Germaine de Staël by Fontana Biancamaria;

Author:Fontana, Biancamaria;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2016-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

THE TESTAMENT OF MY THOUGHT

In the introduction to Of the Influence of Passions Staël did not miss the opportunity to cite Constant’s pamphlet Of the Force of the Present Government in highly praiseworthy terms:

Everything invites France to remain a republic; everything dictates that Europe should not follow her example: one of the most inspired works of our time, the one by Benjamin Constant, has addressed admirably the question of the present position of France. Two reasons of sentiment strike me above all: should we suffer a new revolution in order to overturn the one that has established the republic? And the courage of such great armies, the blood of so many heroes, have they been spent in the name of a chimera of which history shall remember only the crimes it has cost?48

The pamphlet, completed by Constant toward the end of March 1796, had been published in both Switzerland and France; the whole text or parts of it were also reprinted in the periodical press, in Le Moniteur and La Sentinelle.49 In mid-April Constant traveled to Paris to promote his tract, as well as to apply for French citizenship in his capacity as descendant of a family of persecuted French Huguenots.50 His work received some favorable notices but also generated the usual speculations about imaginary royalist conspiracies in which the Swiss author might be involved. (Offensive insinuations in the Courier républicain about the nature of his relations with Staël led him to fight a duel with its editor, Louis-François Bertin.)51

As the passage cited above suggests, the main argument outlined in Of the Force of the Present Government was indeed very close to that previously developed by Staël in Reflections on Domestic Peace, though Constant addressed the issue in his own distinctively terse and incisive style: both authors defended the view that France’s republican government must be sustained in order to avoid the evils of a counterrevolution. Constant’s pamphlet also echoed some themes that were prominent in Of the Influence of Passions: the author referred, for example, to the influence of vanity on the attitude of the French political class; he evoked the greater scope given to ambition in republican (as opposed to monarchical) regimes; he also offered a series of considerations on the role of factions and the spirit of party, a subject that was not prominent in his later works. The question of the textual similarities between Constant’s and Staël’s writings in this initial phase of their intellectual cooperation has been analyzed in great detail by the editor of Staël’s correspondence, Béatrice Jasinski.52 One can only agree with her conclusion that, beyond the obvious similarity in the two authors’ political views, it is impossible to measure the precise degree of their influence on one another. In a letter to Roederer—who had reviewed, somewhat critically, Of the Force of the Present Government in the Journal de Paris—Staël gave her own version of her and Constant’s respective positions: “I answer for what I write; but Benjamin’s work is not my own.

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