This apparently materialistic system was expounded in the first (1796) of twelve mémoires which Cabanis published together in 1802 as Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme. They reveal a powerful mind (or brain) eagerly active over a widening area of curiosity and speculation. The first essay is almost a survey of physiological psychology, studying the neural correlates of mental states. The third analyzes the “unconscious”: our accumulated memories (or neural inscriptions) may combine with external and internal sensations to generate dreams, or may unconsciously affect our ideas even in the most alert of waking states. The fourth holds that the mind ages with the body, so that the same person’s ideas and character may be quite different in his seventies than in his twenties. The fifth is a suggestive discussion of how glandular secretions—especially the sexual—may affect our feelings and thoughts. The tenth essay contends that man has evolved through chance variations or mutations which became hereditary.
In a book purporting to be Cabanis’ Lettres sur les causes premières (1824), published sixteen years after his death, he appears to retract his materialism, and to admit a First Cause endowed with intelligence and will.56 The materialist may remind us that the great surgeon had warned us against the effect of an aging body upon its associated mind. The skeptic may suppose that the mystery of consciousness had led Cabanis to suspect materialism of simplifying a very complex and immediate reality. In any event it is good that a philosopher should remind himself, now and then, that he is a particle pontificating on infinity.
Two men survived from the age of the philosophes to meet in person the Revolution that had been so fervently desired. When the Abbé Raynal, who had made his name in 1770 with Histoire philosophique … des deux Indes, saw the lumières of the Enlightenment darkened by the excesses of the populace, he sent to the Constituent Assembly, on May 31, 1791, a letter of protest and prophecy. “I have long dared to tell kings of their duties; let me today tell the people of their errors.” He warned that the tyranny of the crowd could be as cruel and unjust as the despotism of monarchs. He defended the right of the clergy to preach religion, so long as the opponents of religion or priestcraft were left free to speak their minds. He condemned alike the governmental financing of any religion (the state was then paying the salaries of priests) and the attacks upon priests by anticlerical mobs. Robespierre persuaded the irate Assembly to let the seventy-eight-year-old philosopher escape arrest, but Raynal’s property was confiscated, and he died in destitution and disillusionment (1796).
Constantin Chasseboeuf de Volney lived through the Revolution, and knew every notable in Paris from d’Holbach to Napoleon. After years of travel in Egypt and Syria he was elected to the States-General, and he served in the Constituent Assembly till its dissolution in 1791. In that year he published the philosophical echoes of his wanderings in Les Ruines, ou Méditations sur les révolutions des empires. What had caused the collapse of so many ancient civilizations? Volney answered that they had declined because of the ignorance induced in their people by supernatural religions allied with despotic governments, and by difficulties in the transmission of knowledge from generation to generation. Now that mythological creeds were losing their hold, and printing had facilitated the preservation of knowledge and the transference of civilization, men might hope to build lasting cultures upon a moral code in which knowledge, growing and spreading, would extend man’s control over his unsocial tendencies, and promote cooperation and unity. He was arrested in 1793 as a Girondin, and remained in prison for nine months. Released, he sailed to America, was welcomed by George Washington, was denounced as a French spy by President Adams (1798), and hurried back to France. He served as a senator under Napoleon, opposed the change from Consulate to Empire, and retired to a scholarly seclusion until Louis XVIII made him a peer in 1814. He died in 1820, having shared in deposing and restoring the Bourbons.
VII. BOOKS AND AUTHORS
Despite the guillotine, publishers embalmed the evanescent, poets rhymed and scanned, orators declaimed, dramatists mingled history and love, historians revised the past, philosophers chastised the present, and two women authors rivaled the men in depth of feeling, political courage, and intellectual power. One of these, Mme. Roland, we have met in prison and at the guillotine.
The Didot family, most famous of French publishers, continued to improve the casting of type and the bindings of books. François Didot had established the firm as printers and booksellers in Paris in 1713; his sons François-Ambroise and Pierre-François carried on experiments in typography, and issued a collection of French classics on commission from Louis XVI; François-Ambroise’s son Pierre published editions of Virgil (1798), Horace (1799), and Racine (1801), so exquisite that the rich purchasers could enjoy them without reading them; Firmin Didot (1764–1836), another son of François-Ambroise, earned fame by founding a new type, and was credited with inventing stereotyping; and the company of Firmin Didot published in 1884 the magnificent edition of Paul Lacroix’s Directoire, Consulat, et Empire, from which many items herein related have been filched; therein, for example, we learn that all through the Revolutionary period the sale of the works of Voltaire and Rousseau ran in the hundred thousands. A decree of the Convention (July 19, 1793) guaranteed an author’s ownership of his copyrighted publications until ten years after his death.57
The two most famous poets of the Revolutionary decade began far apart in decoration and style, and ended under the same knife in 1794. Philippe-François Fabre d’Églantine composed pretty verses and successful plays; he became president of the Cordeliers Club, secretary to Danton, and deputy in the Convention, where he voted for the expulsion of the Girondins and the beheading of the King. Appointed to the committee for devising a new calendar, he invented many of the picturesquely seasonal names for its months. On January 12, 1794, he was arrested on charges of malversation, forgery, and dealings with foreign agents and mercantile profiteers. At his trial he sang his charming ballad “Il pleut, il pleut, bergère; rentre tes blancs moutons” (“It is raining, it is raining, shepherd; bring in your white sheep”); but the jurors had no ear for pastorals. On his way to the guillotine (April 5, 1794) he distributed copies of his poems to the people.
André-Marie de Chénier was a better poet with better morals, but no better fate. Born at Constantinople (1762) of a French father and a Greek mother, he divided his literary love between Greek poetry and French philosophy. He was educated in Navarre, came to Paris in 1784, made friends with David and Lavoisier, and accepted the Revolution with reservations. He opposed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which bound the state with the Catholic Church; he recommended to the National Assembly the complete separation of Church and state, and full freedom of worship for every faith; he condemned the September Massacres, praised Charlotte Corday for killing Marat, and wrote for Louis XVI a letter to the Convention asking for the right to appeal to the people from the sentence of death; this service made him suspect to the ruling Jacobins. Imprisoned as a Girondin, he fell in love with a pretty prisoner, Mlle, de Coigny, and addressed to her “La Jeune Captive,” which Lamartine pronounced “the most melodious sigh that ever issued from the apertures of a dungeon.”58 Brought to trial, he refused to defend himself, and went to his death as a relief from an age of barbarism and tyranny. He had published only two poems in his lifetime, but his friends issued, twenty-five years after his execution, an edition of his collected verse, which established him as the Keats of French literature. It must have been his plaint, as well as hers, that he expressed in the final stanza of “The Young Captive”:
O mort, tu peux attendre, éloigne, éloigne-toi;
Va consoler les coeurs que la honte, l’effroi,
Le pâle désespoir dévore.
Pour moi Pâles encore a des asiles verts,
Les amours des baisers, les Muses des concerts;
Je ne veux pas mourir encore.
O Death, you need not haste!—begone! begone!
Go solace hearts that sha
me and fear have known,
And hopeless woes beset.
For me Pales [goddess of the flocks] still has her grassy ways,
Love has its kisses, and the Muse her lays;
I would not die as yet.59
Andre’s younger brother, Joseph de Chénier (1764–1811), was a successful dramatist; recall the turmoil caused when Talma played Charles IX. He wrote the words for the martial “Chant du départ,” and the “Hymne à la liberté” sung at the Feast of Reason; with a skillful translation he introduced to France Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Elected to the Convention, he became in a sense the official poet of the Revolution. In his later years he was commissioned by the Institut to compose a Tableau historique de l’état et du progrès de la littérature française depuis 1789. He died before completing it; even so it is an extensive record of writers once famous and now mostly forgotten even by educated Frenchmen. Immortals die soon after death.
Commanded and engulfed by politics during the Convention, literature recovered under the Directory. Hundreds of literary societies were formed, reading clubs multiplied, the reading public grew. Most of it was content with novels; romantic fiction and poetry began to displace classic tragic drama. Macpherson’s “Ossian,” translated into French, became a favorite with a wide variety of readers, from chambermaids to Napoleon.
VIII. MME. DE STAËL AND THE REVOLUTION
Standing out from the word weavers by force of voice and character was a woman who, amid successful novels and a succession of lovers, accepted the Revolution, denounced the mob and the Terror, fought Napoleon at every step, and survived to victory while he languished in a living death. Germaine Necker had the advantage of being born to prominence and fortune: her father, soon a millionaire, became France’s minister of finance; her mother, once pursued by Edward Gibbon, gathered in her salon the celebrated geniuses of Paris and beyond, to serve unwittingly or unwillingly in the education of her child.
She was born in Paris on April 22, 1766. Mme. Necker, insisting on being her chief tutor, filled her with an explosive mixture of history, literature, philosophy, Racine, Richardson, Calvin, and Rousseau. Germaine trembled with fashionable sensibility over Clarissa Harlowe’s approach to a fate worse than death, and with youthful enthusiasm over Rousseau’s call to freedom, but she proved painfully allergic to Calvinism, and resisted the insistent theology and discipline with which it was daily administered to her. More and more she shied away from her ailing, dominating mother, and fell in love with her virtuous but indulgent and providing father. This was the only liaison that she maintained with lasting fidelity; it made other attachments tangential and insecure. “Our destinies,” she wrote, “would have united us forever if fate had made us contemporaries.”60 Meanwhile, to confuse her emotions with intellect, she was allowed, from puberty onward, to attend her mother’s periodical meetings of the minds; there she pleased the pundits by her quickness of understanding and repartee. By the time she was seventeen she had become the star of the salon.
Now the problem arose of finding for her a husband who could match her mind and her prospective fortune. Her parents proposed William Pitt, the rising light of English politics; Germaine rejected the idea for the same reason that had led her mother to resist Gibbon—there was not enough sun in England, and the women there were beautiful but unheard. Baron Eric Magnus Staël von Holstein, being bankrupt, offered his hand; the Neckers held him at bay until he had become Swedish ambassador to France. This happened, and Germaine agreed to marry him because she expected to be more independent as a wife than as a daughter. On January 14, 1786, she became Baronne de Staël-Holstein; she was twenty, the Baron thirty-seven. We are assured that “she knew nothing of sexual love until her marriage”;61 but she was a quick learner in everything. The Comtesse de Boufflers, who presided at the wedding, described the bride as “so spoiled by admiration for her wit that it will be hard to make her realize her shortcomings. She is imperious and strong-willed to excess, and she has a self-assurance that I have never seen matched by any person of her age.”62 She was not beautiful, being masculine in build as well as mind; but her black eyes sparkled with vivacity, and in conversation she had no equal.
She went to live at the Swedish Embassy in the Rue du Bac, where she soon established her own salon; but also—since her mother was ailing—she took charge of the salon in the apartments over her father’s bank. Necker had been dismissed from the Ministry of Finance in 1781, but he was recalled to office in 1788 to help turn aside the threat of revolution. He was now, despite his millions, the ideal of Paris, and Germaine, passionately supporting him with tongue and pen, had some reason to be proud. Politics, next to unlicensed love, became her meat and drink.
On Necker’s advice Louis summoned the States-General; over Necker’s resistance he bade the three estates sit separately, maintaining class distinction; On July 12, 1789, he dismissed Necker a second time, and ordered him to leave France at once. He and Mme. Necker drove to Brussels; Germaine, wild with wrath, followed them; Staël, forgetting his official duties, accompanied her and her fortune. On July 14 the Parisian populace stormed the Bastille and threatened the monarchy. The frightened King sent a courier to overtake Necker and call him back to Paris and office; Necker came; the people acclaimed him. Germaine rushed to Paris, and thereafter, till the September Massacres, felt every day the hot winds of revolution.
Associating its early stages with her father, and her politics with her income, she supported the States-General, but pleaded for a bicameral legislature under a constitutional monarchy assuring representative government, civil liberties, and the protection of property. As the Revolution proceeded she used all her influence to moderate the Jacobins and encourage the Girondins.
However, she outdistanced the Jacobins in her moral philosophy. Nearly all the men she met thought it reasonable that their marriages, having been unions of property and not of hearts, should allow for a mistress or two to give them excitement and romance; but they held that similar privileges could not be extended to the wife, since her infidelity would cause disruptive uncertainties in the inheritance of property. Germaine did not feel this argument, since in her case—an only child—the property in question and in prospect was almost wholly her own. She concluded that she should feel free to seek romance, even to sampling other beds.
She had soon lost respect for her husband, who was too obedient to be interesting, and too incompetent to be solvent. She did not object to his taking Mlle. Clairon as a mistress, but he was spending his official income on the seventy-year-old actress, was neglecting his duties as ambassador, was gambling and losing, and repeatedly accumulating debts which his wife and father-in-law reluctantly paid. So she made her way through a procession of lovers, for, as she was to say in Delphine, “Between God and love I recognize no mediator but my conscience”; and conscience could be managed. One of her first collaborators was Talleyrand, ex-bishop of Autun, who agreed with her on the flexibility of vows. After him came Comte Jacques-Antoine de Guibert, lately the beau idéal of Julie de Lespinasse; however, he died in 1790, aged forty-seven. A year earlier Germaine had formed a deeper and more lasting attachment with Louis de Narbonne-Lara. He was the son of an illegal union, and was himself, at thirty-three, the father of several bastards; but he was remarkably handsome, and had that ease and grace of manner which unpedigreed youth can seldom learn. By social heredity he was all for the aristocracy against an “upstart” bourgeoisie, but Germaine persuaded him to her ideas of a constitutional monarchy in which the propertied class would share in power with the nobility and the king. If we may believe her, Narbonne “changed his destiny for my sake. He broke his attachments and consecrated his life to me. In a word, he convinced me that …he would consider himself happy to possess my heart, but that if he lost it irremediably he could not survive.”63
On September 4, 1790, Necker, his liberal policy frustrated by the nobles around the King, resigned, and retired with his wife to a temporarily qu
iet life in his château at Coppet. Germaine joined them in October, but she soon tired of Swiss peace, and hurried back to what she called, by comparison, the delectable “gutter of the Rue du Bac.”64 There her salon hummed with the voices of Lafayette, Condorcet, Brissot, Barnave, Talleyrand, Narbonne, and her own. She was not content to set the pace for brilliant conversation; she longed to play a part in politics. She indulged the dream of leading France from Catholicism to Protestantism, but she hoped, through her nest of notables, to bring the Revolution to a peaceful rest in constitutional monarchy. With help from Lafayette and Barnave, she secured the appointment of Narbonne as minister of war (December 6, 1791). Marie Antoinette reluctantly supported the appointment. “What glory for Mme. de Staël,” she commented; “what joy for her to have the whole army at her disposal! “65
Narbonne went too fast. On February 24, 1792, he presented to Louis XVI a memorandum advising the King to break with the aristocracy and give his trust and support to a propertied bourgeoisie pledged to maintain law and order and a limited monarchy. The other ministers angrily protested; Louis yielded to them, and dismissed Narbonne. Germaine’s house of cards fell; and to put salt in her wounds her rival, Mme. Roland, secured, through Brissot, the appointment of her husband as minister of the interior.
Germaine lived in Paris through most of the terrible year 1792. On June 20, 1792, she witnessed (if only across the Seine) the storming of the Tuileries by a crowd whose unvarnished manners frightened her. “Their frightful oaths and shouts, their threatening gestures, their murderous weapons, offered a horrifying spectacle which could forever destroy the respect which the human race should inspire.”66 But that journée (as the French came to call an uprising of the populace) was an amiable rehearsal, crowned and appeased by the red cap of the Revolution on the King’s head. On August 10, however, she witnessed, from her coign of safety, the bloody capture of the Tuileries by a mob that did not rest until the King and the Queen fled to a momentary protection by the Legislative Assembly. The triumphant rebels began to arrest every available aristocrat; Germaine spent her fortune liberally in protecting her titled friends. She hid Narbonne in the recesses of the Swedish Embassy; she stoutly resisted, and finally deflected, a search patrol; and by August 20 Narbonne was safe in England.