This chapter, our third exploring Staël’s role in revolutionary politics, focuses on her relationship with Benjamin Constant. Constant met Staël in 1794, as Robespierre fell and the Jacobin Terror ended, and remained with her until 1810. Evidence is provided that key ideas in Constant’s political thought appear earlier in Staël’s 1790s publications, taking into account both the problem facing the friends of liberty when Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s social contract succumbed beneath the Terror and this couple’s parallel answers to it:

• A philosophical tradition, notably Rousseau in Le Contrat social, identifies liberty with citizens’ active participation in the polis or res publica. Jacobin discourse returns often to this definition.

• As early as the Consulat, Constant opposes this ancient and public liberty, now discredited by the Terror, to the modern private liberty he celebrates: These “positive and negative” liberties have since become a touchstone of modern liberalism. As it happens, this distinction already appears in Staël’s neglected political treatises and broadsides written under the Convention and the Directoire.

• This “negative liberty” of classical liberalism, whose weaknesses we begin to underline today, presents a problem for Staël as a woman that is necessarily less crucial to her friend Constant, a new problem to which her work again offers a solution. The modern man of liberal discourse may very well desire to have his hands free at home when he leaves the public square, but has he consulted his wife? The Revolution founded a public sphere from which women were excluded, a distinction crudely illustrated in the Serment des Horaces and the Brutus of David, where a single action gives the public sphere to men and to women a “negative or private liberty” that is nothing but sequestration in the oikos. The actions of the Jacobins in 1793, then the Code Napoléon, proved to Staël that in France the Rights of Man decline in the masculine. She responds with a resolutely public discourse, uniting the two liberties opposed in contemporary debate to extract from them a new social contract, founded in the idea of public credit taken in its broadest meaning. For her, nation and deputies exist in symbiosis, making it impossible to imagine public or private liberty without the other being equally present.

First Response to Rousseau: Negative Liberty

Constant meets Staël in Switzerland at the end of the Terror, on September 29, 1794, and vigorously contradicts her in preaching “la liberté illimitée de la presse,” a theme to which he will often return under the Restoration. But in his Directorial brochures, he adopts the objections she had opposed to him; seen from Brunswick, where he had been living, the Revolution had a more abstract meaning than for Staël who had lived it.¹ The two republicans establish themselves in Paris in May 1795. After the defeat of the royalists at Quiberon, Staël has her Réflexions sur la paix intérieure printed, but does not put them on sale because of the events of 13 Vendémiaire, the attempted royalist coup. This is the first time she develops her personal vision of “negative” liberty in answer to the Terror:

The idea of a government strong in tolerance, and whose authority itself might allow the liberty required, is a leitmotif of Protestant thought; it gives to Constant’s liberalism a particular cachet, as Stephen Holmes has underlined.² But Staël’s distinction between two liberties, which has important precedents in economic discourse, remains little in evidence before 1800 in the writings of Constant, who at this time is more Jacobin in politics than his friend: “Ceux qui ne croient pas aux droits du peuple,” he says after the republican coup of 18 Fructidor in a speech for the planting of a tree of liberty, “doivent être déshérités de ces droits.” He attacks those who wish to “mêler à nos formes austères et mâles la dangereuse mollesse des formes efféminées” and adds that “la puissance et le plaisir doivent appartenir exclusivement à la République”: This is the liberty of the ancients he will later attack.³ Today, it is easy for us to reproach him for his commitment, but the royalist threat was real in the Year V, and the Constitution of the Year III opposed no legal barrier to it, as Staël and Constant always remarked. In his Directorial action, Constant struggles to overcome this gap. He underlines that a government that is weak and attacked will never renounce arbitrary measures. Let the moderates then pause in their attacks, which can only bring about a prolongation of despotism or a more terrible counterrevolution: “[I]l s’agit de trouver [le] repos dans la République ou de … retourner à la tyrannie, en remontant le fleuve de sang qu’on a vu couler au nom de la liberté” (Force 88).

This appeal to the confidence of the governed is fairly rare in the works of Constant: He returns to it in his 1815 writings, in favor both of Louis XVIII and of Napoleon, and in his brochure of 1816, De la doctrine qui peut réunir les partis en France. On the other hand, this thematics is at the root of Staël’s thought. It appears in her first book on Rousseau in 1788, and above all in her collaboration in the speeches of her friend Narbonne. Staël’s argument can be summed up thus: The great danger in the interior is mistrust, which hamstrings political action and leaves the field open to extreme parties. One must therefore submit the Assemblée to a centrist coalition that alone will be able to represent silent France. This government will unite order and liberty and will be directed by the aristocracy of talent. As early as her 1791 writings, Staël insists on a symbiosis between the silent nation and its public representatives.

Considering their life in common and shared model, did Staël and Constant draft their texts together? We know they collaborate closely as early as 1795; Staël says to Félix Desportes, the French resident in Geneva, “[J]e suis en partie l’auteur de l’ouvrage de Benjamin Constant.”⁴ But in the absence of proof, such questions are delicate, and I distinguish relatively few passages in one author that recall the style of the other – in De la force du gouvernement actuel, the start of chapter VIII, perhaps, and chapter IV of Des réactions politiques. One might point out some recurrence of images: Benjamin speaks in 1796 of prejudices “du quatorzième siècle,” as Staël had done in 1794 (Force 55; Paix 93), and in 1797 he evokes a party that is “montagnard pour la royauté,” much as she had spoken of the “montagnards de la royauté” in 1795 (Réactions 118; RPI 142). Finally, the title De la force du gouvernement actuel […] is not without resemblance to the title of the first chapter of Staël’s earlier Réflexions sur la paix: “De la force actuelle de la France.”

Holmes and Etienne Hofmann wonder whether Constant may have collaborated on chapter III of Des circonstances actuelles, a political treatise Staël drafted around 1798 that, in their view, is somewhat new in tone. The question is worth asking, because this chapter elaborates in detail the famous two liberties distinction we have already seen in Staël’s writing in 1795. Readers will also see that the theme recurs throughout the 400 pages of this treatise, in a series of passages very close to texts Constant will produce later.⁵

Constant lays out this distinction between 1803 and 1806, after his expulsion from the Tribunat, in book XVI of his Principes de politique, and he returns to it in 1814–1819, in De l’esprit de conquête et de l’usurpation and in De la liberté des anciens comparée à celle des modernes.

In his Principes de politique, Constant denounces ancient liberty’s anachronism. In the “nations libres de l’antiquité,” he says, “l’individu était entièrement sacrifié à l’ensemble.” Modern philosophers, led astray by the resemblance of words, facilitated the Terror by praising an ancient liberty we no longer have access to; Constant here targets Rousseau and Gabriel Bonnot de Mably. He notes five differences between the moderns and the ancients that make it impossible to follow their example. First, their republics were small: “[L]e peuple délibérait en souverain sur la place publique.” Second, they were always at war. Third, no republic was commercial; commerce frees the individual, and the credit it entails “place les gouvernants dans la dépendance des gouvernés.” Fourth, slavery among the ancients “donnait à leurs mœurs quelque chose de sévère et de cruel” that facilitated personal sacrifices. Finally, we moderns, having lost the naive character of the ancients, need continuity and habit.⁶ He thus summarizes his argument: “La liberté des temps anciens était tout ce qui assurait aux citoyens la plus grande part dans l’exercice du pouvoir social. La liberté des temps modernes, c’est tout ce qui garantit l’indépendance des citoyens contre le pouvoir.”⁷

This conclusion comes precisely from Staël’s 1798 chapter III, as Hofmann indicates, and other foreshadowings of Constant are not rare. “Les anciens,” she writes, “avaient toutes leurs affections, tous leurs intérêts enveloppés dans le sort de leur patrie … [I]ls n’avaient aucun moyen de transporter leur fortune dans aucun autre pays.” Citizens “d’un état peu nombreux,” they were “soumis à chaque instant aux volontés d’un peuple délibérant sur la place publique”; our great modern associations offer the “possibilité d’exister isolément.” Modern legislators must accept these realities without seeking to recreate the patriotism of Sparta or Rome: “En France, on croira toujours que si le gouvernement n’agissait pas, tout irait mieux.” The ancients compensated with the public interest for a private life less rich than ours; today, public opinion will be grounded in the love of peace and quiet.

The pure political liberty of the ancients is thus in modern times, for Staël and Constant, a fatal and impossible anachronism; we require the refuge of the oikos – that is the Terror’s lesson. This is the meaning of Constant’s question in 1797: May one lie to a murderer looking for a friend hidden in your home? Here is a dilemma that opens every manual of ethics since Immanuel Kant’s famous brochure in answer. Constant took it in fact from Staël’s biography – she hid Mathieu de Montmorency in the Swedish embassy when the police came looking.⁸

Facing such an intrusion, pure civil liberty – negative liberty – has simple merits, as Constant’s hero Adolphe underlines: “Je me trouvais si bien d’être libre, d’aller, de venir, de sortir, de rentrer, sans que personne ne s’en occupât! je me reposais, pour ainsi dire, dans l’indifférence des autres.”⁹ Indeed, readers have sought in Constant’s celebration of the private the double trace of the Terror and of his private life. This is not wrong, but let us also remember his long public career, the sad end of Adolphe, and the presence of this same dialectic in Staël’s texts. “Ce n’est point,” Constant writes, “à la liberté politique que je veux renoncer, c’est la liberté civile que je réclame” (PP 436).

Second Response to Rousseau: A New Social Contract

Women occupy a limited place in the political writings of Benjamin Constant, as commentators rarely mention. And yet they represent, lest we forget, half of this French nation for which the Revolution was made. What had they gained from it?

Examples of Frenchwomen’s civil and juridical nullity under the Old Regime are not lacking. The events of 1789 provoke a good number of hopes, as witnessed by pamphlets and cahiers de doléance, but apart from the new right to divorce, the Revolution only worsens women’s existence. Following Rousseau, men attribute the corrupting softness of the Old Regime to the influence of women; we saw this topos in Constant. From 1789 on, talk of the rights of women is associated with disdain for the roles of wife and mother, with promiscuity, with the imposition of trousers for all. In summer 1793, the Convention bans women’s clubs, and at the end of 1793, Hercules replaces Marianne at the head of official correspondence. After the sansculotte uprising of Prairial Year III, women are forbidden from entering the Convention; in the Year VII, bizarrely, they are forbidden to wear the national cocarde, which had been obligatory a few years earlier. The term citoyenne falls out of use.¹⁰

Returning then to this chapter’s opening question, liberty manifestly had a sex in this epoch. Staël’s life and works bear witness to it; let us limit ourselves to the new social contract she proposes, and to the place of women in her argument.

If positive liberty was forbidden to Frenchwomen after the Year III, the negative liberty that people still oppose to it offered them above all the prison of a house closed to the outside – the sealed space favored by contemporaries like the Marquis de Sade. That development is the story of the nineteenth century. “Londres est composé,” writes Staël, “d’un grand nombre de petites maisons fermées comme des boîtes, et où il n’est guère plus facile de pénétrer” (CRF 557). Raised in the salons, Staël prefers the civilization they bring, and the line they draw within the oikos between public and private spheres. To Rousseau, who speaks of the fatal softness engendered by public women, she replies by taking up the attack in order to make it the basis of an irrefutable response, ridiculing it as she proceeds. Rousseau protests to Jean le Rond d’Alembert that a modern genius, under the influence of women, will seek applause and a communion of sentiment with his public. Precisely so, Staël replies, and that constitutes a progress of the human spirit.¹¹ Admiration, a feminine sentiment according to her, and emulation, a Greek sentiment if ever there was one, are at the basis of all Staël’s thought; they allow her to anchor the representative government she finds necessary for any modern state within a philosophy both elegant, original, and logically rigorous. We might call it a philosophy of public credit. Its elements appear in Constant’s works but without the synthesis his friend draws from them.

This philosophy is laid out across Staël’s career; let us take it in its flowering, in the Considérations sur la Révolution française, published in 1818, a year after her death, and printed, writes Jacques Godechot in his introduction (CRF 32), in 60,000 copies, an astonishing number.

Constant in his political treatises considers recent tyrannies as anachronisms. “La tyrannie,” Staël likewise says, “est une parvenue, le despotisme un grand seigneur” (601); her attack leans on public credit. Napoleon, she states, lost a twenty-five-year war because though he had cash, he had no credit; as Montesquieu writes, dictators do not inspire confidence in bankers. In England, where the people are free, banks played their role and allowed the war to be won. This model unites Coppet’s thought on art and economics and designates ethics as the secret of all lasting political success: “Bonaparte, qu’on persiste à nommer habile,” found, according to Staël, only “l’art maladroit de multiplier partout les ressources de ses adversaires” (406).

Economies need credit; and what is that? Staël defines it like John Maynard Keynes as “l’opinion appliquée aux affaires de finance” (79). All modern states are governed with tomorrow’s money. John Law then the Physiocrates confirmed French mistrust of Protestant and cosmopolitan bankers, a mistrust Napoleon inherited and which lasted until the reign of his nephew Napoleon III. Constant for his part, tribune and deputy, intervenes in questions of public debt without engaging in a philosophy of it. Staël, a banker’s daughter, emphasizes that credit is no luxury; without the British constitution and public spirit, “comme les champs seraient desséchés, comme les ports deviendraient déserts.”¹² Grass indeed grew in the ports of the First Empire. According to Staël, good and bad governments can be distinguished by their finances, because “jamais le crédit ne pourrait exister sans une constitution libre … Bonaparte … n’aurait pu se faire prêter librement la plus faible partie des sommes qu’il recueillait par la force” (384). An astute judgment, and one that the Dictionnaire Napoléon repeats. The Bourbons never learned this lesson.¹³

One also needs credit in politics. For the Encyclopédie, the term crédit “marque quelqu’infériorité,” and “on ne dit point le crédit d’un souverain.” Staël says precisely the opposite: Public credit, she writes, is granted to the government by the nation, which it directs but which remains the true sovereign. Staël thus unites a Protestant theory of credit with Rousseau’s famous social contract to renew two traditions of political philosophy. A large republican state cannot assemble without delegation; a dilemma also faced by Constant, Jacques Necker, and Jean-Charles-Léonard Sismondi. For these thinkers of the Groupe de Coppet, that delegation is guaranteed in speech, which is the coin of power. Speech in the public sphere is at the center of Staël’s thought, from Zulma to Corinne. The nation produces heroes who represent it; they gather in public to govern their people, pushed on by a noble emulation and by a discourse the electors can credit. The career of talent is open to all. The Athenian polis was also founded on public credit, as Hannah Arendt brilliantly showed, and Staël is very conscious of her classical sources, more Athenian than Spartan: Their models are indeed striking in their resemblance.¹⁴ But when the people’s credit is refused, people and government can only suffer. A silent nation will be the slave of its passions in a revolution, yet impassive before the fall of its leaders, as Constant also writes: “Le gouvernement verrait la masse de ses sujets se tenir à l’écart, morne spectatrice … A peine lève-t-on la tête pour le contempler un instant” (ECU 143). The despot for his part, in prey to a mad ambition and the political necessity of war, will seek the nation that nourishes him and see only himself. Napoleon, for example, “a fini par ignorer qu’il faisait froid en Russie dès le mois de novembre … [I]l avait réduit les hommes à n’être que des échos … [I]l était ainsi seul au milieu de la foule qui l’environnait” (CRF 427). Without public confidence, power is no more real than the ribbon protecting the Tuileries. In such a country, deputies will leap out of the window before the bayonets; Marshal Ney will pass from Louis XVIII to Napoleon; Napoleon falling like the Louis XVIII he had sent packing will call in vain on a nation that is mute (243, 360, 454).

Finally, one needs credit for genius. In art as in politics, Staël proclaims that inspired heroes will have the credit of a grateful nation that speaks through them. Nation and genius live in symbiosis: Without the credit of genius, the nation, rich but mute, will dry up like the untilled soil of empire, and genius will speak like Napoleon into the void (78, 581). The Romanticism that Staël offers Europe and America here finds its sense; courtly esthetics died with the Old Regime, and the art of the West’s new nations, true and simple according to eternal virtues, demands the sanction of the masses – the invisible consumers we know so well. For Staël, famous from Moscow to Monticello, the people’s voice is the voice of God (254); the odi profanum vulgus of her successors seems in comparison obsolete and, for a Romantic, remarkably bad logic. Little purpose is served by a national and popular art that despises the people.

In a country where the public sphere is forbidden women, where the terms homme public and femme publique are not synonyms, only artistic credit can bind a female genius to the nation she represents and directs. If not, why write? Corinne and Dante, says Staël, give to their people the voice of genius; Tasso is sung by gondoliers; a German commis de barrière who meets Staël tells her he can now die happy.¹⁵ For Staël, writing offers a public tribunal; she presents herself as an anti-Napoleon, a Moses addressing the nations he sought to dupe. From Protestant credit theory, and a social contract inherited from the Greeks, she draws a powerful tool to marry the aristoi to the silent nation, a tool perfectly adapted to the Romantic universe that brought us national assemblies and the modern press.

Where Staël finds a solution, Constant sees a problem. Even in his finest treatises, like De l’esprit de conquête, Constant is much less persuaded of this symbiosis: “On ne peut s’empêcher de regretter,” he says, “ces temps où … l’éloquence dominait les esprits et remuait les âmes; la gloire était à la portée du talent, qui, dans sa lutte contre la médiocrité, n’était pas submergé par les flots d’une multitude lourde et innombrable; la morale trouvait un appui dans un public immédiat” – but “ces temps ne sont plus” (ECU 152). This old mixed government dilemma goes back in fact to the Laws of Plato; without Staël’s representative symbiosis, what we might call her Romantic social contract, an organic solution to the problem seems impossible.¹⁶

Holmes thus underlines the logical incoherence that ends the 1819 two liberties discourse. In the last paragraphs of De la liberté, Constant brusquely pivots to celebrate the ancient liberty that had been his target:

With this contradiction, the author refuses too facile a synthesis of his thought.

One source for the obstacle separating Constant from his friend might be found in their vision of energy. For Staël, liberty is not only the absence of restraints, as Hobbes once defined it, but also a positive moral force, the “impulsion libérale” Norman King describes and which closes the book De l’Allemagne. Negative liberty is for her nothing but independence, a distinction she makes explicit; the Germans, she writes, are “plus indépendants en tout parce qu’ils sont moins libres” (DA II 29). Virtue and enthusiasm must in her thought guarantee public speech – an electricity uniting the nation and its deputies, as the rhapsodes of Plato united the nation and the gods.¹⁸ But this primordial electricity in fact becomes an obstacle in Constant’s writing. The term électriser appears twice in his short brochure of 1796, after he first meets Staël: “[O]n ne peut se livrer,” he says, “à l’enthousiasme, on n’est pas électrisé par la reconnaissance de ses égaux”; he adds that ideas “se rencontrent et s’électrisent par le commerce des individus” (Force 72, 78). The word is rare in the rest of his works; in the Principes de politique, should we read électricité when the text speaks of “je ne sais quelle élasticité morale qui se communiquait de lui à son peuple et de son peuple à lui” (PP 14)? Yet the image reappears at least twice in his work in an ironic mode. If for Staël electricity is a principle of life, De l’esprit de conquête speaks on the contrary of “convulsions hideuses qu’un art, plus effrayant qu’utile, imprime aux cadavres sans les ranimer” (ECU 173) – an echo of contemporary science; and a letter to Prosper de Barante explains, when Wallstein leaves for the printer’s, that “tout ce qu’on peut faire en France dans notre état de décrépitude, c’est du galvanisme et non de la vie.”¹⁹ Staël and Constant speak of the same force, but for Constant it is applied to cadavers.

From this study emerges something we already knew: the intimate connection between the thought of Constant and Staël, two friends of liberty who spent the best part of their lives together; it is indeed impossible to know the thought of one in detail without lingering for some time over that of the other. This chapter elaborates a new proof of that fact in their double theory of liberty, an intellectual ballet traced out across their writings from the Législative to the July Monarchy, a subtle and evocative pas de deux for us, their heirs in the twenty-first century.