Madame de Stael [Hardcover]

Maria Fairweather (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 14, 2005

The influence of the salons of Paris on the thought and culture of the eighteenth century would be difficult to overstate. These meeting places for the vanguard of society were presided over by a succession of clever women, and the most brilliant of all of them was Madame de Stäel. Born Germaine Necker in Paris on April 22, 1766, her father was a powerful banker and her mother a Swiss pastor’s daughter who never got over her good fortune in marrying a rich man. In 1786 Germaine was married to a secretary in the Swedish embassy called de Stäel. Although she thought him "a perfect gentleman," she also found him dull and clumsy. She began to take lovers—the Vicomte de Narbonne and possibly Talleyrand—and then Benjamin Constant, in whom she at last met her intellectual equal. In 1806 her novel Delphine was published. It was an instant success and praised by Goethe and Byron, among others. Her salon thronged with glittering visitors, among them the tsar, Talleyrand, Madame Recalmier, Chateaubriand, Lafayette, and Wellington. Maria Fairweather gives an entrancing, illustrated account of this vanished world, so merciless to outsiders, but for those of the inner circle incomparably glamorous and exciting.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"At Madame de Stael's this evening I meet the world," wrote early American statesman Gouverneur Morris, and British biographer Fairweather's expansive biography of Germaine de Staël (1766–1817) rightly focuses on the salon as backdrop to French literary and political intrigues of the 18th and 19th centuries. The salons—where the great men of politics and culture gathered during and after the ancien régime—were often a woman's only avenue of influence, and Mme. de Staël's gatherings included the most brilliant politicians, writers and artists of her day, including Chateaubriand, Talleyrand and Lafayette. Fairweather digs deep into de Staël's past to contextualize her rise from daughter of a self-made Swiss banker, a former finance minister to Louis XVI, and a Protestant governess whom he married, to author and hostess of one of Paris's leading salons. The result is a complicated portrait of a passionate woman well versed in Enlightenment philosophy, German literature and Calvinism, whose outspokenness pitted her against France's extreme factions—the royalists, the Jacobins—and eventually Napoleon, leading to her exile in Geneva. But this did not deter her from challenging France's leaders from afar or continuing her fruitful literary life. Fairweather (The Pilgrim Princess) offers an extensively researched history; however, only dedicated students of French culture and literature may have the fortitude to wade into this almost over-rich tome. Illus. not seen by PW.
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From The New Yorker

At one time, it was said that "there are three great powers in Europe: Britain, Russia and Madame de Staël." Outspoken, childish, intelligent, she lived in a tornado of social engagements, political intrigue, literary work, and love affairs. Fairweather's biography rewardingly chronicles her long career, from busy days at the court of Louis XVI through the French Revolution, the Terror, and the rise and fall of the Napoleonic empire. Growing up, she knew Gibbon, Diderot, and D'Alembert, and met Voltaire; later her circle included Talleyrand, Wellington, Goethe, Schiller, and Byron. Her temperament was legendarily volcanic. Talleyrand, hearing that she had professed herself baffled that he could have married his unintellectual wife, commented, "To understand the full value of such peace of mind, one would have to have lived under the same roof as Madame de Staël for a month!"
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf (January 14, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786713399
• ISBN-13: 978-0786713394
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,550,100 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Christmas Memory, December 22, 2007

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Madame de Stael (Paperback)

As Christmas approaches nearer and nearer my mind strays to thoughts of Madame de Stael, who always kept a warm place for Christmas in her heart, even when persecuted by Emperors and forced to live in alien lands, or when reeling from the tragic loss in her life, the death (by duelling sabre) of one of her sons while still a very young man, and she, though heavy in mind, insisted on Christmas as normal so as not to disappoint the little ones, nor her pensioners whom she gathered around her like old, well-loved blankets.

And her lovers, for she was a lover all her life. The poet George Stanley recommended this book to me, telling me that it seemed to him I knew nothing of de Stael and it was high time I learned. Immediately I ordered a copy of the recommended biography, but it looked a little dense, so I put it to one side, then wound up months later packing it hastily on my last minute trip to Basel this past summer. Well there I was in my single bed on top of a Basel garret, high summer and you could almost see the tops of the Jungfrau, and I opened the pages of the book and found out, to my utter surprise, that Madame De Stael was, in fact, from Basel! I swallowed this unbelievable coincidence with a twist of bottled water, and from there on in, I could see why George Stanley, whose own writing is filled with a boiling hunger for the human, and a restless quest for the divine, why a writer like Stanley would be so taken with the peripatetic Madame de Stael. She was everywhere and did everything, and she never stopped her love life. Maybe money helped. She was born Germaine Necker, the lively, bluestocking daughter of Jacques Necker, the man they called the Croesus of Switzerland, and in thinking about her life I would have to say that she was usually able to summon up vast amounts of money and yet still, she had sympathies with all sides of the French Revolution in which she played a key part. She was friends with Marie Antoinette, sort of, and with Talleyrand (and with Napoleon Bonaparte until he took an uninformed dislike to her and to her novels and agitprop).

She wasn't the most beautiful woman in the world, not even in the top fifty per cent, but she had something, didn't she, an intelligence that Coleridge said matched his own, and a joie ve vivre that made men, women, children and animals stop in the street and turn around and stare, drawn to her ebullience like honey. Maria Fairweather has a telling anecdote about Madame de Stael attending the first French circus ever shown in snowy Moscow, in the company of famous Russians of all sorts, and the clowns and circus animl;s were all gazing in rapture at Madame de Stael chatting in the royal box, trying to make out scraps of her witty comversation. Even the acrobats on their trapezes gradually stopped swinging, hoping for that perfect moment of silence in which one might hear her speak.

She was in love with many men, and many loved her; among them, Narbonne, the aristocratic white dandy whose plantation, "Limonade," in Haiti was seized by his agnry slaves and burnt to the ground in one of those famous anticolonialist demonstrations in 1792. Another problematic friend was the novelist Fanny (EVELINA) Burney, who seemed simultaneously to admire and to despise her, like Mary Astor and Bette Davis in THE GREAT LIE or OLD ACQUAINTANCE. All of her life Germaine de Stael suffered from the feeling that her mother hadn't much cared for her, while her true passion was for her father, the former Croesus of Switzerland, the man who saved France. The saddest day of her life was the day Jacques Necker expired in his chalet. Meanwhile she met and enchanted the weird, Crispin Glover like Benjamin Constant, and wound up travelling around Europe with him for what seemed like forever. Goethe translated her works into German, and years later, Jean Genet had them distributed to the Palestinian radicals he befriended in his later years. She was the "empress of the mind," Fairweather reminds us, but what makes her so interesting was perhaps her eternal curiosity--she was mad for knowledge and hardly ever minded changing her mind once the facts were in. People laughed at her rustic peasant way of dressing, for it was a bit silly, as if Barbara Hutton dressed in the costume of Minnie Pearl, but she took the criticism with good grace and continued to cut her blouses down to here. She battled Bonaparte over his domineering methods and his forced alliance of church and state, using the public's fondness for ritual to shore up his own control. "Society cannot exist without inequality of wealth, and inequality of wealth cannot exist without religion," he argued, to which Germaine de Stael forthrightly replied, Very well then, let us do without society! But never, she would say, clutching her harlequin-patterned satin blouses to her breast, never let us give up Christmas, the season in which we remind ourselves, we are both animals and angels! So Joyeux Noel to all who read these words, and who go on to imitate Madame de Stael in virtue and in vice.

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic beyond belief, June 5, 2006

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Gaunilon - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Madame de Stael (Paperback)

Probably the most interesting transition in European history is from absolute monarchy to democracy, with the noticeable eddy of Napoleon's dictatorship. In literary history, the movement from pastoral romance to sturm und drang ROMANTICISM ranks among the most exciting: marivaudage and bucolic love à la Rousseau can only take you so far. In philosophy, you likewise have the jump from rationalism to Kantian metaphysics and empiricism. How can it be that one person stood at all these crossroads, cultural and political, and wrote thoroughly of them? But she was no mere observer, but a participant as well, probably the only person Napoleon ever feared.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Detailed, contextualised, readable, March 29, 2009

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Clive R. Jones "pominstates" (Syracuse NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Madame de Stael (Paperback)

This recent bio of one of France's most amazing women is full of well-researched detail, very well referenced and yet readable (despite the irritating but, thankfully, infrequent habit of putting a comma between subject and verb) because Fairweather can tell a good story, engaging her reader with the lives and situations her work recreates. This is done with considerable empathy not merely for de Stael but for her friends, family and lovers. She accurately presents Germaine's husband as a ninny but tactfully refuses to say so in so many words. Fairweather reveals a detailed knowledge of events in France during de Stael's lifetime. Particularly good in her analysis of de Stael's relationship with her father, the formidable Necker. Irresistable for anyone with the least interest in the woman or her time.