Like most authors, Germaine de Staël and Benjamin Constant were naturally preoccupied with the possible impact of their work on posterity; yet neither of them ever imagined that their sentimental partnership might itself become an inspirational model for future generations. Unlike that other famous literary couple to whom they are often compared – Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir – they were not inclined to be smug about their association, idealizing it as the superior union of free spirits; on the contrary, they soon came to view their life together as an unmitigated disaster, one from which they made protracted, if unsuccessful, attempts to extricate themselves.

So what is it that makes de Staël and Constant so interesting as a couple? Contemporaries would have replied unhesitatingly that their genius for brilliant conversation shone most brightly when they were in each other’s company, that one could not claim to have known either of them, unless one had seen them performing together. This double-act dimension of the relationship is unfortunately lost for us, as are all but a few of the many letters they exchanged over the years. In a spirited “dual biography”, Renée Winegarten retraces the evolution of the partnership in an attempt to place it on firmer ground; unsurprisingly, perhaps, this comparative exercise brings to light more differences than similarities between the two protagonists.

Constant and de Staël were in their late twenties when they first met in 1794, just after the fall of the Jacobin regime. Both came from Swiss families of French Protestant descent (though de Staël had been born and raised in France) and were united by a common dislike of their quiet, provincial Swiss background. Both had been child prodigies and impressively, if unconventionally, educated; they shared broad intellectual concerns, a taste for glittering conversation and caustic wit, and a passionate interest in the complex political legacy of the Revolution. At the time, however, the affinity between them did not go much further.

At the age of twenty-eight, de Staël could already be described as a celebrity, indeed a phenomenon. Daughter of the wealthy banker and former minister Jacques Necker, wife of the Swedish ambassador to Paris, mistress to another exiled minister, the Count of Narbonne, she was an important public figure in her own right as well as an influential salon hostess and a writer with several published works to her credit. As a girl she had met the most prominent personalities of the Enlightenment, from Voltaire to Diderot, from Reynal to Gibbon, many of them family friends or regular guests at her mother’s salon; as a young wife she had experienced the rituals of the declining Bourbon court and witnessed at close range the unfolding of the Revolution, advising her father, following the debates at the National Assembly, and befriending the leaders of its various political factions. Forced into exile by the Terror, she continued to entertain a tight network of contacts both inside France and abroad: in short, she knew everybody who was anybody in post-Revolutionary society. By comparison, Constant’s position was far more obscure. He was the rebellious son of a provincial nobleman and career officer, and his vague ambitions were in any case disproportionate to his uncertain prospects. While de Staël lived at the heart of French society, he was travelling aimlessly through Europe, leading the life of an ancien régime libertine, accumulating gambling debts, a vast cosmopolitan erudition, and a string of unfinished literary projects.

Suspicious at first of de Staël’s fame, Constant was instantly mesmerized by her charms; she thought he had the making of a “second Montesquieu” – in modern parlance, she recognized his potential. Soon they joined forces in the conquest of a Parisian society that was just recovering from the traumas of the Revolution. He began to make a name for himself as a pamphleteer and aspiring politician, while her salon became once again the centre of intense political activity. Unfortunately the collapse of the tottering government of the Directory and Napoleon’s advent to power with the coup of Brumaire in 1799 pushed them gradually into political opposition and, eventually, into a protracted exile that placed a lot of strain on their relationship.

There is enough evidence to suggest that they were from the start emotionally and sexually unsuited to one another. For one thing, neither was the other’s type: she liked grand aristocrats with virile, military looks and stylish manners; he favoured simpering sentimental beauties or, failing that, compliant young prostitutes. She loved company and managed to produce an impressive volume of publications while leading an exhaustingly busy social life. He needed calm and solitude to concentrate on his never-completed works, and longed for domestic peace and country retreats. He found her possessive, excessively demanding and sexually uninteresting; she accused him of being disloyal and ungrateful. They were only united in their shared taste for dramatic scenes, rivalling each other in the display of floods of tears, hysterics, fainting fits and suicide threats.

While Sartre and Beauvoir rejected marriage on principle as a repressive bourgeois institution, Constant and de Staël had nothing against marriage as such, provided it was to somebody else: both were married (though estranged from their spouses) when they first met, and both had secretly remarried other partners by the time their liaison came to an end. They briefly contemplated the possibility of marriage after the death of de Staël’s first husband, but in the end neither seemed to think it would be a good idea. Intellectual affinity – the need for constant stimulation and exchange – was the fatal attraction that kept them together, against all odds, for nearly two decades.

One of the issues Winegarten tries to address in her comparative approach is how the balance of power between the two shifted through time, following the ups and downs of their respective fortunes. To begin with, de Staël was clearly the dominant partner: in addition to a forceful personality she had the reputation, the connections and the money that made Constant’s public career possible. Later on, however, she became more vulnerable and dependent on him. The death of her husband in 1802, and especially that of her beloved father in 1804, made her status and financial circumstances more uncertain, depriving her of the strong support Constant was never quite able to provide. Although they were united in their opposition to Napoleon’s regime, she was from the start the main target of public hostility, attracting vicious attacks in the press; moreover, she alone was submitted to systematic persecution by the authorities and, finally, to banishment from France.

It is difficult not to attribute this treatment to a gender bias, to the intolerance that public opinion in general, and the notoriously misogynistic Napoleon in particular, felt towards a woman who persisted in attracting attention and taking an active part in political life. Yet the question of gender in relation to de Staël is complex and very difficult to assess, as Angelica Goodden makes apparent in Madame de Staël: The dangerous exile. Goodden provides a detailed and elaborate reconstruction of the experience of exile in relation to the forging of de Staël’s major literary works, all produced while she was forcibly kept away from Paris and the French political scene. The assumption is that, by depriving her of the public space she craved, Napoleon unwittingly provided the stimulus that turned her into a major author; that by exiling her from France, he allowed her to develop a broader European perspective that her early writings had lacked. This idea of exile as a source of creative freedom is not new; but in Goodden’s interpretation the notion of exile becomes a cipher for the condition of the woman writer, condemned to a permanent tension between her own female experience and her aspiration to genderless creation, between her private self and her public persona. This tension is well illustrated by the attitude of de Staël’s critics, who accused her simultaneously of being “unfeminine” – in her appearance, manners and sensibility – and “too feminine” – that is to say, emotional and incoherent – in her writings.

Even so, placing de Staël neatly within a gender perspective seems an impossible task. Her own beliefs about the role of women in society followed the rather discouraging line adopted by Rousseau: she thought women morally superior to men, victims of the unfair double standards of society, but also emotionally too vulnerable for the tasks of public life and active citizenship. These notions were prominent in her writings, but had no limiting impact whatsoever on her conduct, except perhaps in the care she displayed in preserving proprieties (she never contemplated divorce, and carefully protected those of her children who were not her husband’s from any suspicion of illegitimacy). In fact, she shaped her own life and created her own exceptional destiny, ignoring all constraints, pushing herself well beyond the prospects that birth and social privilege could have granted her in the normal course of things. It is unclear, moreover, whether the hostility pamphleteers directed towards her, both during and after the Revolution, was mainly the product of a gender bias, rather than the measure of her political influence and of what she represented. Her father, when a minister, had been the target of similarly vicious attacks, often loaded in the same way with obscenity and sexual innuendo. As to Napoleon, though his prejudices against women cannot be disputed, it is just possible that in exiling de Staël rather than Constant, he might have correctly identified her as the more dangerous and influential enemy.

If during her life she became the victim of attacks and persecution, it would be misleading to read her politics only in terms of contestation and militancy, in a “woman against the system” kind of perspective. Historical circumstances led her to oppose the action of two arbitrary regimes: first Revolutionary terrorism and, later, Napoleon’s personal rule. Inevitably, the language mobilized by this opposition was that of the uncompromising, radical defence of fundamental moral values threatened by despotism; she used it passionately and most eloquently, as, incidentally, did Constant in his anti-Napoleonic pamphlets The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation. But this was only one side of de Staël’s involvement in politics: the other side consisted of a realistic approach to the exercise of power, based on moderation, compromise and the pursuit of consensus. Ordinary politics – with its vices and limitations – was something she understood very well and identified with deeply, even if she could only ever practise it by proxy. Her remarkable political intelligence when it came to contemporary events, so clearly deployed in her posthumous Considerations on the French Revolution, cannot be explained without this strong feeling for everyday political realities; it is ironic that it was only after her death in 1817 that Constant was able to develop a comparable sensibility.

“But was it love?”, asks Winegarten. As the biographical evidence is rehearsed once again – the famous phrases, the momentous episodes, the witnesses’ contradictory impressions – the question is left hanging in the air. Short of some miraculous archival finds, there are no striking revelations to be expected on this front. Constant and de Staël were certainly “in love” at some stage or other of their liaison. Both, however, were better at intellectual friendship, at intimacy within a circle of like-minded people, than at the kind of exclusive romantic union they both imagined in their novels. Whatever the nature of their relationship, French romantic fiction, the history of literature, modern constitutional theory and liberal politics would be a little different, and certainly poorer, without it.

Renée Winegarten
GERMAINE DE STAËL AND BENJAMIN CONSTANT
A dual biography
336pp. Yale University Press. Paperback, £20 (US $35).
978 0 300 119251

Angelica Goodden
MADAME DE STAËL
The dangerous exile
342pp. Oxford University Press. £45 (US $90).
978 0 19 923809 5

Biancamaria Fontana’s Montaigne’s Politics: Authority and governance in the “Essais” was published earlier this year. She is Professor at the Institut d’Études Politiques, Université de Lausanne.

Explore The TLS

• TLS Selections

• TLS Archives

• TLS Arguments

• TLS Writers

• TLS Letters

• Poetry in the TLS

• Then & Now