Bastille Day, Germaine de Staël, and the Making of Modern France
Stacie Allan, author of Writing the Self, Writing the Nation: Romantic Selfhood in the Works of Germaine de Staël and Claire de Duras
In France, what we in the Anglophone world call Bastille Day is simply known as le quartoze juillet (the fourteenth of July) or la fête nationale (the national holiday). In English, emphasis is placed on the storming of the Bastille as the revolutionary founding event of modern France, an event whose symbolic importance far surpasses freeing the seven prisoners who were being held there at the time. The French name for the day is more neutral, perhaps acknowledging that the French Revolution was not an end in itself but a road marker on the long path of nation-building.
The fourteenth of July also marks the death of writer Germaine de Staël, one of the most famous women in Europe when she died in 1817. This date is an apt one for someone who spent her life writing about the building of nations and whose personal history was entwined with the making of modern France.
Germaine de Staël was born in 1766 to Swiss parents in Paris where she began a life-long personal involvement in European politics and culture. Her father Jacques Necker was finance minister to Louis XVI; a position from which he was dismissed three days before the storming of the Bastille. Her mother Suzanne Curchod held a Parisian salon frequented by men and women of politics, letters, and science. In 1786, Staël married Swedish ambassador Erik Magnus Staël von Holstein in a rather unromantic exchange of money for him and the title of ambassadress for her. The latter had the benefit of diplomatic immunity, which would become a handy safeguard for Staël and her friends during the French Revolution. During the September Massacres in 1794, Staël left Paris for Switzerland before travelling to England. When Staël returned to her beloved France, which was engaged in wars across Europe and thus highly suspicious of foreigners, her own nationality came under scrutiny. Much to her chagrin, she was declared Swedish, her husband’s nationality, and a warrant was issued for her deportation. When Napoleon rose to power, her opposition angered him and she would spend the next decade circumventing his empire, only returning to France once he had been deposed. In her later years, Staël would remark that her experiences of exile, as a result of the French Revolution and its long aftermath, made her lose her links to Paris and she became European. Yet, the thought of France would always sadden her and that is how she knew she was French.[1] Staël’s experiences of exile from France, her family connections to the French government, and her cultural and philosophical immersion meant no one was better placed than her to write about the process of nation-building.
Staël’s interest in nations is evident from the titles of her novel Corinne or Italy (1807) and her travelogue-cum-philosophical treatise On Germany (1813), whilst other works — The Influence of Literature upon Society (1800) and Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution (1818) — demonstrates how she reflected upon the way in which society, politics, and the arts contributed to build nations. Following her death, Staël was said to have ‘created the art of analysing the spirit of nations and the springs which move them’.[2] Staël broke down nations into their constituent parts and described how these elements combined to create unity, but she always undertook this endeavour with an eye to their internal contradictions and interactions with other nations. For example, Staël’s famous heroine and representative of Italy Corinne has an English father and she draws on these mixed origins in creating her Italian poetry. Elsewhere, Staël depicted the German Lands separately in their cultural diversity and, when combined, as embodying a Northern European spirit. Staël might have spoken of national characteristics or customs, but not of exceptionalism.
This perspective extends to how Staël saw the emergence of modern nations. Staël’s early work on fiction concluded that historical narratives ‘always suit nations as they are invariable and considered in general terms’.[3] Historical narratives draw a link between people of the past and the present, creating a sense of unity and identity that reduces differences across time. In her assessment of the French Revolution, however, Staël invites her readers to look at the history of England where she believes they will find echoes of early nineteenth-century France. In particular, she draws parallels with England’s Glorious Revolution to suggest that, in spite of the rise of Napoleon and the restoration of the monarchy in 1814–15, the French Revolution could still form the rupture with the past that kick-started the nation-building of modern France. In doing so, Staël demonstrates that by considering history with a broad brush, narratives can be adapted and mobilised for a variety of causes. However, by using English history to plot France’s potential future, Staël shows that no nation is unique in the process of its development or the types of founding stories that it requires.
The events, stories, and myths that make a nation continue to have social and political value — for some, perhaps even more so in our current globalised world. The recent gilets jaunes protests in France hoped to draw on the country’s Revolutionary spirit as a rallying point by depicting President Macron as a Bourbon king. In the UK’s Brexit debates, the Second World War is repeatedly evoked to demonstrate Britain’s isolation from and superiority over a European continent that was overrun by Nazis. Trump’s Make American Great Again refrain points to a mythical past era of prosperity where America put its national concerns first. Bastille Day, then, is both a national holiday and a focal point onto which the Revolutionary origins of modern France can be projected. In focusing on Bastille Day, we forget that the French Revolution set in motion almost one hundred years of political instability during which republic, monarchy, and empire violently vied for supremacy. The stories that make a nation stand in ever constant tension with historical progression and more detailed counter-narratives that seem to have less emotional or dramatic pull. In Paris today, the site of the Bastille is marked by a column topped by a gilded figure at the centre of a roundabout. The column commemorates not the revolution of 1789 but that of 1830, a revolution that installed a monarchy rather than overthrew one. The remnants of the prison can only be found below ground where its exposed foundations are visible in the Metro station. History is built on top of history in layers of nuance, though the architectural evidence of that might leave the tourist searching for the famous Bastille somewhat disappointed.
[1] Cited in Alfred Götze, ‘Sechs unveröffentlichte Briefe der Frau von Staël am Frau von Berg und Gräfin Voss’, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 202 (1965), 43–52 (51).
[2] ‘Chateau of Coppet: Letter Third’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 21/4 (1818), 277–80 (278).
[3] Germaine de Staël, ‘Essai sur les fictions’, in Stéphanie Genand, ed., Œuvres complètes, série I: Œuvres critiques: De la littérature et autres essais littéraire, 3 vols (Paris: Champion, 2013), II, 38–65 (57). Translation my own.
