Amber pages:
One of my background agendas for writing this blog - indeed, it has been the background agenda for most of the books and blogs I have written these past forty years - is to provide for myself a structure, and within the structure both a discipline and a goal, in order to find out about people and "things" that I have heard of, that I feel I should know something about, preferably more than just "something", because usually I know absolutely nothing at all about them.
Such is the case with Emanuel Kant, born today in 1724, who I am able to state with total conviction, transcending any idealism about the matter of epistemological definitions, was a philosopher, and then to add, equally certainly, that when we accuse someone of "canting", of "talking a lot of cant", that word is spelled with a "c" and not a "k", and so we are not making accusations against said Emanuel (or even said Immanuel, as some prefer to spell him). And there my knowledge ends, both a priori and a posteriori - and no, I have no idea what are the source and origins and meaning of the word "cant", only that it has nothing to do with the concept of ability, and reason therefore permits and enables me to state, with Kantian certainty, that I absolutely categorically can list him alongside Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer as three of the most important European philosophers of the Enlightenment... though I confess that I know virtually nothing about K or S either...
So, pause, and I will come back when I have undertaken the discipline and fulfilled the goal...
Precisely the same is true of Madame de Stael, born today in 1766, though I do know that her full name was Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein, because I just looked that up...*
Whereas I could write reams (but probably shan't) about:
Nikolai Lenin (whose real name was Vladimir Ilyitch Ulyanov), born today in 1870, the leader of Russia's second revolution in 1917, the Bolshevik Communist one that overthrew the Menshevik government of Kerensky...
And ditto Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, novelist, born today (or possibly tomorrow, the accounts vary, rather like critical opinions of his books, especially "Lolita") in 1899.
Whereas the opportunities for some hyperlinks to some serious jazz music, and an entire album of Joni Mitchell songs, is virtually irresistible when I notice that today, in 1922, the great jazz bass player Charlie Mingus was born... but I already did that, for his obituary, on January 5
Which leaves only two other birthdays that interest me:
So I guess it's back to Kant and Madame de Staël (must remember that umlaut), or the lights on this page may get stuck in amber for a while.
”Ought not every woman, like every man, be able to follow the bent of her own talents?”
Salon-hosting was something she learned from her mother, who operated under the principles defined by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, though Germaine (she preferred that part of her name) had also read Montesquieu, Shakespeare and Dante by the time she was thirteen, and Voltaire and Horace Walpole were among the regulars, so there may well have been some really good arguments.
She might have been married to William Pitt, but instead the lucky man was Baron Erik Magnus Staël von Holstein, a Swedish diplomat in Paris who was by all accounts more interested in daddy's money than his daughter - certainly her habit of taking lovers was not interrupted by the mere formalities of marriage. Nor her writing. Two years later, in 1788, she published her first work, "Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractère de J.J. Rousseau" ("Letters on the works and character of J.J. Rousseau"), and then, in May 1789...
The Estates-General had been meeting to advise the king since Philip IV summoned the first in 1302, bringing together representatives of the nobility, the clergy, and even a few from among the commoners. This one was called to deal with an economic crisis, which meant dad was even more central than the king, and when the two came into conflict, the king fired the finance minister, banished him indeed, a decision that made the populace of Paris so angry they stormed the Bastille. The Neckers fled to their homeland, Chateau Coppet in Switzerland. Madame de Staël stayed at the Swedish embassy in Paris, where the privileges as the consort of an ambassador protected her. This allowed her to continue her salon, frequented by moderates (among them the politically active bishop Talleyrand, who at some point also joined her list of lovers), as well as monarchists (it is said that she took personal charge of the effort to whisk the king away to safety), and the French Constitution its consequence, as already noted.
Germaine had other talents though, besides her interest in politics, and she was determined to follow their bents as well, announcing very formally to her friends that "fine arts and letters will occupy my leisure"; interesting that she regarded writing books as a leisure activity, especially if you consider, say, "Delphine", which tells the story of the Reign of Terror through the only-very-slightly fictionalised account of her fellow authoress Delphine de Sabran, Marquise de Custine. She could have told her own tale too: stopped by the rioting crowds as she tried to flee the declaration of the Republic on September 21st 1792, she was dragged before Robespierre, arrested and interrogated, but eventually allowed to leave the city with a new passport.
I have yet to find a description of Robespierre by her, but I imagine it will have been even less generous than the ones she expressed about Napoléon, who she met twice. "A ruthless tyrant who regarded individuals as pawns on a chessboard which he controlled" is one of them; and in "Considérations sur les principaux événemens de la révolution françoise" ("Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution") she says that he "constantly intimidated me more and more. I had a confused feeling that no emotion of the heart could act upon him." Mind you, he met her after she had published "De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales" ("The Influence of Literature Upon Society"), which was her attempt to pacify the philosophical debates between Rousseau and Montesquieu and Talleyrand and Voltaire over the nature of European civilisation, so it wasn't very likely that he would respond positively. For Napoléon a woman's place was always one of the three Bs, boudoir, bedroom or brothel. And if she did feel the need to follow the bent of her talents, she should stick to knitting.
Bonaparte is not only a man, but a system, (...). One must
therefore examine him as a great problem, whose solution matters for the
thought of all ages.
Madame De Staël, Considerations on the Principal Events of the
French Revolution
In
October 1803 he forced her into exile without a trial - her husband had died the year before so she no longer had diplomatic immunity. Germany first, where Goethe referred to her as an "extraordinary
woman", and Schiller
complimented her intelligence and eloquence. When her father died in April
1804, she took her family to his estate in Switzerland, but skiing was about
the same as knitting in her table of evaluations. To Italy in December exploring
through her writings the differences between northern and southern European societies,
and upsetting Napoléon even more by
publishing "Corinne, ou L'Italie", a novel in theory, though she
found an opportunity to list all the Italian works of art that had been plundered
by Napoléon and taken to France. In
response he ordered her back to Switzerland - which simply meant turning her
salon into a free hotel, and air-b-and-b-ing every other intellectual of the
banished order. Stendhal described it
as "the general headquarters of European thought".
Next
"De l'Allemagne" ("On Germany"), which one of the websites
I have been plundering for this biography describes as "one of the most
influential works of the 19th century". It came out of her conversations
with Goethe and Schiller, and suggested that their Germany,
Weimar Germany, provided Europe with a supreme ethical and aesthetic model;
sadly Hitler never read it.
But
Napoléon did - or probably had some
junior give him a briefing paper. Because she stuck her finger right up his
nose by coming to France to publish it, and including criticisms both of the French
political structures he had introduced, and of Napoléon
himself. Surprise, surprise, he sent her into exile once again. And
had the book pulped.
Four
months of travelling, then to late-husband-land in Sweden, where she began but left
unfinished a memoir that would have been called "Dix années d'exil" ("Ten
Years' Exile"). Instead to England, where she was the darling of some new-boy British poet who had described her as Europe's greatest living writer, "with
her pen behind her ears and her mouth full of ink". George Gordon his name, though he was
introduced to her as Lord Byron.
And
then came the beginning of the downfall of Napoléon;
as he set out for Elba, she set out for Paris, started to write again, revived
her salon. But then he revived, albeit briefly, and she to the safety of
Switzerland where she married a wannabe author two decades younger than herself, Albert Jean Michel de Rocca. Until news came of Waterloo, final defeat, abdication. A holiday in
Italy that could have been a piece of pure symbolism; then back to Paris, where
she died, and this time the symbolism is unavoidable, however accidental, on Bastille
Day, July 14 1817.
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