, mother of eightyear -old Naomi, and a religious bookstore employee, meets Sacha, a divorced 206 FRENCH REVIEW 86.1 man of forty, photographer, father of a boy about to be bar mitzvah. Sacha is the son of Holocaust survivors, and had been married to a non-Jew; Anna grew up in a strictly observant family. When Simon presents himself to the Yom Kippur eve dinner sitting between Anna and their daughter, he declares that Anna will never have her “guet,” the religious divorce, which only the husband can grant. Simon’s use of blackmail worsens throughout the novel. If Sacha is Anna’s redemption, Simon is her living hell. Anna struggles with her new love and her old religious beliefs. She and Sacha are soulmates, certain that their lives are connected : “un fil inexplicable enlaçait nos vies, comme s’il n’y avait que nous deux, qui avions échappé à ce singulier tropisme: ce fil rouge qui nous reliait tout en nous séparant” (62). Simon, outwardly pure and inwardly hypocritical, has completely neglected all the commandments of a religious husband to his wife: he has abused her, mocked her, but this is not what the community sees—he is very good at pretense. The reaction of those around Anna is typical. She is anathema; the blame for the failed marriage is all hers: “Moi, j’étais comme...

Benjamin Constant and the Birth of French Liberalism by K. Steven Vincent

favorable to him. When they in turn fell, he supported Napoléon Bonaparte, an option that his principles or his self-interest could not sustain to the end. He eventually engineered the return of the Bourbons, and later their departure. Meanwhile, his proverbial role at the Congress of Vienna demanded all his talents to restore the balance of power in which he firmly believed. Pflaum does not spare the details on Talleyrand’s personal life, especially the many women who became his mistresses and possibly the mothers of his children. Although only Charles de Flahaut can be documented with any certainty, three others may qualify. Talleyrand’s infatuation with Catherine Grand, his mistress and later his wife, was eclipsed by several other women, including his niece-in-law, Dorothée Courland, Duchess de Dino, whom he named his principal heir. Despite his questionable morals in many spheres, Talleyrand died reconciled to the Church, which he claimed to have served faithfully. This biography is quite readable and even gripping, assuming the proportions of a novel. Precise in detail and often poetic, it engages the reader throughout . However, the Ciceronian style sentences often separate the antecedent far from the pronoun, so that one needs to reread to follow the thread. In addition misprints (such as mis-en-scène, Mére, “principle” claim to fame) distract the reader. Louis XVI was crowned in 1775, not Louis XV (402). Inaccuracies, especially regarding religious matters, appear throughout. St-Lazare is the cathedral at Autun, not at Reims (13) where kings were crowned. Secular priests do not make vows at ordination, and the festivities of Mardi Gras are pre-Lenten, not postLenten (206). The Latin words of absolution are “Ego te absolvo,” not “absoudre” (430). While the bibliography lists most of the published literature on Talleyrand, the text does not contain any notes, with the exception of those documenting direct quotations. It is therefore impossible to trace any information. The author frequently states that current research has disproved a commonly-held belief, but unfortunately does not indicate the source. She indicates dates, but often omits years. A number of colored plates, all well-documented, complement the work, but there is no reference to them in the text. Despite these shortcomings, this biography does achieve its goal of presenting Talleyrand and his world. At the end the reader appreciates the many sides of a colorful personality that becomes an intriguing presence not easily forgotten. Chestnut Hill College (PA) Mary Helen Kashuba VINCENT, K. STEVEN. Benjamin Constant and the Birth of French Liberalism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. ISBN 978-0-230-11009-0. Pp. 288. $85. The origins of French liberalism, and the variants into which it later evolved, are the topic of ongoing debates. Vincent’s innovative approach is to consider those authors who originated the use of the term libéral in a political context: “the first calls for a ‘liberal’ politics were offered in the 1790s” (2). The earliest specific expressions of political liberalism thus arose during the French Revolutionary period, more precisely in the aftermath of the Terreur (1793–94), when France seemed to be in danger of lurching from the worst excesses of Jacobinism to a vengeful aristocratic reaction. By contrast, political centrists or moderates were seeking to salvage what they saw as the positive legacy of the Revolution: Reviews 205 “Constant first labeled his position ‘liberal’ in 1795. He and Germaine de Staël were the first in France to use this term to define a political stance” (76). Vincent’s study correspondingly emphasizes the contributions of Constant (1767–1830)— partly in association with Staël—to the development of political liberalism in France (as opposed to other putative fathers of the liberal tradition, such as Guizot). Vincent also highlights Constant’s influence on, and affinities with, subsequent exponents of liberalism: “There are marked similarities [...] between Constant’s stance and that of his famous successor Alexis de Tocqueville” (63). Throughout his book, Vincent associates close readings of Constant’s voluminous political works (along with his famous novel, Adolphe) with the contextualization of his public and private life. In this perspective, the biographical details are not secondary. As a partial outsider...

What We Think About When We Think About 'Exile'

This paper will examine the largely under-theorized political phenomenon of exile, specifically as it appears in modern liberal regimes and whether it can be justified. People flee their nations or cities of origin for a number of reasons, but what sets exiles apart from others (refugees, for instance, or economic immigrants) is that their involuntary departure is political in nature.Exile was an accepted feature of the political landscape in ancient Greece and Rome. Early moderns like Machiavelli, as well, accepted exile as a risk associated with political action. When Napoleon Bonaparte came to power, he employed exile not only to weaken his political opponents, but also as a method of making other citizens complicit in the punishment of their dissident peers. Germaine De Stael roundly condemns exile as cruel and barbaric, while her friend Benjamin Constant considers the possibility that given the proper procedures, political expulsion could be a legitimate tool of the sovereign power. In the present-day, political expulsion persists, although its political nature is often cloaked in bureaucratic language.

Germaine de Stael: Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution, ed. Aurelian Craiutu

Germaine de Stael: Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution, ed. Aurelian Craiutu

The Critique of Hamletism in The Wild Irish Girl and Corinne

This essay explores the intertextual use of Hamlet in Sydney Owenson's Wild Irish Girl and Germaine de Staël's Corinne to shed new light on these writers' interventions in European Romantic politics. Both Owenson and Staël associated their male protagonists with the figure of Hamlet at a time when Shakespeare's Danish prince was being reinvented as an embodiment of Romantic weltschmerz and as a symbol for the powerless, isolated intellectual. Instead of contributing to the Romantic cult of a melancholy Hamlet, Owenson and Staël confront their protagonists with the influence of empowered Ophelias who illustrate a less solipsistic version of melancholy. Thus both authors criticize the inertia that gripped their male counterparts directly after the French Revolution. Staël's novel ultimately follows a tragic pattern, while Owenson's gestures toward the possibility of a comic ending. But beyond the different levels of optimism implied by those endings, Owenson and Staël deliver a similar message to the Romantic intellectual, a message that most Romantics ignored in their persistent cultivation of Hamletic attitudes.

Men with Muskets, Women with Lyres: Nationality, Citizenship, and Gender in the Writings of Germaine de Staël

On 23 May 1812 Germaine de Stael (1766-1817), Europe's best-known enemy of Napoleon Bonaparte, set out from her estate on Lake Geneva to escape to England. In her reminiscences, she reflected on the pivotal event as follows:[A]fter ten years of ever-increasing persecutions [. . .] I was obliged to leave two homelands as a fugitive, Switzerland and France, by order of a man less French than I. For I was born on the banks of the Seine, where his only claim to citizenship is his tyranny. He saw the light of day on the island of Corsica, practically within Africa's savage sway. His father did not, like mine, devote his fortune and his sleepless nights to defending France from bankruptcy and famine; the air of this beautiful country is not his native air; how can he understand the pain of being exiled from it, when he considers this fertile land only as the instrument of his victories. Where is his patrie? It is any country that accepts his domination. His fellow-citizens? They are whatever slaves obey his orders.1In this passage, de Stael deliberately links nationality and citizenship. In her view, citizenship status was acquired simply by being born on French soil. Her family's tireless labors on behalf of the nation added another irrefutable proof of Frenchness. In addition, growing up in France and breathing the country's invigorating air had created an emotional attachment that a person raised elsewhere simply could not fathom. We thus have a triad of birth/service/sentiment that connects the deserving individual to his or her nation (in this case la grande nation).In this essay I explore de Stael's understanding of the twin concepts of nationality and citizenship through the lens of gender. Nationality and citizenship were of perennial concern to her thought, partly because of the turbulent times she lived in, partly because of her personal experience in exile. Influenced by history and literature, she early on admired the gallant men with muskets who heroically sacrificed their lives for the glory of the nation. But it was the exceptional women with lyres who were destined to act as the nation's unifying agents by recreating the gallants' deeds in writing. By imagining the nation these women fulfilled the supreme task of citizenship. In what follows I will argue that de Stael conceived of the ideal citizen as a woman writer or artist who served her nation by inspiring its members with enthusiasm and virtue.2 In elaborating her view of the superior woman as citoyenne and national muse she made an important contribution to the debate on the nation and the citizen.The only daughter of Louis XVI's finance minister Jacques Necker and the salonniere Suzanne Curchod-Necker, of Genevan and Vaudois citizenship respectively, de Stael gained fame and notoriety through her brilliant conversational talents, political intrigues, and unconventional relationships with famous men. Though she considered herself a true Frenchwoman (veritable francaise),3 she was a citizen of Geneva and a Swedish subject by marriage, at least until 1803 when she took advantage of the Code Civil and officially claimed French citizenship.4 Considering this multiplicity of conflicting loyalties, it is not surprising that her major writings reveal a sustained preoccupation with these issues.Despite their undeniable significance for early nineteenth -century European intellectual history, historians have so far devoted scant attention to de Stael's writings. In fact, in the US, Staelien studies have largely been dominated by literary criticism and theory.5 This has had the effect of prioritizing her novels over her non-fiction, downplaying the historical context of her oeuvre and, most grievously, ignoring de Stael's historical contribution to socio-political thought.6 As a result of the complex ways in which her personal experience informed her writing, her oeuvre is best examined as a unified, though certainly inconsistent, whole. …

Neither Public nor Private: The Domestic Sphere in French Enlightenment Thought

Neither Public nor Private: The Domestic Sphere in French Enlightenment ThoughtFor the last twenty years or so there has been a burgeoning interest in the contribution of women to the cultural life of the ancien regime. Much of the groundbreaking research has been done by scholars who have argued for the importance of gender as both a historical as well as analytical category.1 In addition to reshaping the boundaries separating historical and theoretical research, scholarship has also underscored the attendant methodological difficulties in combining the two. At the risk of simplification, one can say that historians have tended to privilege empirical evidence of women's activity while literary and cultural critics have focused on the cultural value of key women writers and artists.2Lesley H. Walker's A Mother's Love: Crafting Feminine Virtue in Enlightenment France (Bucknell, 2008) intervenes on both sides of the issue. Tracing the emergence of a discourse centered on an idealized mother figure, Walker aims to historicize our current notions of feminine virtue which she views as bound up in a modernist narrative of emarrcipation. By arguing for the importance of the domestic sphere in the development of an enlightened society based on greater justice and equality, Walker's goal is to recuperate an alternative picture of female virtue. This is one in which maternal solicitude, and rejection of the public sphere in favor of private virtue, are key factors to overall social reform. Walker convincingly shows that the domestic sphere cannot be reduced to the distinctions between public and private spheres, since domestic reform was considered an essential component in the creation of an enlightened community. In so doing she argues against the traditional narrative, which has typically cast the domestic sphere as the place where women have been 'repressed,' 'silenced,' 'marginalized/ and 'domesticated' (18). In this sense, her book rejoins Carla Hesse's recent claim that radical scholarship, by focusing on the exclusion of women from the public sphere, has underestimated the cultural contributions of women who saw themselves as working within the liberal enlightenment tradition.3Walker's evaluation of the domestic sphere is motivated by two observations. First, that scholarship, while opening up new areas of research, has tended to privilege visionary personalities such as Olympe de Gouges or public figures such as Germaine de Stael to the detriment of those female writers and artists who cleaved more closely to the century's own understanding of feminine virtue. Second, that the contemporary theoretical interest in the psychodynamics of the bourgeois nuclear family, especially as developed by Sigmund Freud and the psychoanalytic tradition, has its roots in an eighteenthcentury valorization of domestic life whose historical specificity has been subsequently forgotten. Unlike Freud's narrative that is predicated on an absent mother, Walker shows how eighteenth-century idealizations of the loving family stressed the presence pf an (often) all-seeing, self-sacrificing mother and the virtual absence of the as a viable love object (35). Although not all readers will accept her characterization of affectionate mother-daughter relations as homo-erotic, Walker's suggestion that the eighteenth century viewed heterosexual love between husband and wife as an unsustainable norm even as it privileged an idealized domestic life is an interesting one. For it suggests that the domestic sphere functioned as a space of freedom for women even as it constrained them in other ways.Subsumed under these general goals is a further concern: to introduce the reader to key women writers and artists in order to expand our understanding of what constitutes a feminist canon. In addition to analyzing the works of such well-known figures as Marie-Jeanne Roland, de Stael, Elisabeth Vigee Lebrun, and Stephanie-Felicite de Genlis, Walker also treats lesser-known figures such as the prolific writer and journalist Jeanne-Marie Ie Prince de Beaumont and the painter and engraver Marguerite Gerard, sister-in-law of Jean-Honore Fragonard. …

Poétesses: Muses and Mistresses, Revolutionaries, Scribblers, Bluestockings, et al.

Poétesses:Muses and Mistresses, Revolutionaries, Scribblers, Bluestockings, et al. Catharine Savage Brosman (bio) Norman R. Shapiro, ed. and trans., French Women Poets of Nine Centuries: The Distaff and the Pen. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. xlvi + 1184 pages. $90. This massive anthology, which provides both originals and translations of more than 600 poems, is the realization of an enormous and well-executed project: first identifying the corpus of poetry now available by French women from the Middle Ages onward; then evaluating the poets' accomplishments and appeal, making selections, and gathering basic biographic information; and finally translating and annotating the selections. Norman Shapiro, who is a professor of romance languages at Wesleyan University, is responsible for numerous earlier translations of French poets and dramatists (La Fontaine and other fabulists, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Feydeau, Louisiana Creole authors). His skill and conscientiousness with regard to both form and content are remarkable. His stellar work in this volume, which includes a translator's preface as well as a selected (but extensive) bibliography, is complemented by a three-part index and contributions by others. Rosanna Warren has written the foreword; the introductions to chronological divisions are the work of Roberta Krueger, Catherine Lafarge, and Catherine Perry. Fifty-six poets, many unknown even to those familiar with French literature, are represented—from Marie de France, in the late twelfth century, to Liliane Wouters (born in 1930) and Albertine Sarrazin (1937–67), who spent much of her short life in reform schools and jail. Some names are utterly obscure; others are known in various connections. Marguerite de Navarre, who wrote tales collected in L'Heptaméron, was the sister of François i; Jeanne d'Albret, Marguerite's daughter, became the mother of [End Page 177] Henri iv; Pernette du Guillet was the muse of Lyonnais poet Maurice Scève; Madeleine de Scudéry, an important novelist and salon hostess, devised the celebrated "Carte de tendre" (map of love); Fanny de Beauharnais was connected to the future empress Joséphine; Delphine Gay de Girardin, who met the literati in her mother's salon, was involved with the poet Vigny, and then married the director of an important newspaper and had her own salon; Louise Colet was Flaubert's mistress and had other literary liaisons; Louise Michel was a revolutionary exiled to New Caledonia; Natalie Clifford Barney and Renée Vivien led notoriously unconventional lives; Cécile Sauvage became the mother of the composer Olivier Messiaen; Louise de Vilmorin, briefly the fiancée of Saint-Exupéry, had lengthy affairs with André Malraux. Some otherwise well-known women authors, notably George Sand, do not appear here because they published little or no verse. All the selections are complete. The translator follows scrupulously the original form—syllable count, stanza, and rhyme pattern (nearly all the poems are rhymed, even in the twentieth century, when free verse was widely adopted by men). He finds English equivalents for puns and other witticisms, often reproduces sound echoes (he has a fine ear), and, with great skill, honors other features of the originals; his rare liberties are explained in notes. He is obliged, however, to use extra lines: French is more concise than English, and he has chosen to lengthen his versions rather than to sacrifice meaning. Projects such as this, based on sexual, ethnic, racial, or religious categories, are taken for granted now, and not just on practical grounds; groups, however they may be defined, are assumed to have distinct characteristics, setting them apart from others, and thus should have avenues of expression reserved for them. These groups may be narrowly construed, approaching atomization; that does not apply, of course, to the category of women. In the present instance one may make a historical case for selection on the basis of gender. The treatment of women authors that characterized certain nineteenth-century French criticism is so out-of-date as to be risible. To the poet Lamartine, Germaine de Staël (a novelist) had sacrificed her femininity and become an "orator"; George Sand was labeled, pejoratively, une écriveuse (woman scribbler). Gustave Lanson, the most methodical literary historian of his period, dismissed Christine de Pizan (1364?–1430?), now held in high regard by...

IN SEARCH OF LITERARY MOTHERS ACROSS THE RHINE: THE INFLUENCE OF GENLIS AND STAËL ON THE WRITING OF HELMINA VON CHÉZY

This essay addresses the cultural influence of French authors Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis and Germaine de Staël on German women writers, in particular Helmina von Chézy. As the Paris-based editor of the journal Französische Miscellen (French Miscellanea), Chézy regularly wrote about the latest French literature by women and promoted not only the literature of Genlis, Staël, Sophie Cottin, and George Sand, but also these authors' understanding of themselves as professional artists, as voices of the public sphere, and as women engaged in the capitalist book market. Although Chézy was a prolific writer and lyricist, she never achieved the fame or influence of the French writers. The essay evaluates the strategies Chézy used to style herself after the French writers, considers reasons for Chézy's failure, and argues that German nationalism and the resurgence of political conservatism after the Napoleonic Wars purged the German literary public sphere of the political voices of women.