# Transcript

Emma Barker
Several of the women whom we have looked at so far, defied Napoleon's expectations of the female sex, in one way or another. However, the woman who above all challenged him, not just in her way of life but also through her ideas, was the writer Germaine De Stael, whom we see here in a portrait painted by Gerard after her death in 1817, wearing her characteristic turban.
For Napoleon, the very idea of a woman being actively involved in public life, as Stael had been during the Revolutionary years, was an outrage. And she compounded the offence in his eyes, by her consistent championing of liberty, both political and personal, and her opposition to despotic authority.
Dr. Angelica Goodden,
He didn't like strong women that meant he didn't like assertive, loud, capable, and calculating women that he thought Madamme De Stael was calculating, and he was quite convinced that she was plotting his downfall or the downfall of the regime that he represented.
Emma Barker
After she was exiled from France by Napoleon in 1803, Madame Destile took up residence at her family home, the Chateaux de Coppet, near Geneva. Here she made up for the tedium of exile by surrounding herself with friends and other visitors. They included Madamme Recamiere, one of her closest friends, in a portrait by Eulalie Morin.
Presenter
Between 1804 and 1810, Coppet became a centre of liberal opposition to Napoleon, and a literary forum in which many of the fundamental tenets of romanticism were elaborated. The debates that took place here, at Coppet, fed into Stael’s writing, notably on Germany, which so angered Napoleon, that he ordered the entire first edition to be pulped in 1810.
The Group de Coppet was not simply the accidental byproduct of Stael’s exile however. On the contrary, the mixing of sociability, literature, and politics that it represented, links it to the French tradition of the Salon, that is a gathering of regular guests presided over by a hostess, which went back to the seventeenth century.
Stael’s mother, Madame Necker had held her own Salon in Paris in the decades before the Revolution, and it was by sitting beside her mother, and listening to the conversation of the Enlightenment philosophs who frequented Madame Necker’s salon, that the young Germaine was initiated into this tradition.
Presenter
In adult life she was renowned for her eloquence which is commemorated in Gerard’s portrait. Here her mouth is slightly open as if she is about to speak. And she is holding a sprig of greenery the prop she habitually used for emphasis and conversation.
Conversation was one thing for a woman however, and publication quite another. Stael’s father, Jacques Necker, Finance Minister to Louis 16th, had no objections to his wife's salon, but he forbade her to pursue a literary career by publishing her works. Necker's disapproval of women writers, it was obviously a problem for his daughter who adored her father, and longed to please him.
Stael’s devotion to her father is commemorated in this portrait in which she is shown standing in front of a bust of Necker. Her desire to please him meant that she always felt somewhat guilty about her literary activities. So much so, that she did not even have a desk of her own until 1807, by which time her father had been dead three years.
In her writings moreover, her statements on behalf of her own sex are usually tentative, even conservative.
Her principal concern was not so much with the oppression of women in general, but rather the particular plight of the woman writer. What she most feared was that by venturing into a sphere of activity traditionally reserved by men for themselves, she would not only incur their disapproval, but also forfeit their love.
The dilemma faced by the woman of genius, between literary glory on the one hand, and her desire to be loved on the other, is central to Stael’s immensely successful novel Corrine, published in 1807. It tells of how a Scottish nobleman, Oswald Lord Melville, travels to Italy, where he falls in love with Corrine, a poet whose talent is for improvisation. Oswald sees Corrine for the first time in Rome as she is being honoured for her genius in a grandiose ceremony on the capital.
Man
Oswald went out into the public square. The four white horses drawing Corrine's chariot made their way into the midst of the crowd. Corrine was sitting on the chariot, built in the style of ancient Rome, and white robed girls walked alongside her. Everyone shouted 'long live Corrine, long live genius, long live beauty'.
She was dressed like Domenichino Sybil. An Indian turban was wound round her head, and intertwined with her beautiful black hair. Her dress was white, with a blue stole fastened beneath her breasts.
Dr. Angelica Goodden
There were famous women improvisers, at the time as a kind of continuation of the classic notion of the Sybil this woman who was the fount of some kind of quasi religious, magical, expressive genius.
He is captivated by her but as they talk as they get to know each other as they proceed through a trawl of Italy's artistic treasures, he's increasingly worried by the sense that there's something not quite proper about Corrine, that she's too interesting to be safe, and crucially that she's not a demure enough character.
And so, really Corrine's fate is sealed. She's in love with the wrong sort of man it's a classic scenario. She's in love with the wrong sort of man and a man who has given his head will curb and in fact kill her artistic genius.
Corinne’s unhappiness in love can be seen as a projection of Stael’s own fears, since her heroine is clearly an idealised self-portrait.
Presenter
The painter, Elizabeth Vigee Lebrun, the most successful woman artist of the period, even painted a portrait of Stael as Corrine, the year after the novel was published. In the painting she is dressed in a simple antique tunic, of the kind that Stael herself did in fact wear, and is accompanying herself on a lire. On the hill behind her is the Temple of the Sybil at Tivili.
This small copy of the Vigee Lebrun portrait, by Firmin Massot conforms much more closely than the original to contemporary conventions of female portraiture. The features are softened, the expression is more demure, and the dress less austere.
Stael commissioned the copy because she did not care for Vigee Lebrun’s frank depiction of her forceful features, and wanted a more flattering image.
Stael could not escape conventional expectations of feminine beauty, despite otherwise challenging notions of proper feminine behaviour.
Stael’s novel ends tragically with the death of Corinne after Oswald has abandoned her in order to marry a conventionally demur and domesticated young girl. But what happened to the real life women who’s portraits we have been looking at ? Josephine at least died in her own bed at Mal Maison in 1814, by which time her ex-husband was a prisoner on the island of Elba. Her sister-in-law, Caroline, was less lucky, her husband Marrot was executed by anti-Napoleonic forces in 1815 and she died in excile Florence in 1839. Pauline died in Rome in 1825, shortly after a final reconciliation with her husband Camilo Borhese. Madamme Recamiere continued to attract devoted admirers until late in life. Madamme Benoist’s career was brought to an end by her husband ‘s official promotion.
Prof. Helen Weston
He is made a conciere de ta, which is a very high official position. At that point it's no longer decorous seemly for his wife to be exhibiting paintings in the Salons. What it does of course is to return her to the conventional domestic space of the home, and that takes us right back to the eighteenth century and to the ideas of Jean Jacques Rousseau.
Emma
Madame de Stael died in 1817 after having seen her political ideas triumph over Napoleon. However, she never resolved the contradictions in her own life.
Dr. Angelica Goodden
She knew that she was a good mother. She took the education of her children seriously but she took up art seriously too and she could never quite reconcile the constraints of art and the constraints of domesticity. She shows that women can find a kind of fulfilment that is quite apart from the fulfilment that a domestic life and the love of a man can procure but what is perhaps to a feminist, disappointing, what is perhaps, old-fashioned, to the modern reader, is that ultimately that kind of fulfilment is set above the fulfilment that artistic genius can procure.