Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France. Lucy Moore
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her three passions–love, Paris and power—were ‘the noblest pleasure of which human nature is capable’.
‘We breathed more freely, there was more air in our lungs,’ she wrote of this optimistic period; ‘the limitless hope of infinite happiness had gripped the nation, as it takes hold of men in their youth, with illusion and without foresight’. If her friend the marquis de Talleyrand could say that no one who had not lived before 1789 could know the true sweetness of living, then Germaine could equally truly declare that for her, nothing could compare to the exquisite flavour of those days between 1788 and 1791 when she was in love and believed a new France was being created within the four gold-embroidered walls of her drawing-room.
Germaine de Staël was twenty-three in July 1789, the month that her father Jacques Necker, on-and-off Finance Minister to Louis XVI, was sacked by the king. Louis's powers permitted him to appoint, dismiss and banish ministers at will, so there was nothing unusual in this; what was unusual this time was the response it provoked.
Necker had made himself unpopular at court by advising the king to make wide-ranging changes to his archaic administration, urging modernization (particularly of the system of taxation, which weighed most heavily on the poor) and greater accountability to the French people. He had encouraged the king to summon the Estates-General, France's only national representative assembly, for the first time since 1614 and, partly at his daughter's urging, argued that the three estates (clergy, nobles and commons, known respectively as the First, Second and Third Estates) should vote individually -thus preventing the nobles and clergy from grouping together to block the Third Estate's demands.
Hard-line royalists, who feared the changes sweeping France, were convinced Necker would betray the king to his people, and welcomed his downfall. In the royal council, two days before Necker was dismissed, the king's brother, the comte d'Artois, told the minister to his face that he ought to be hanged; on the same day, in Paris, a well dressed woman was publicly spanked for spitting on his portrait.
Necker's defiant attitude towards the king had prompted his discharge and cemented his status as a popular hero; his reputation for financial acumen was matched only by his reputation for probity. Reformers who idolized him saw his expulsion as a manifestation of outmoded arbitrary power and an unwelcome confirmation of the king's distaste for reform. They rallied to the cause of their champion.
News of Necker's dutifully silent departure from Versailles reached Paris on Sunday, 12 July. A large crowd had gathered in the Palais Royal, as it did every Sunday, to eat ices, buy caricatures, ribbons or lottery tickets, ogle scantily dressed femmes publiques and magic lantern shows, and listen to orators declaiming against the government. The Palais Royal, owned by the king's cousin the duc d'Orléans, was a vast, newly built piazza surrounded by colonnaded shops, theatres and cafés. By the mid-1780s, protected from police regulation by its royal owner and encouraged by that owner's well known antipathy to the court party at Versailles, it had become a city within a city, a place where anything could be seen, said or procured, and the centre of popular opposition to royal abuses.
On that July afternoon the crowd gathered around a passionate young journalist, Camille Desmoulins, who stood on a table urging his fellow-citizens to rise up against the king's ‘treachery’ in sacking Necker. ‘To arms, to arms,’ he cried; ‘and,’ seizing a leafy branch from one of the chestnut trees that edged the Palais Royal, ‘let us all take a green cockade, the colour of hope.’ With Desmoulins carried triumphantly aloft, the shouting, clamouring, bell-ringing mob surged on to the streets to search Paris for the weapons that would transform them into an army.
The king was not unprepared for this type of rising; indeed, one of the underlying causes for the popular uproar that greeted Necker's dismissal was distrust of the troops—about a third of whom were Swiss or German soldiers rather than French—with which Louis had been quietly surrounding Paris during late June and early July as preparation for a show of force that would silence his critics for good. But the democratic germs of patriotism and reform that had infected the French people had penetrated as far as the lower ranks of the army, for so long a bastion of aristocratic privilege and tradition, and their leaders' response to the crisis was hesitant. The Palais Royal mob, by evening numbering perhaps six thousand, met a cavalry unit of the Royal-Allemands at the Place Vendôme and the Place Louis XV (later, Place de la Révolution, and still later Place de la Concorde) just to the north-west of the Tuileries palace, and, reinforced by the popular Paris-based gardes françaises, forced the German and Swiss soldiers, in the early hours of 13 July, to retreat from the city centre. After a day of chaos and plunder, on the 14th the people's army reached the Bastille, and the revolution received its baptism in blood.
The storming of the Bastille was by no means the first act of the revolution. Since 1787, extraordinary developments had been witnessed in government. France was a nation trembling on the brink of change. Its causes were many and varied: ideological, fiscal, constitutional, personal, economic, historical, social, cultural. ‘The Revolution must be attributed to every thing, and to nothing,’ wrote Germaine. ‘Every year of the century led toward it by every path.’ In the summer of 1789 the fateful mechanism that would exchange absolute for representative government (and back again) was already in motion. Nor was Necker's dismissal the sole cause of the Bastille's fall. But Germaine de Staël can be forgiven for thinking that her adored father—and through him, she herself—was at the heart of events.
It was no accident that green, the colour Camille Desmoulins chose as the emblem of hope in the Palais Royal, was the colour of Necker's livery—and typical of the confusion inherent in the revolution itself that it should be replaced soon after with the tricolour because it was also the livery colour of the king's unpopular brother, the comte d'Artois. The tricolour contained within it a multitude of references: red and blue for Paris, combined with white for the Bourbon dynasty; red and blue were also the colours of the popular duc d'Orléans. Like everything during this period, these colours were laden with symbolism: white for the revolutionaries' purity, blue for the heavenly ideals they were pursuing, red for the blood which was already seen as the necessary price of France's liberation. The tricolour was immediately invested with an almost mystical aura. It became a sacrosanct emblem of the new France that the revolution was creating, materially revered in bits of ribbon representing the fatherland.
Germaine had been dining with her parents in Versailles when Necker received Louis's notice on 11 July. Saying nothing, but squeezing his daughter's hand beneath the table, Necker got into his carriage with his wife as if for their regular evening drive; instead of idling round the park in Versailles, they headed straight for the border with the Low Countries. Germaine returned to Paris that night (fourteen kilometres, a carriage journey of about two hours) and found there a letter from her father informing her of his departure and advising her to go to his country house at Saint-Ouen. Ignoring, despite herself, the crowds already gathered in the rue du Bac to hear news of Necker, she rushed to Saint-Ouen with her husband, only to find there another letter summoning them to Brussels, where they arrived on the 13th. There she found her parents, still wearing the same clothes in which they had sat down to dinner two days earlier.
After a week Necker received a courier from the king recalling him to Versailles. He deliberated for three days and then began the journey back to Paris with his wife, daughter and son-in-law. Fifteen years later, Germaine remembered how intoxicated she was by the accolades showered on her father, the bliss of basking in his popularity. Women working in the fields fell to their knees as the Neckers' coach passed by; as they entered each town, their carriage was unhitched from the horses and drawn through the streets by the inhabitants. When they reached the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, where a massive crowd was waiting to greet the man on whom their hopes for reform and prosperity rested, Germaine fainted, feeling she had ‘touched the extreme limits of happiness’.
The excitement even made her write affectionately to her husband, uncharacteristically sending him in a note, soon after they returned to Paris, ‘mille et mille tendresses’. The same letter concluded, more characteristically, with a message for her father: ‘Tell my father that all of France does not love or admire him as much as I do today.’
It was in this heady atmosphere that Germaine de Staël's salon became the most important in Paris. The tradition of the salon, in which