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The Reception of Considerations - Germaine de Staël, Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution (LF ed.) [2008]

Edition used:

Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution, newly revised translation of the 1818 English edition, edited, with an introduction and notes by Aurelian Craiutu (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008).

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


The Reception of Considerations

Soon after its publication, Considerations became a classic sui generis in France and was regarded as a first-rate contribution to the ongoing political and historical debate on representative government and its institutions in nineteenth-century France and Europe. Staël’s book was praised for having opened the modern era of French liberalism.34 It was hailed as a genuine hymn to freedom based on a perceptive understanding of the prerequisites of political freedom as well as on a detailed analysis of the social, historical, and cultural contexts within which political rights and political obligation exist. As time passed, however, the book fell into oblivion and shared the fate of French nineteenth- and twentieth-century liberals who became marginalized and ignored in their own country. Not surprisingly, Considerations went out of print for more than a century, from 1881 to 1983.

Considerations triggered a number of powerful critiques among Staël’s contemporaries, who disagreed with some of its ideas and interpretations. One such critical response came from Stendhal, who was put off by Staël’s exceedingly harsh treatment of Napoléon. Another came from the pen of Jacques-Charles Bailleul, who published an extensive, two-volume (chapter by chapter) critique of the book.35 But it was Louis de Bonald, a leading writer himself and a prominent representative of the ultraroyalists, who put forward the most trenchant critique of Staël’s book. In Observations on the Work of Madame de Staël Entitled “Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution” (1818), Bonald argued that Madame de Staël failed to give an impartial account of the Revolution, preferring instead to reinterpret its main events in order to vindicate her father’s actions and legacy. The Catholic Bonald went further and attacked Staël’s political ambitions as well as her liberal principles and values and Protestant outlook. Ultraconservatives like Bonald and Maistre disagreed with Staël’s emphasis on the inevitability of the Revolution as well as with her claim that France did not have a proper constitution prior to 1789. If there was anything inevitable in the Revolution, Maistre claimed, it concerned God’s punishment for the excesses of the Enlightenment. Not surprisingly, some regarded the Revolution as a unique (and Satanic) event in history that displayed a degree of destruction and human depravity never seen before.36

[34. ] For an account of the reception of Madame de Staël’s work, see Frank Bowman, “La polémique sur les Considerations sur la Révolution française,” Annales Benjamin Constant, 8–9 (Lausanne and Paris: Institute B. Constant and Jean Tonzot), 225–41. For an analysis of the liberalism of the Coppet group (Necker, Staël, Constant, and Sismondi), see Lucien Jaume, ed., Coppet, creuset de l’esprit libéral, especially the essays by Lucien Jaume (“Coppet, creuset du libéralisme comme ‘culture morale,’” 225–39), Luigi Lacchè (“Coppet et la percée de l’État libéral constitutionnel,” 135–56), and Alain Laquièze (“Le modèle anglais et la responsabilité ministérielle,” 157–76).

[35. ] The full title of Bailleul’s book is Examen critique de l’ouvrage posthume de Mme. la Bnne. de Staël, ayant pour titre: Considérations sur les principaux événemens de la Révolution française.

[36. ] This thesis looms large in Maistre’s Considerations on France, in which he argued that the Revolution contained no single element of good, being “the highest degree of corruption ever known, . . . pure impurity, a horrible assemblage of baseness and cruelty.” (Maistre, Considerations on France, 38–39)