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PARTISAN REVIEW
vigorously the corrupting effects of the feminization of modern morals
under aristocracy. In his
Letter to d'Alembert
he wrote, ".. . this disadvan–
tage which degrades man is everywhere great; but states like our own
[Geneva] must especially guard against it. A monarch may be rather in–
different to whether he governs men or women so long as he is obeyed;
but in a republic one needs men." In this disagreement between two of
the eighteenth century's greatest minds one sees previewed the great rev–
olutionary drama in which the aristocracy's "civilization of manners" was
to be rejected in favor of an imaginary heroism whose natural counter–
part was a relatively narrow conception of feminine virtue.
But even here it is hard to treat the revolution as a radical break
with the absolutist and aristocratic
anden regime,
as the naive discovery of
the chasm that always exists between civilized and civic virtues. This is
clear when we consider the leaders of the revolution itself: Mirabeau, the
first great tribune, was a living example of aristocratic corruption; Saint–
Just, the archangel of terror, began as a libertine poet; Robespierre, the
idol of the
sans-culottes,
wore a wig; Danton was a dissipated hedonist;
and so on. And when we review the manner in which the literature of
the nineteenth century was later to treat the passions, we note that it
habitually mixed memories of the revolution and the
ancien regime
in or–
der to make common cause against the dull prose of the bourgeois
world - that is, against modern democracy itsel( This double strategy -
now
revolutionnaire,
now
reactionnaire
-
is nowhere more evident than in
the works of Madame de Stael, Stendahl, and Flaubert.
As admirers of England and the Whig tradition, French liberals of
the nineteenth century rejected both the tradition of aristocratic abso–
lutism and the heroic fantasies of Jacobinism and Napolean's Empire; in
this sense they were somewhere between Rousseau's imaginary heroism
and Hume's rather conservative skepticism. Madame de Stael was, along
with Benjamin Constant, a foremost defender of "modern" over
"ancient" liberty and a disenchanted yet faithful child of the Enlighten–
ment. But her distinctive contribution to French liberal doctrine lies
in
her reflections of the condition of women and their rapport with litera–
ture. Her "feminism," such as it was, was unlike Condorcet's, for she in–
sisted less on the common reasonable nature of men and women than on
woman's singular contribution to civilization. It is therefore perfectly
natural that she would simultaneously praise England's political institu–
tions, its literature, and its treatment of women. England, she wrote in
On Literature
in 1800, owes the quality of its novels specifically to the
relations of its men and women:
The existence ofwomen, in England, is the principal cause of the in-
