Conversation and Censorship: De l'Allemagne and the British Reviews

263 Conversation and censorship: De l’Allemagne and the British reviews ERIC GIDAL Presenting his translation of the correspondence between Schiller and Goethe in the winter of 1803-1804 regarding Mme de Staël’s visits and conversations in Weimar and Jena to his readers in Fraser’s magazine for town and country for 1832, Thomas Carlyle offers a compelling portrait of his times: In this age, by some called the Locomotive, when men travel with all manner of practical, scientific, and unscientific purposes; to fish Mexican oysters, and convert the heathen; in search of the picturesque, in search of cheap land, good groceries, bibliography, wives, new cookery, and, generally, though without effect, in search of happiness; when even kings, queens and constitutions, are so often sent on their travels; and what with railways, what with revolutions, absolutely nothing will stay in its place – the interest that once attached to mere travellers is gone: no Othello could now by such means win the simplest Desdemona.1 Carlyle’s suggestive inventory of literal and figurative dislocation characterises modernity as motion, a logic of dispersion, both geographic and social, that erases distinctions and diminishes wonder.2 By contrast, he distinguishes Staël as a recuperative force of exiled ennui whose search for ‘noble characters’ and ‘national physiognomies’ elevated her above the incessant fluctuations in men and manners and the revolutions in states and societies. She sought ‘to read the living book of man, as written in various tongues; nay, to read the chrestomathy and diamond edition of that living polyglot book of man, wherein, for clear eyes, all his subordinate performances, practices and arrangements, or the best spirit of these stand legible’. Carlyle casts Staël’s travels through Germany as a quest ‘not for this or that object of culture, this or that branch of wisdom; but for culture generally, for wisdom itself’. Her experiences in Germany as related in De l’Allemagne (1810-1813) appear to Carlyle as ‘a 1. 2. Thomas Carlyle, ‘Schiller, Goethe and Madame de Staël’, Fraser’s magazine for town and country 5:26 (March 1832), p.171-76 (171). Though silent on this article, Jonathan Arac offers suggestive meditations on the railroad as a figure of modernity in the nineteenth-century imagination; see Commissioned spirits: the shaping of social motion in Dickens, Carlyle, Melville and Hawthorne (New Brunswick, NJ, 1979). See also Ian Carter, Railways and culture in Britain: the epitome of modernity (Manchester, 2001). 264 Eric Gidal true tour of knight-errantry, and search of spiritual adventures and feats of intellect – the only knight-errantry practicable in these times’. Such valorisation is at once nostalgic and proactive. Carlyle poses Staël’s comparative literary reflections as a chivalric antidote to an age of dissipation and revives her association with Schiller and Goethe within a ‘rose-coloured cloud’ of poetic imagination.3 Yet Carlyle weaves this majestic mythology only to unravel it, moving, as he puts it, from ‘fancy’ to ‘science’ in translating a correspondence that reveals the mundane concerns and temperamental conflicts just behind the tapestry of Staël’s poetic achievement: ‘The ‘‘spiritual Amazon’’ was a mortal woman; those philosophic joustings and symposia were also transacted on our common clay earth – behind that gorgeous arras, of which we see not the knotty side, who knows what vulgar, angular stone and mortar lies concealed!’4 The ‘stone and mortar’, revealed both in the correspondence and in a select passage from Goethe’s autobiography, concerns primarily the ongoing irritation both men felt with Staël’s inquisitive sociability and impassioned oratory, an ‘immeasurable difference in temper and way of thought’ which repeatedly drew them out of what Schiller guarded as his ‘productive solitude’. Goethe’s reflections in particular emphasise a distinction between the French traveller’s wit and exuberance and the ‘silent, collected posture’ of the man of duty: ‘To philosophise in society, means to talk with vivacity about insoluble problems. This was her peculiar pleasure and passion. Naturally, too, she was wont to carry it, in such speaking and counter-speaking, up to those concerns of thought and sentiment which properly should not be spoken of except between God and the individual.’ Both Schiller and Goethe deem Staël as temperamentally incapable of metaphysical speculation, ‘the carbonic gas in which she dies’, as Schiller puts it, ‘for what we call poetry there is no sense in her: from such works it is only the passionate, the oratorical, the intellectual, that she can appropriate’. But neither Carlyle, nor Schiller, nor Goethe intend a simple repudiation of Staël’s ambitions and all three cast their complaints and ironies within a laudatory tribute. Carlyle leaves the final words to Goethe, who reflects: that work on Germany, which owed its origin to such social conversations, must be looked on as a mighty implement, whereby, in the Chinese wall of antiquated prejudices which divided us from France, a broad gap was broken; so that across the Rhine, and, in consequence of this, across the Channel, our neighbours at last took closer knowledge of us; and now the whole remote West is open to our influences.5 3. 4. 5. Carlyle, ‘Schiller, Goethe and Madame de Staël’, p.171. Carlyle, ‘Schiller, Goethe and Madame de Staël’, p.171. Carlyle, ‘Schiller, Goethe and Madame de Staël’, p.172-76. Conversation and censorship: ‘De l’Allemagne’ and the British reviews 265 Goethe borrows this image from Staël’s own claim in De l’Allemagne that ‘car nous n’en sommes pas, j’imagine, à vouloir élever autour de la France littéraire la grande muraille de la Chine, pour empêcher les idées du dehors d’y pénétrer’, a passage marked for censorship with the note that despite Staël’s compliance ‘les gendarmes envoyés par le ministre de la Police firent l’office de censeurs d’une façon plus brutale, en mettant le livre entier en pièces’.6 Goethe’s tribute thus ironically highlights how this ‘mighty implement’ of European Romanticism owes its origins not only to conversation, but to censorship, and how Staël constructs a model of national literature as a record of the one and a repudiation of the other. Carlyle’s whimsical celebration, Schiller’s splenetic irritation and Goethe’s sincere tribute give credence to the proposition now forwarded by Siskin and Warner that ‘Enlightenment is an event in the history of mediation’.7 Ever the salonnière, Staël’s literary accomplishments in De l’Allemagne seem inextricable from her insistence upon conversation as the privileged medium of philosophical exchange, transgressing national boundaries and ‘antiquated prejudices’ through a free reciprocity of intellectual inquiry. But it is the printed word and the categorical authority of the modern nation-state that enable her to re-establish those ideals in the face of Napoleonic tyranny. John Isbell notes that De l’Allemagne ‘has the rare distinction of being a work of ostensible literary criticism whose entire first edition was pulped by government troops’, and the story of how Napoleon first censored and then destroyed the 1810 text has been told many times, not least by Staël herself in the preface added to the French and English editions finally published in London in 1813.8 The text itself bears the reflexive traces of Napoleonic censorship on its very pages, marking and annotating the passages excised by the French authorities, and thereby signalling in its material form the breakdown of free exchange at the bedrock of Staël’s vision for literary society. In concert with her extensive meditations on the reflective isolation of the Germans, which she contrasts repeatedly with the sparkling pleasantries and witty exchanges of the French, these marks of censorship isolate De l’Allemagne from the conversational ideal of French Enlightenment only to resituate it in the print culture of England which 6. 7. 8. Mme de Staël, De l’Allemagne, vol.1, p.23. ‘This is Enlightenment: an invitation in the form of an argument’ in This is Enlightenment, p.1. John Isbell, ‘Censors, police and De l’Allemagne’s lost 1810 edition: Napoleon pulps his enemies’, Zeitschrift fur französische Sprache und Literatur 105.2 (1995), p.156-70 (156). See also Simone Balayé ‘Madame de Staël et le gouvernement impérial en 1810; le dossier de la suppression de De l’Allemagne’, Cahiers staëliens 19 (1974), p.3-17; and Michael Polowetzky, A Bond never broken: the relations between Napoleon and the authors of France (Rutherford, NJ, 1993), p.131-38. 266 Eric Gidal finally gives her liberty to publish. In its reflexive form, and in its subsequent reception in the British press, De l’Allemagne provides an index of mediation at the dawn of the locomotive age. Siskin and Warner’s recent project aims less to contest than to sidestep intellectual histories of Enlightenment critique in favour of material histories of enabling and proliferating technologies (postal systems, public newspapers, literary journals, associational practices, protocols of exchange) and the social, political and philosophical transformations these evolving systems of mediation produced. The collection of essays recently published under the claim that This is Enlightenment addresses, through a variety of case studies, the historical reciprocities between Enlightenment and mediation, a model of cultural history self-consciously motivated by a perceived crisis in both the intellectual and the technological developments for which it seeks to account. Siskin and Warner locate this crisis both in the ‘saturation’ of mediation congruent with the rise of Romanticism as a Kantian logic of Enlightenment-inprocess at the end of the eighteenth century and in our own contemporary moment of electronic and digital reproduction. Carlyle locates it in the period of the locomotive engine whose history, beginning with Richard Trevithick’s invention of the first steam locomotive in 1803-1804 in Wales, coincides exactly with Staël’s travels in Germany.9 In this context, we may understand Carlyle’s translation of Schiller and Goethe’s correspondence on Staël for the readers of Fraser’s magazine less as an exercise in heroic nostalgia in retreat from modernity and more as a reflexive engagement with the ongoing history of mediation in which both he and Goethe grant Staël significant status. His translation reminds his readers not only of Staël’s self-anointed position as an agent of cultural mediation – between North and South, classicism and Romanticism, antiquity and modernity – but also of the mechanisms of mediation by which the tension between ‘productive isolation’ and ‘social conversation’ was transformed into a ‘mighty implement’ for the advancement of national literature. What Carlyle refers to as ‘culture generally’, the subject of Staël’s chivalric quest, itself names a modern logic of mediation – between individual and social identities, between historical and geographical contingencies, between ethical and political norms – that is as bound to ‘subordinate performances, practices, and arrangements’, as the ‘gorgeous arras’ of De l’Allemagne.10 Such meditations do more than position Staël’s work at the cusp of the industrial age, for her own reflections on literature and culture speak to 9. See Angus Sinclair, Development of the locomotive engine: a history of the growth of the locomotive from its most elementary form (New York, 1907). 10. On culture as mediation, see William Ray, The Logic of culture: authority and identity in the modern era (Malden, MA, and Oxford, 2001). Conversation and censorship: ‘De l’Allemagne’ and the British reviews 267 the historicity of mediation. Looking back more to the salon than to any printed medium of the eighteenth century, Staël emphasises rhetoric rather than representation, presenting literature as a conduit of sociability and conversation to be judged by standards of eloquence and taste.11 ‘En France on ne lit guère un ouvrage que pour en parler’ she observes approvingly in De l’Allemagne, ‘et quelle société de l’âme peut-on faire avec un livre qui ne seroit lui-même que l’écho de la société!’12 Her assessments of national literatures throughout her writings repeatedly emphasise the aural qualities of different languages and the sincerity of expression among authors, qualities that are not so much byproducts of social institutions as they are homologous manifestations. Her distinctions between Italian, Spanish, French, English and German cultures return repeatedly to qualities of conversation rather than technologies of reproduction and hence imagine literature as not only characteristic of society but essentially identical with it. It is the orator – or improvisatrice – and not the writer or publisher whom Staël models as the heroic man or woman of letters, and hence her history of literature from Homer to 1789 pays no notice to the printing press, public literacy or any other aspects of print mediation stressed by other conjectural histories of the time. Instead, she emphasises Christianity, Northern invasions and the influence of women as the key factors separating the ancient from the modern world. Her account of literature is profoundly sociological insofar as it stresses ‘quelle est l’influence de la religion, des mœurs et des loix sur la littérature, et quelle est l’influence de la littérature sur la religion, les mœurs et les loix’,13 but her account of influence is based on the oral dynamics of immediate conversation. If the progress of literature, for Staël, is ‘le perfectionnement de l’art de penser et de s’exprimer’14 then literature names less the product than the operations of a social collective. Hence Staël positions liberty not only as a political ideal but as the precondition for the advancement of literature. ‘Il est impossible’, she 11. Barbara Naumann has recently argued for conversation as a transgressive and ‘transmedial’ model of communication in Corinne ou l’Italie; see ‘Emphase: Madame de Staëls Improvisation und die Trunkenheit der Rede’ in Trunkenheit: Kulturen des Rausches, ed. Thomas Strassle and Simon Zumsteg (Amsterdam, 2008), p.129-51. See also Brunhilde Wehinger, Conversation um 1800: Salonkultur und literarische Autorschaft bei Germaine de Staël (Frey, 2002) and Margaret Bloom, ‘Conversation in the writings of Mme de Staël’, PMLA 48.3 (1933), p.861-88. On conversation as a mediation of Enlightenment more generally, see Benedetta Craveri, The Age of conversation, translated by Teresa Waught (New York, 2005); Goodman, The Republic of letters; and Katie Halsey and Jane Slinn (eds), The Concept and practice of conversation in the long eighteenth century, 1688-1848 (Newcastle, 2008). 12. Staël, De l’Allemagne, vol.2, p.13. 13. Staël, De la littérature, p.15. 14. Staël, De la littérature, p.28. 268 Eric Gidal argues in De la littérature (1800), ‘que, dans un état libre, l’autorité publique se passe du consentement véritable des citoyens qu’elle gouverne. Le raisonnement et l’éloquence sont les liens naturels d’une association républicaine. Que pouvez-vous sur la volonté libre des hommes, si vous n’avez pas cette force, cette vérité de langage qui pénètre les âmes, et leur inspire ce qu’elle exprime?’15 Expressing a logic of mediation as much as a political or philosophical proposition, Staël’s emphasis upon liberty seeks to recuperate the practices of the Parisian salon for the governance of the French nation. Dena Goodman has articulated the centrality of the eighteenth-century salon in creating the ‘social and discursive practices’ by which the ideals of reciprocity and benevolent governance were developed and promoted in the French Enlightenment. Suzanne Necker would write that ‘le gouvernement d’une conversation ressemble beaucoup à celui d’un Etat; il faut qu’on se doute à peine de l’influence qui la conduit’,16 a model of governance in which the salonnière and the good taste she promoted were the guarantors of successful exchange. As Goodman puts it, ‘true liberty rested on acceptance of the equal right of each to speak, on mutual respect for the rules of discourse by which such rights were guaranteed, and on acceptance of the salonnière’s role in enforcing them’.17 Staël’s extensive censuring of bad taste in the early years of the Revolution in De la littérature seeks to reclaim such governance in the promotion of a free society: La politesse est le lien que la société a établi entre les hommes étrangers les uns aux autres. Il y a des vertus qui vous attachent à votre famille, à vos amis, aux malheureux; mais dans tous les rapports qui n’ont point pris encore le caractère d’un devoir, l’urbanité des mœurs prépare les affections, rend la conviction plus facile, et conserve à chaque homme le rang que son mérite doit lui obtenir dans le monde.18 Reciprocity and equality become in this discourse less abstract ideals than protocols of exchange offered from the salon to the nation in the hopes of redeeming the noblest aspirations of the Revolution. Liberty, for Staël, becomes synonymous with conversation, a rhetorical apparatus of mediation in the interest of an advancing society. But if De la littérature may be read as an attempt to recuperate and sustain the practices of the salon as a mechanism for social perfectibility, then De l’Allemagne must be read as an elegy for that world, both from the 15. Staël, De la littérature, p.29. 16. Suzanne Curchod Necker, Mélanges extraits des manuscrits de Mme Necker, ed. Jacques Necker, 3 vols (Paris, Charles Pougens, 1798), vol.2, p.1, as cited in Goodman, The Republic of letters, p.90. 17. Goodman, The Republic of letters, p.111. 18. Staël, De la littérature, p.303. Conversation and censorship: ‘De l’Allemagne’ and the British reviews 269 introspective and isolating milieu of German literary culture and in response to the implacable authority of the Napoleonic censors: Il me semble reconnu que Paris est la ville du monde où l’esprit et le goût de la conversation sont le plus généralement répandus; et ce qu’on appelle le mal du pays, ce regret indéfinissable, de la patrie, qui est indépendant des amis même qu’on y a laissés, s’applique particulièrement à ce plaisir de causer que les Français ne retrouvent nulle part au même degré que chez eux.19 If all philosophy is homesickness, as Novalis famously quipped, then Staël suggests that the French are permanently on the road. She cites Bacon’s opinion ‘que la conversation n’étoit pas un chemin qui conduisoit à la maison, mais un sentier où l’on se promenoit au hasard avec plaisir’,20 yet finds the Germans, as it were, solidly at home: ‘Une femme d’esprit a dit que Paris étoit le lieu du monde où l’on pouvoit le mieux se passer de bonheur’: c’est sous ce rapport qu’il convient si bien à la pauvre espèce humaine; mais rien ne sauroit faire qu’une ville d’Allemagne devı̂nt Paris, ni que les Allemands pussent, sans se gâter entièrement, recevoir comme nous le bienfait de la distraction. A force de s’échapper à eux-mêmes ils finiroient par ne plus se retrouver.21 The first witticism, marked in quotations, was, as Staël observes in a footnote, ‘supprimé par la censure sous prétexte qu’il y avoit tant de bonheur à Paris maintenant qu’on n’avoit pas besoin de s’en passer’.22 Her conflation of national characters between the metaphysical solitude of the German and the pleasing dissipation of the French becomes, under the mark of Napoleonic censorship, a lamentation for the salon and the model of freedom it represents. Tyranny converts happiness from a condition of free exchange to a false conformity to dictatorial will with the only alternative appearing to be a noble but isolated spirit of idealist speculation. Yet the markings of this passage and the sarcastic retort of the footnote point to a third alternative present throughout the text of De l’Allemagne, namely the British press in which this book was being freely produced, translated and distributed. ‘En Angleterre’, she notes in this same chapter, ‘on permet l’originalité aux individus, tant la masse est bien réglée!’23 and throughout De l’Allemagne it is English liberty that offers a third way to counter both French obsequiousness and German rigidity. Under the pressure of the censor, Staël’s eulogy for the French salon becomes a vindication of the British freedom of the press. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. Staël, De l’Allemagne, vol.1, p.158-59. Staël, De l’Allemagne, vol.1, p.161, italics original. Staël, De l’Allemagne, vol.1, p.166, italics original. Staël, De l’Allemagne, vol.1, p.166. Staël, De l’Allemagne, vol.1, p.170. 270 Eric Gidal In the preface to De l’Allemagne, Staël reprints the claim of General Savary, duke of Rovigo, that ‘votre dernier ouvrage n’est point français’, and retorts that ‘comme je me garde bien de voir en lui le représentant de la France, c’est aux Français tels que je les ai connus que j’adresserois avec confiance un écrit où j’ai tâché, selon mes forces, de relever la gloire des travaux de l’esprit humain’.24 The text which follows performs this task admirably and stands to this day as a key critical work of comparative literary analysis in the service of anti-imperial activism. But while it is addressed ‘aux Français tels que je les ai connus’, its most immediate audience, given the circumstances of its publication, was British. ‘L’énergie de l’action ne se développe que dans ces contrées libres et puissantes où les sentiments patriotiques sont dans l’âme comme le sang dans les veines, et ne se glacent qu’avec la vie’, she writes at the end of her second chapter on the manners of the Germans. This passage was not marked by the censors but may likely have contributed to the book’s suppression. As Staël notes to her English audience, Je n’ai pas besoin de dire que c’étoit l’Angleterre que je voulois désigner par ces paroles; mais quand les noms propres ne sont pas articulés, la plupart des censeurs, hommes éclairés, se font un plaisir de ne pas comprendre. Il n’en est pas de même de la police; elle a comme une sorte d’instinct vraiment remarquable contre les idées libérales sous quelque forme qu’elles se présentent et dans ce genre elle dépiste comme un habile chien de chasse tout ce qui pourrait réveiller dans l’esprit des Français leur ancien amour pour les lumières et la liberté.25 Conversely, it was the very concluding paragraph of De l’Allemagne which Staël tells us ‘a excité le plus d’indignation à la police contre [son] livre’: Oh, France! Terre de gloire et d’amour! Si l’enthousiasme un jour s’éteignoit sur votre sol, si le calcul disposoit de tout, et que le raisonnement seul inspirât même le mépris des périls, à quoi vous serviroient votre beau ciel, vos esprits si brillants, votre nature si féconde? Une intelligence active, une impétuosité savante vous rendroient les maı̂tres du monde; mais vous n’y laisseriez que la trace des torrents de sable, terribles comme les flots, arides comme le désert.26 This final elegiac paean to France was obviously intended to arouse the ire of the censors, but in the context of its final publication under the mark of suppression, it not only underscores Staël’s contempt of Napoleonic power but inserts the question of mediation directly in between the enthusiasm which Staël claims as the font of all great literature and the durability of a national culture. 24. Staël, De l’Allemagne, vol.1, p.6, 10. 25. Staël, De l’Allemagne, vol.1, p.63. 26. Staël, De l’Allemagne, vol.5, p.230. Conversation and censorship: ‘De l’Allemagne’ and the British reviews 271 The censorship and subsequent suppression of De l’Allemagne in France and the publication of the marked text in London offered the primary object of fascination for the British reviews.27 Many gleefully reproduced the censored passages as an isolated group, converting the censor into an anthologist to underscore a contrast between French tyranny and British liberty that was a mainstay of the press during the Napoleonic wars. The Gentleman’s magazine reprinted a review devoted almost entirely to the book’s suppression and an extensive printing of its excised passages. ‘Our own attention,’ the reviewer confessed, ‘has been principally directed to those casual and incidental touches, which, to the lynx-eyed jealousy of despotism, have probably appeared unfavourable to the permanence of the Tyrant’s power’.28 The Eclectic review suggests that it is ‘from this very persecution [that] the volumes acquire an additional interest. We naturally take the part of an injured person, of a woman and a mother, driven into exile, and experiencing that utter desolation of mind which she had so prophetically and so feelingly described.’29 The Literary panorama focused with similar exclusivity on the narrative of suppression and the censored passages as ‘one of the most curious demonstrations of exquisite apprehension, and latent but irresistible conviction, that ever came under our notice’, and observed that ‘this work on Germany becomes a review of France at the time. It was not so intended; but this extreme sensibility, becoming known, together with the banishment of the authoress, has marked the performance; and now its character is compounded partly of what it is in itself; and partly of what extreme suspicion and jealousy conceived it to be.’30 Censorship thus assumes a signifying function as the notes of suppression record the excesses of Napoleonic power far more explicitly than Staël’s more suggestive reflections. But if the material text of De l’Allemagne signifies France as much as Germany, its notice in the pages of the reviews becomes simultaneously a testimonial to English liberty. The Quarterly review converts Staël’s indignant preface to the British critic’s gratification in repeating the narrative of the work’s destruction: To imitate or to extol Europeans is in China, we believe, illegal; but in Europe it would be difficult to find another instance where an author was, 27. On Staël’s reception in England, see Robert C. Whitford’s still useful ‘Madame de Staël’s literary reputation in England’, University of Illinois studies in language and literature 4 (1918), p.1-62; as well as Escarpit, L’Angleterre dans l’œuvre de Madame de Staël; Roberta J. Forsberg, Madame de Staël and the English (New York, 1967); and Roberto Romani, National character and public spirit in Britain and France, 1750-1914 (Cambridge, 2002), p.85-92. 28. Gentleman’s magazine (Nov. 1813), p.460-62 (461). 29. Eclectic review 11 (Jan. 1814), p.1-27 (2). 30. Literary panorama 15 (Mar. 1814), p.171-78 (171, 178). 272 Eric Gidal under pain of banishment, forbidden to criticise with fairness or favour the writings and morals of foreigners; of foreigners, above all, whose nations, in every instance but one, were at that moment the allies of her own. Yet, in truth, the policy of such prohibition is altogether consistent with the interests and hazards of an empire built mainly on opinion, and whose ascendancy relies, as that of France so lately did, on a supposed superiority over all the earth in literature no less than arms.31 The Critical review reprinted all of the suppressed passages as a coda, only to suggest ‘it is almost incredible, that these sentences should have terrified the government even of the late Emperor, into an useless act of vandalism – ‘‘England, with all thy faults, we love thee still’’’.32 And the British critic, which had ridiculed Staël in earlier reviews of her treatise on the passions and Delphine, suggested that the marked text of De l’Allemagne forms ‘one of the most curious documents on record in the history of literature and government’. While characterising Staël’s language in gendered and nationalist terms as ‘the eloquent loquacity of her sex and nation’, the review compares her favourably with Tacitus, if primarily to bemoan the tyranny of ‘the soi-disant Trajan of modern times, a Tiberius in malice and a Domitian in persecution’, offsetting an extensive account of the book’s suppression in France with what even the reviewer acknowledged as excessive quotations from its pages. In its celebration of ‘the favourable reception and the general applause which this extraordinary production of female genius has already obtained in England’, the British critic offers perhaps the clearest explication of the recuperative logic by which De l’Allemagne is received in the British press: To Madame de Staël herself it ought to be some consolation for the destruction of the first impression of her work, that by making its first appearance in this free and happy country, the brightest specimen of her moral and intellectual powers has the advantage of coming forward to the present age, and to posterity, in all those ‘fair proportions’, of which it would have been ‘curtailed’, if published in France.33 Reproducing the textual logic of De l’Allemagne in the self-satisfied language of national pride, these reviews equate the nation itself with modes of mediation, suggesting that the political and cultural tensions between Germany and France are resolved if not redeemed in the triumphant publication of Staël’s work. Such self-promotions are deeply ironic given the restrictive stamp taxes and libel and sedition laws that, while stopping short of state censorship, placed significant restraints upon the British press during 31. Quarterly review 10.20 (Jan. 1814), p.355-409 (356). 32. Critical review 5.4 (April 1814), p.359-73 (373). 33. British critic 1 (Mar. 1814), p.504-28 (511, 504, 506, 511). Conversation and censorship: ‘De l’Allemagne’ and the British reviews 273 the Napoleonic wars and the reform agitations which immediately followed, culminating in the ‘Six Acts’ or ‘Gagging Acts’ of 1819.34 While these reviews are eager to use the occasion of De l’Allemagne’s publication to cudgel Napoleon and unite the British war effort under the mantle of liberty, they also lay claim to national literary culture as a privileged position of social and political legitimation. Paul Keen has argued that ‘a belief in the centrality of print culture to British liberty remained one point on which – however differently they might interpret it – opposed critics could still find some measure of common ground’,35 and literature, in this respect, becomes synonymous with the discursive configuration of the nation. It enables otherwise ideologically opposed reviews from the High Church British critic to the progressive Quarterly review to cast De l’Allemagne as a textual embodiment of British freedom, even as they express as much disdain for German metaphysics and religious enthusiasm as they do for French volubility and political submission. These reviews reproduce the triangulation of national character that David Simpson has traced in a cultural resistance to theory constitutive of British Romanticism, a rhetoric of ‘judicious mediation’ that enlisted fears of philosophical materialism and emotional extravagance in the production of a national literary identity.36 As the Quarterly review puts it so succinctly in their review of De l’Allemagne, ‘more active and ambitious than the one, more studious and contemplative than the other, England may be said to form an intermediate link in the chain of which France and Germany are extremities’.37 Hence the British review demurs from the perceived excesses of ‘German illumination which, by the agency of France, had nearly set the universe on fire’ while also critiquing Staël’s celebrations of conversation as ‘too ambitious for ease, and too vague for instruction’: ‘Among a people so thoroughly depraved, conversation, to be decent, must belie their character, and its only escape out of this pollution of sentiment is into the region of badinage, flattery, and frivolity’.38 The British critic opined that readers would find in De l’Allemagne ‘something to offend the taste, and something also to baffle the comprehension of a plain sober-minded Englishman, who naturally dislikes the least appearance of rant or exaggeration, and is not disposed to identify the superficial with the clear, the mystic with the profound, and the extravagant with the 34. See Arthur Aspinall, Politics and the press c.1780-1850 (London, 1949). 35. Paul Keen, The Crisis of literature in the 1790s: print culture and the public sphere (Cambridge, 1999), p.27. 36. David Simpson, Romanticism, nationalism and the revolt against theory (Chicago, IL, 1993), p.84. 37. Quarterly review 10.20 (Jan. 1814) p.355-409 (362). 38. British review 5:10 (Feb. 1814), p.424-70 (428, 432-33). 274 Eric Gidal sublime.’ The book would thus have been far more salutary in France, the reviewer concludes, since ‘in this country there are not as yet, we are happy to believe, any very general symptoms of that coldness at the heart, that deadness to all high and holy feeling, that mental and moral exhaustion, the effect of abandoned manners and venomous opinions, which in France required an intellectual dram, of so ardent a quality as that which Madame de Staël has administered’39 Repeating the common discomfort of the reviews with the third volume on philosophy and religion, the Monthly review summarised its decidedly mixed recommendations as ‘advising our readers to bind up the first and second volumes for preservation, and to burn the third’.40 The publication of De l’Allemagne may be cause for celebration; its contents are another matter. James Mackintosh’s laudatory account in the Edinburgh review is notable in this context, both for the relative brevity with which he treats the book’s suppression in a single opening paragraph and for his unqualified valorisation of Staël’s critical reflections. He notes that ‘the history of the examination and suppression, and the letter from the Minister of Police, given in the preface, are extremely curious. They are characteristical of Napoleon’s government, and documents for the general history of tyranny over literature.’41 But Mackintosh’s primary interest concerns Staël’s unification of French, German and English culture under the mantle of philosophical criticism. Repeating Staël’s contrast of German and French reading habits, as well as the often cited passage that ‘les Anglais ne séparent point, il est vrai, la dignité de l’utilité, et toujours ils sont prêts, quand il le faut, à sacrifier ce qui est utile à ce qui est honorable’,42 Mackintosh suggests that it is the singular achievement of De l’Allemagne to bridge these national practices through a model of philosophical travel: The genius of the philosophical and poetical traveller is of a higher order. It is founded in the power of catching, by a rapid glance, the physiognomy of man and of nature. It is, in one of its parts, an expansion of that sagacity which seizes the character of an individual, in his features, in his expression, in his gestures, in his tones, in every outward sign of his thoughts and feelings. The application of this intuitive power to the varied mass called a Nation, is one of the most rare efforts of the human intellect. The mind and the eye must cooperate, with electrical rapidity, to recal [sic] what a nation has been, to sympathise with their present sentiments and passions, and to trace the workings of national character in amusements, in habits, in institutions and opinions.43 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. British critic, 1 (Mar. 1814), p.504-28 (510-11). Monthly review 76 (Apr. 1815), p.443-44 (443). Edinburgh review 22:43 (Oct. 1813), p.198-238 (198). Staël, De l’Allemagne, vol.2, p.22-23. Edinburgh review 22:43 (Oct. 1813), p.204. Conversation and censorship: ‘De l’Allemagne’ and the British reviews 275 Comparing Staël’s methods to the historical painter, Mackintosh suggests that the naming of the nation from the ‘varied mass’ becomes the new task of literature, one that may bind together the loquacious vivacity of the French, the solemn meditations of the Germans and the public utilitarianism of the English. Mackintosh here echoes Francis Jeffrey’s review of De la littérature from earlier in the same year, which praised Staël’s ‘bold and vigorous attempts to carry the generalising spirit of true philosophy into the history of literature and manners’,44 and he anticipates Carlyle’s later celebration of Staël’s cultural ‘knighterrantry’. The British review and the Monthly review had critiqued explicitly just this generalising spirit as ‘expressing in abstract terms the collective impression of repeated phænomena, and of moralising when she might depict’,45 but in the contest between Napoleonic authoritarianism and British political economy, such bulwark arbiters of taste as the Edinburgh review promote comparative literary reflection as the model of a vibrant national culture.46 Staël would return the favour in her final work, the posthumouslypublished Considérations sur la Révolution française (1818) in which she claimed that ‘grâce à la tolérance, aux institutions politiques et à la liberté de la presse, il y a plus de respect pour la religion et pour les mœurs en Angleterre que dans aucun autre pays de l’Europe’, and singled out the philosophical spirit of the Scottish Enlightenment and the Edinburgh review: ‘La critique littéraire est portée au plus haut point dans les journaux, et particulièrement dans celui d’Edimbourg, où des écrivains faits pour être illustres eux-mêmes, Jeffrey, Playfair, Mackintosh, ne dédaignent point d’éclairer les auteurs par les jugemens qu’ils portent sur eux.’47 Whereas conversation offered Staël the privileged model for a culture of reciprocity in her earlier treatises, print culture now stands as the distinctive medium for the free exchange of ideas. ‘Les journaux politiques ont commencé en même temps que les gouvernemens représantatifs’, she observes, ‘et ces gouvernemens en sont inséparables.’48 Her chapter on the liberty of the press and the state of the police during the time of the Constituent Assembly contrasts the court gazettes of absolute monarchies with the newspapers circulated in a representative government which she compares in turn to the English 44. Edinburgh review 21:41 (Feb. 1813), p.1-50 (3). 45. Monthly review 72 (Dec. 1813), p.421-26 (425). 46. On the ideological agendas and influence of the Edinburgh review, see Biancamaria Fontana, Rethinking the politics of commercial society: the Edinburgh review 1802-1832 (Cambridge, 1985). See also Ian Duncan, ‘Edinburgh, capital of the nineteenth century’ in Romantic metropolis: the urban scene of British culture, 1780-1840 ed. James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin (Cambridge, 2005), p.45-64. 47. Staël, Considérations, p.550-51. 48. Staël, Considérations, p.189. 276 Eric Gidal sermons of 1688. Print continued to circulate under Napoleon, ‘car il ne s’agissoit pas de commander le silence à une nation qui a besoin de faire des phrases dans quelque sens que ce soit, comme le peuple romain avoit besoin de voir les jeux du cirque’, but by simply repeating imperial mantras and brooking no contradiction, the press became a device of ‘tyrannie bavarde’: ‘Car, de même que les troupes réglées sont plus dangereuses que les milices pour l’indépendance des peuples; les écrivains soldés dépravent l’opinion bien plus qu’elle ne pouvoit se dépraver, quand on ne communiquoit que par la parole, et que l’on formoit ainsi son jugement d’après les faits.’49 Echoing the advocacy by Guizot and the Doctrinaires of publicity as the essence of a free society, as well as her father’s conviction in the power of public opinion, Staël holds that the qualities of eloquence and virtue that she sought to promote in De la littérature are only possible in a free society of open exchange.50 Her primary argument in favour of freedom of the press is that it allows for rebuttal, without which ‘l’art de l’imprimerie devient ce que l’on a dit du canon, la dernière raison des rois’.51 Once again it is England that provides the best model, as Staël refashions the spirit of conversation as the guiding principle of English literary culture: La liberté des journaux qu’on a voulu nous représenter comme contraire à la délicatesse des mœurs, en est une des causes les plus efficaces: tout est si connu, si discuté en Angleterre, que la vérité en toutes choses est inévitable; et l’on pourroit se soumettre au jugement du public anglois, comme à celui d’un ami qui entreroit dans les détails de votre vie, dans les nuances de votre caractère, pour peser chaque action ainsi que le veut l’équité, d’après la situation de chaque individu.52 What is materially marked in the pages of De l’Allemagne and explicated by the British reviews becomes a recurrent subject of consideration in her final historical work. Staël offers literature as a principle of mediation between citizens as well as friends, a mechanism of public discussion and a foundation of political power. In resistance to state censorship, national literature comes to name less an aesthetic or social ideal than the rhetorical protocols and enabling technologies of a modern age. 49. 50. 51. 52. Staël, Considérations, p.368. On the Doctrinaires and freedom of the press, see Craiutu, Liberalism under siege, p.245-72. Staël, Considérations, p.369, italics original. Staël, Considérations, p.552.