Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Men with Muskets, Women with Lyres: Nationality, Citizenship, and Gender in the Writings of Germaine de StaëlSusanne HillmanOn 23 May 1812 Germaine de Staël (1766–1817), Europe’s best-known enemy of Napoleon Bonaparte, set out from her estate on Lake Geneva to escape to England. In her reminiscences, she reflected on the pivotal event as follows:[A]fter ten years of ever-increasing persecutions [...] I was obliged to leave two homelands as a fugitive, Switzerland and France, by order of a man less French than I. For I was born on the banks of the Seine, where his only claim to citizenship is his tyranny. He saw the light of day on the island of Corsica, practically within Africa’s savage sway. His father did not, like mine, devote his fortune and his sleepless nights to defending France from bankruptcy and famine; the air of this beautiful country is not his native air; how can he understand the pain of being exiled from it, when he considers this fertile land only as the instrument of his victories. [End Page 231] Where is his patrie? It is any country that accepts his domination. His fellow-citizens? They are whatever slaves obey his orders.1In this passage, de Staël deliberately links nationality and citizenship. In her view, citizenship status was acquired simply by being born on French soil. Her family’s tireless labors on behalf of the nation added another irrefutable proof of Frenchness. In addition, growing up in France and breathing the country’s invigorating air had created an emotional attachment that a person raised elsewhere simply could not fathom. We thus have a triad of birth/service/sentiment that connects the deserving individual to his or her nation (in this case la grande nation).In this essay I explore de Staël’s understanding of the twin concepts of nationality and citizenship through the lens of gender. Nationality and citizenship were of perennial concern to her thought, partly because of the turbulent times she lived in, partly because of her personal experience in exile. Influenced by history and literature, she early on admired the gallant men with muskets who heroically sacrificed their lives for the glory of the nation. But it was the exceptional women with lyres who were destined to act as the nation’s unifying agents by recreating the gallants’ deeds in writing. By imagining the nation these women fulfilled the supreme task of citizenship. In what follows I will argue that de Staël conceived of the ideal citizen as a woman writer or artist who served her nation by inspiring its members with enthusiasm and virtue.2 In elaborating her view of the superior woman as citoyenne and national muse she made an important contribution to the debate on the nation and the citizen.The only daughter of Louis XVI’s finance minister Jacques Necker and the salonnière Suzanne Curchod-Necker, of Genevan and Vaudois citizenship respectively, de Staël gained fame and notoriety through her brilliant conversational talents, political intrigues, and unconventional relationships with famous men. Though she considered herself a “true Frenchwoman” (véritable française),3 she was a citizen of Geneva and a Swedish subject by marriage, at least until 1803 when she took advantage of the Code Civil [End Page 232] and officially claimed French citizenship.4 Considering this multiplicity of conflicting loyalties, it is not surprising that her major writings reveal a sustained preoccupation with these issues.Despite their undeniable significance for early nineteenth-century European intellectual history, historians have so far devoted scant attention to de Staël’s writings. In fact, in the US, Staëlien studies have largely been dominated by literary criticism and theory.5 This has had the effect of prioritizing her novels over her non-fiction, downplaying the historical context of her oeuvre and, most grievously, ignoring de Staël’s historical contribution to socio-political thought.6 As a result of the complex ways in which her personal experience informed her writing, her oeuvre is best examined as a unified, though certainly inconsistent, whole. Her writings were rarely “products of intense deliberation, but rather reflections...