Introduction
While moderation constitutes the core of Staël’s liberal political thought, I do not intend to moderate my argument. This book claims that Anne Louise-Germaine Necker de Staël-Holstein (1766–1817) was among the most influential liberal political thinkers in nineteenth-century France. I substantiate this assertion by demonstrating that Staël’s particular version of liberal political thought impacted the historical development of political liberalism in France.
My claim may be at odds with contemporary historiography on French liberalism. Since the collapse of the Communist bloc in Europe in 1989, liberal democracy has become the only legitimate political model. Nevertheless, as the only available option, intellectual historians have gradually become critical of internal contradictions within Anglo-American liberal traditions and have started to consider, instead, the diversity of political liberalisms in European history. This awareness has directly triggered strong scholarly interest in nineteenth-century French liberal political thought. The global context was thus favorable to restoring Staël as a historical figure: Staël’s literary and political works have been republished in both French and other foreign languages and her biographical study intensified.1
Staël’s liberal political thought, however, has been obscured next to major male thinkers such as Jacques Necker, Benjamin Constant, François Guizot, and Alexis de Tocqueville.2 This situation seems best illustrated by the fact that the most recent book on French liberalism addresses Staël’s liberal political thought only sporadically.3 Does this situation reflect gender-influenced historians’ opinions of Staël’s political thought? Or does it indicate that their opinions of Staël’s liberal ideas were not as high as those of the ideas of her male counterparts?4
Gender certainly plays a role. We witness no more scholarly work on Staël that reflects a primary and naked male chauvinistic attitude than either Gautier or Guillemin’s biography of Staël.5 However, Winock remarks that Staël’s prevailing image is that “she was always second to Benjamin Constant, caught up in the fame of the author of Adolphe, a daddy’s girl who never let anyone forget that her father’s name was Necker.”6 We cannot rule out that this impression continues to subtly influence our perceptions of her liberal thought.7
Even so, over the last decade, intellectual historians have started to take Staël’s political thought seriously. Kalyvas and Katznelson claim that “something of a Staël revival in political theory” is underway.8 Gauchet remarks that her republican literature retains more “analytical acuity” than later works such as Considerations on the Principal Events of the Revolution in France (Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution française).9 As if to certify Gauchet’s remark, historians have analyzed aspects of Staël’s republican political thought in 1795–1799 as a precursor to important nineteenth-century liberal currents such as either liberal republicanism or neo-republican liberalism.10 Their emphasis on Staël’s republican phase is somewhat paradoxical, because the republican Staël was not liberal in matters of intellectual or religious liberty.11 Additionally, Livesay asserts that Staël strongly anticipated what our contemporary scholars have only recently discovered about the political culture of the Directory’s politics: the historical rise of the strong state.12 His comment on Staël’s thought sounds almost like a strong enough refutation of the liberal aspect of Staëlian republican thought.
In addition, those historians who emphasize the liberal implications of Staël’s republicanism generally overlook her subsequent political literature, such as Considerations on the Principal Events of the Revolution in France (Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution française).13 Darnton points to Considerations, commenting, “When she discussed forms of government, she advocated an unoriginal version of constitutional monarchy as practiced in Britain.”14 Consequently, according to current historiography on French liberalism, this common attitude gives the impression that Staël’s political heyday was over in 1800.15
Darnton delivered the last blow, asserting that Staël’s “minor status” as a political thinker is justifiable by the fact that we do not find her name in standard textbooks on the Western history of political thought.16 It may well be that, by traditional definitions of political philosophy in terms of “studies on theories behind politics,” she is not a prestigious political thinker. Even so, we should recall the ambiguous status of French liberalism in the history of Western political thought, as well: unlike its British counterpart, French liberalism is a heteroclite corpus of policy-oriented thought rather than an ideologically coherent set of doctrines.17 In addition, other factors inherent in the nature of Staël’s political literature contributed to eclipsing her presence in intellectual history. The fact that Staël never summarized her political thought in a single book is one reason. Another is that her unique language designed to fit various contexts did not help elucidate the corpus of her thought. This explains why it is not enough to analyze Staël’s literature; we also need to ascertain how her ideas were received in the actual political and historical context of a given period in French history, a call that has prompted more studies on the reception of Staëlian literature.
Tribouillard’s Le tombeau de Mme de Staël: les discours de la postérité staëlienne en France (1819–1850) is still the most representative such work.18 She assesses powerful and wide-ranging reactions to the entirety of Staël’s works after her death, between 1819 and 1850. Tribouillard perceives the 1848 revolution as a critical break in the history of Staël’s audience, claiming that she was mostly forgotten after 1848 because “her political and literary ideas had become anachronistic by then.” She observes that, under the Second Empire, “the program of Staël and, with it, that of the first Romanticism, arouses disdain and suspicion; it seems to have lived on, at least for a time.”19
More specifically, several historians assessing the reception of Considerations in Restoration France generally conclude that the Restoration’s political protagonists immediately refuted Staël’s posthumous book in public opinions.20 The following comment of Tribouillard may synthesize other historians’ individual assertions:
Throughout the century, the visibility of her work is ultimately disappointing…. Looking at the fundamentals of Staël’s historical thinking, we note that the historians of the following two generations, even of the entire nineteenth century, contradicted or paid little heed to some of the ideas set up in Considerations.21
In short, Staël’s status in studies on French liberalism remains paradoxical: despite being called the mother of French liberalism, she is not an orthodox political thinker. Although Considerations has enjoyed a long-standing reputation as being politically influential over the last two centuries, scholars attempt to demonstrate the opposite and claim that it exerted little influence on nineteenth-century political history. The following comment of Mme Necker de Saussure’s thus seems quite just: “The influence that [Staël] exercised over her century does not lend itself well to the narratives.”22
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This book proposes to reassess Staël’s political liberalism by analyzing its impact on nineteenth-century political history. To explain why we should analyze Staël’s thought and influence altogether, I start by tracing the historical origin of two terms, libéralisme and conservatisme. Historically speaking, the apparition of these concepts was in response to the emergence of two corresponding political groups, rather than political ideologies.23 The first historical example of libéralisme was found in the title of a political pamphlet in April 1819. Meanwhile, the term conservateur , if not conservatisme,was a neologism used for the title of a counter-revolutionary periodical that was first published in the fall of 1818 to refute the liberal implications of Considerations.24 It is symptomatic that libéralisme and conservateur started as tit...