Wonder Woman of the Enlightenment: Madame de Stael
Yesterday I read Francine Du Plessix Gray’s biography of Madame de Stael, entitled Madame de Stael, The First Modern Woman (a silly title, not borne out by the book itself). I thoroughly enjoyed this biography, both in terms of subject (what a woman!) and in style (hyperbolic awe). But even with Du Plessix Gray’s hyperbole, her diagnosis that De Stael was bi-polar, and her habit of ending chapters with cliff-hangers about the men (so many!) in De Stael’s life, the author does an excellent and completely engaging job of conveying the immensity of De Stael’s energy and ambition, and the scope of all she accomplished as a writer, as a political force, and as a human being.
We are left with no doubt as to the “credo” of De Stael’s life: enthusiasm. Of all emotions, it was the one that governed her life. For she was nothing if not enthusiastic about ideas, politics, friends, lovers, family, and France. She herself wrote, “Enthusiasm is the emotion that offers us the greatest happiness, the only one that offers it to us, the only one able to sustain human destiny in whatever situation destiny places us.” And I love this quote of hers: “Enthusiasm is tolerant not out of indifference, but because it leads us to recognize the value and beauty of things.” She was humanistic, caring, energetic, and intelligent: with such a combination, it is no wonder she was a celebrity wherever she went.
De Stael was a celebrity not for her looks but for her words, both written and spoken. She was known far and wide for her excellence at the art of conversation. Conversation for her was not about prattle and jokes and flirting: instead it was a combination of charm and intellect that utilized ideas and current political and social facts to shape opinions, form concrete plans, and carry forward a future based on ideals of the Enlightenment. De Stael believed in the power of words to cajole, charm, convince, and improve the world around her.
De Stael would have been a firm believer in my motto that “great good comes from reading great books”. Du Plessix Gray’s excerpts from De Stael’s book On Literature made me beam with kinship to this amazing woman: “Writers’ talent leads the barriers of existence to disappear and to transform mortals’ vague hopes into brilliant images.” And “One above all admires certain writings because they have uniquely moved all the moral powers of our being.” Yes!
De Stael, according to Du Plessix Gray, “believed literature could augment the enlightenment necessary to democracy, and help to cure, or at least calm, the human tendency to violence; reading good literature might even lessen the crime rate throughout the world by developing in human beings the capacity to be moved. It encourages the emergence of national collective identity….and is an essential feature of moral or spiritual regeneration.” Yes, yes, and yes again!
I don’t believe that Du Plessix Gray herself believes that De Stael was the “first modern woman”: nowhere else in the entire biography does Du Plessix Gray use those words to describe this most incredible woman. What De Stael was, was a true product of the Enlightenment. Her mother thought she was raising her daughter according to the principles laid out by Rousseau in his manifesto of the Enlightened education, Emile, but even if she got the details wrong, her daughter was enlightened, empowered, and wholly liberal in attitude and intelligence. She was one of many women of her time and class who used intelligence and wit to cultivate political roles alongside social leadership, but the difference with De Stael was that she did everything with full-force charm, holding her huge intelligence under wraps in a display of modesty and good humor but always active in her work towards political and social change. She was a supreme politician, although not always a realistic one, and her writings still bear intellectual force for liberalism today. In every way she was a woman of her times, just more so than anyone else. There were many like her in talents, ambition, and interests, but certainly no one rivaled her scope in all three of these attributes, nor in her unfailing enthusiasm for life, for humanity, for conversation, and for love (her many lovers are of course the stuff of legend but she really did love to love, physically and psychically).
Du Plessix Gray’s biography provides a fascinating and genuine people’s history of the French Revolution, the Republic that followed, the years of Napoleon, and of the Restoration. De Stael played a role in every phase, working to save members of the nobility from the Terror under Robespierre (she was no royalist but instead a committed to a constitutional Republic) and writing that “[t]here is no greater possibility of happiness than to save the life of an innocent person.” She and Napoleon clashed. With his “instinctual repulsion for powerful, intelligent” women, it is no surprise that he found De Stael both frightening and annoying; what is surprising is how avidly she sought his approval. But then after all, it was he that held the power — which he exercised most meanly for over ten years — to exile her from her beloved France.
This biography reads like a good novel, informs like an engaging history tract, and completes what is for too many people the flat, accepted view of De Stael as the great lover. She was that, but she was much, much more: a great thinker, a mover and shaker, and — so embracing for me — a true believer in the power of the written word to change the world.
