Mary Wollstonecraft
At about the same time as Olympe de Gouges was arguing for the rights of women, Mary Wollstonecraft took up the same cause. Like de Gouges, she was spurred into action by the events of the French Revolution. By coincidence, they were both in Paris at the same time and mixed in similar circles, but they never seem to have met. |
| Mary Wollstonecraft, by John Opie Tate Britain Public domain |
Mary Wollstonecraft was born in London on 27 April 1757, the second child and first daughter of a master silk-weaver, who squandered his inheritance. Her father was tyrannical and her mother submissive. She grew up in a household where girls did not matter. The second great influence on her early life was her sentimental friendship with Fanny Blood, whom she met in 1775. For a while, this friendship was the ruling passion of her life, but too much should not be read into it. Such friendships were common at the time and were not necessarily lesbian.
Wollstonecraft knew she would have to earn her living and that the options were limited. In 1778 she left home to become a paid companion to Sarah Dawson, a widow living in Bath. The post did not suit her rebellious temperament. In 1782, following the death of her mother, she went to live with Fanny Blood and her family.
In 1784, with Fanny Blood and her sister, Eliza, she set up a school in Newington Green, north of London. There she came into contact with the radical clergyman, Dr Richard Price, and the community of ‘Rational Dissent’. Two disasters then struck her: in 1785 Fanny Blood died in childbirth in Portugal, where Mary had gone to nurse her; in 1786 the school failed.
After an unhappy experience as a teacher in Ireland, Wollstonecraft published Thoughts on the Education of Daughters in 1787, a plea for girls' education to be rational rather than ornamental.
After this, her publisher, the radical, Joseph Johnson, employed her to write on a regular basis for the Analytical Review. In 1788 she published Mary. A Fiction, a semi-autobiographical novel of female friendship.
Wollstonecraft and the Vindication
It was the French Revolution that was to make Wollstonecraft famous. In 1789 the Bastille fell. In 1790 Edmund Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France, an attack on the Revolution that infuriated radicals. Wollstonecraft responded immediately with A Vindication of the Rights of Men. She criticised Burke for his reactionary politics and also for sentimentalism.She followed this up in January 1792 with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a ground-breaking work that called for 'a revolution in female manners' so that women 'by reforming themselves' can 'reform the world'.
A wild wish has just flown from my heart to my head. I will not stifle it though it may excite a horse-laugh. —I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless where love animates the behaviour. For this distinction is, I am firmly persuaded, the foundation of the weakness of character ascribed to woman; is the cause why the understanding is neglected, whilst accomplishments are acquired with sedulous care: and the same cause accounts for their preferring the graceful before the heroic virtues.
How many women thus waste life away the prey of discontent, who might have practised as physicians, regulated a farm, managed a shop, and stood erect, supported by their own industry, instead of hanging their heads surcharged with the dew of sensibility, that consumes the beauty to which it at first gave lustre? How much more respectable is the woman who earns her own bread by fulfilling any duty, than the most accomplished beauty… Yet I sigh to think how few women aim at attaining this respectability by withdrawing from the giddy whirl of pleasure, or the indolent calm that stupefies the good sort of women it sucks in.
In spite of the severe rationalism of the Vindication, Wollstonecraft had been in love for the past three years with the married Swiss painter, Henry Fuseli. She planned to travel to France with him in order to see the Revolution for herself, but when Fuseli's wife threw cold water on the scheme, she decided to travel there alone, and she arrived there in December 1792 - just as preparations were afoot to put the king on trial.
Wollstonecraft in France
In Paris, she quickly became part of the Girondin circle run by the Rolands. She was welcomed by the lively bohemian circle of British and American radicals, including Thomas Paine. In January 1793 she witnessed Louis XVI on his way to his execution, a sight that distressed her although she did not condemn the king's death.In the early months of 1793 Wollstonecraft met Captain Gilbert Imlay, an American revolutionary soldier turned commercial adventurer. She fell passionately in love with him and by the end of the summer of 1793 she was pregnant. Far from being dismayed at her situation she was delighted and more in love with Imlay than ever.
By this time Britain was at war with France and Wollstonecraft could have been in some danger as an enemy alien. In August she registered at the American embassy as Imlay’s wife, though the pair never married. When Imlay left her to go on his commercial travels, she followed him to Le Havre, where it became clear he was losing interest in her. There, on 14 May 1794 (25 floréal, Year II), her daughter, Fanny, was born. It was there, too, that she completed her book on the French Revolution, which Johnson published in London.
The unhappy love affair
In April 1795 she followed Imlay to London with Fanny. Hecontinued indifferent and in May, she attempted suicide by taking an overdose of poison (possibly laudanum). A maidservant revived her and the unhappy relationship dragged on. Meanwhile, Imlay’s business in Norway was doing badly and he asked her to travel there in order to sort it out. In June 1795 she travelled with Fanny to Scandinavia, in an effort to recover his lost or stolen cargo ship.
Many scholars believe that her subsequent book, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, is her best. However her efforts could not salvage the relationship. Back in England in October she attempted to drown herself by throwing herself off Putney Bridge. She was pulled out of the river by fishermen.
Marriage and death
In 1791 she had met the philosophical radical, William Godwin at a dinner party at Joseph Johnson’s. They argued over religion and did not get on. However, in 1796, within months after she broke with Imlay, they met again and very soon became lovers. As radicals, they had no intention of getting married and Wollstonecraft still went by her ‘married’ name of Imlay.However, when Wollstonecraft became pregnant, they married on 29 March 1797. She moved into his house in Somers Town. On 30 August she gave birth to her second daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin but the placenta failed to deliver spontaneously. She died of puerperal fever on 10 September.
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| The tomb of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin St Pancras Old Church My photograph |
Madame de Staël: a new lover
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| Benjamin Constant Literary figure and politician Lover of Madame de Staël Public domain |
In 1793 Germaine de Staël spent four months in England, much of them at Juniper Hall, but in the summer of 1793 she returned to the family home at Coppet. Her relationship with Narbonne had cooled, and she had a brief affair with Count Adolph Ribbing, an exiled Swedish aristocrat. In 1794 she began a what was to be a long-standing affair with the Swiss-French writer, Benjamin Constant, who like her, was a liberal in politics. In 1797, with the Jacobin government overthrown, the couple moved to Paris, where Germaine re-opened her salon. In June 1797 her daughter, Albertine was born in Paris. She had red hair – like Constant.
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| Madame de Staël and her daughter, Albertine by Marguerite Gérard Château de Coppet Public domain |
Meeting Napoleon: the battle commences
In December 1797 Madame de Staël was introduced to General Bonaparte, newly returned from his successful campaign in Italy, at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, now headed by her ex-lover, Talleyrand. This was the first of several meetings. He had just returned from his successful campaign in Italy. At first she courted him assiduously but he made it clear that he disapproved of women who engaged in politics.On 9 November 1799 (18 Brumaire, Year VIII) General Bonaparte overthrew the Directory and established himself as First Consul. The French Revolution was over. Madame de Staël later recalled that she had cried:
not for liberty, it had never existed in France but for the hope of liberty, without which this country would only suffer shame and misfortune.
Bonaparte appointed Constant to the Tribunate, and Germaine’s salon hosted the Bonapartist elite. But Constant openly criticised Napoleon and Madame de Staël was criticised in the press:
It is not your fault that you are ugly, but it is your fault that you are an intriguer. Correct this quickly or your reign is over. You know the way to Switzerland.She found herself ostracised.
Undeterred, in 1800 she published her first major work, De la litérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales. It was a work of literary criticism, but much more – an assertion that literature had a moral purpose in aiding the human race in its quest for perfectibility and freedom from superstition. It was too free-thinking for Napoleon, and he hated it.
His hostility was becoming pathological. When she attacked him when Constant was ousted from the Tribunate in 1802, he said to his brother, Joseph, with whom she was friendly:
So she wants war does she! … Serve notice to this woman that I am [not] a Louis XVI.… Advise her not to block my path … otherwise I will break her. … I will crush her… tell her to be quiet.
In the spring of 1802 (before she left Paris to look after her husband, who was dying in Switzerland), Madame de Staël became involved in a plot to depose Bonaparte. The plot was foiled and in August Bonaparte became First Consul for life. She now lived in virtual exile in Coppet, where she worked on her semi- autobiographical novel, Delphine, published in Paris and Geneva at the end of 1802.
Napoleon hated this book too. He pronounced it immoral, anti-social, anti-Catholic and anti-French. He was furious that the police had not prevented its publication, and he issued an order banning ‘the foreign intriguer’ from France.
To Germany
Madame de Staël then made the decision to go to Germany. In December 1803 she arrived in Weimar with her two younger surviving children, Albert and Albertine.Through their patronage of literature, the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar, Karl August, and his mother, Anna Amalia, had made this small principality one of the cultural centres of Europe. The writings of Johann Gottfried von Herder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller had sparked a new interest in German literature and culture and she wanted to explore it for herself.
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| Goethe, the literary genius of the age by Angelica Kauffmann (1787) He respected Madame de Staël but found her exhausting. Goethe Museum, Weimar Public domain |
German literature opened up a new world to Madame de Staël.
She wrote to her cousin:
Goethe, Schiller and Wieland have more ingenuity, more depth in philosophy that anyone I have ever met. … German drama makes one think again, Schiller and Goethe are attempting all kinds of innovations in the theatre.
In March 1804 she was in Berlin. There she met August Wilhelm Schlegel, who with his brother had founded a periodical, Das Athenäum, which set out the theory of German Romanticism. She hired him as a tutor for her children and he travelled with her when she left Germany.
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| August Wilhelm Schlegel theoretician of Romanticism who became Madame de Staël's devoted follower. |
Corinne
On 9 April 1804, Jacques Necker died. Germaine was distraught that she was not with him. It was the greatest loss of her life. But she was now the owner of Coppet. She presided over an anti-Napoleon salon, which included Benjamin Constant and August Wilhelm Schlegel, turning into a dazzling intellectual powerhouse.In December 1804 she travelled to Italy and in 1807 she published what became her best-known work, Corinne ou l'Italie. The central character, an idealised self-portrait, is crowned on the Capitol in Rome for her talents. She dies after an unhappy love affair. The theme of the genius who is outside society was one she had picked up from the German Romantics.
De l'Allemagne
Madame de Staël spent the summer of 1810 at the château of Chaumont, the home of her American agent. Because it was just outside the 40-league limit of Paris, she was given permission to stay there. She worked there on the proofs of her book De l’Allemagne (On Germany), one of the most important books of the early nineteenth century. It introduced the philosophy of German Romanticism (a word she coined) to the rest of Europe and was to be profoundly influential. |
| An important work of literary criticism and philosophy Pulped on Napoleon's orders |
Although Madame de Staël maintained that her book was purely literary, it angered Napoleon because it praised England and Germany but did not mention France. Jean Marie René Savary, the Minister of Police, told her eldest son, Auguste:
You think, Monsieur, that we have waged war in Germany for six years so that a person as well known as Madame your mother, should publish a book without even mentioning us. The book will be burned and we should have put its author in Vincennes [prison].
Madame de Staël was now under virtual house-arrest at Coppet. Schegel was forced to leave Geneva and Constant had married. In this period of loneliness she took a new lover, a twenty-three-year-old Swiss Piedmontese called John Rocca. On 7 April 1812, at the age of forty-six, she secretly gave birth to a son.
The long journey to England
Napoleon’s invasion of Russia gave her the chance to escape. Her destination was England – a country she had always admired as the home of liberty. But how to get there when the Channel ports were closed to her? On 23 May 1812 she left Coppet secretly. She travelled to Russia via Bern, Vienna and Kiev, and arrived in Moscow on2 August. She left for St Petersburg a few weeks before Napoleon arrived. On 24 September she arrived in Stockholm, where she set up a salon.On 17 June 1813 she arrived in England, where she was given a triumphant reception. She annoyed radicals like Lord Byron by her dislike of Napoleon and what they saw as her uncritical admiration for all things British. She astounded others by her lack of decorum and her offences against female propriety.
On 4 November 1813 John Murray published De l’Allemagne. It sold out in three days.
Return to France
With Napoleon’s defeat and abdication in the spring of 1814, the Bourbon dynasty was restored. In May Louis XVIII, the brother of Louis XVI, returned to France. Madame de Staël was not an enthusiast for the restored dynasty but she was eager to settle once more in Paris. Later that month, accompanied by Rocca, Albertine and Schlegel, she landed at Calais. On 25 May she inaugurated a new salon in Paris, where she received Tsar Alexander of Russia, other foreign royals and Talleyrand, the great survivor of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period.On 6 March 1815 Paris learned of Napoleon’s return from Elba. A dismayed Madame de Staël fled to Coppet. She still distrusted Napoleon deeply, but she believed he would be defeated and feared for the fate of France, conquered for the second time.
After Waterloo she travelled to Italy with Rocca for the sake of his health. She returned to Coppet in June 1816 for her last and most brilliant summer there.
Lord Byron, who had left England to escape his matrimonial troubles, was staying across the lake at the Villa Diodati. He was a frequent visitor to Coppet. He wrote to a friend, ‘I am indebted for many kind courtesies to Our Lady of Coppet’.
Marriage and death
On 10 October Madame de Staël secretly married John Rocca at Coppet. She returned to Paris, where she managed to persuade the Duke of Wellington, the head of the army of occupation, to reduce troop numbers.She died on 14 July 1817. She was buried next to her parents at Coppet. Her son and daughter, Auguste and Albertine, ensured that her Considérations sur la Révolution française, with its ferocious attack on Napoleon as a monster of egotism was published in the following year.
Conclusion
- Mary Wollstonecraft and Madame de Staël were both profoundly affected by the French Revolution. They were both in Paris at the end of 1792 though their paths never crossed.
- Both later wrote about the French Revolution. Wollstonecraft was more sympathetic than Staël but both believed that its noble ideals had become corrupted.
- While Wollstonecraft was a feminist, de Staël never wrote about women's rights. She became famous through her connections and her extraordinary talents but this did not make her an advocate of women's rights.
- De Staël was the greatest female celebrity of her day, whereas Wollstonecraft was much less well known. Perhaps, however, she is now the more influential of the two.
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