PHILIPPE RAYNAUD
exhaustible profundity of English writers.. .. The relations between
men and women are multiplied infinitely by sensibility and delicacy..
. . Nowhere as in England have women enjoyed the happiness pro–
vided by domestic affections. . . . England is the country where
women are the most truly loved.
639
Even in this work of 1800, though, Madame de
Sta~l's
praise is
discretely tempered by that of the culture and elegance of the French.
But it is really in her posthumously published
Considerations on the French
Revolution
(1818) that the difficulties of women's emancipation in both
countries are most eloquently expressed. Here she speaks the language of
both Rousseau and Hume, as it were, claiming that the price of political
liberty was the subordination of women, and that the French monarchy
had offered women an incomparable place within it:
In England, women never enter into the conversation; the men have
never accustomed them to taking part in general discussions; when the
women retire after dinner the conversation only grows more ani–
mated.... In this respect, the women are extremely timid, since in a
free state men take over their natural dignity and women feel them–
selves subordinated.
This is not the case in an arbitrary monarchy like the one that
existed in France, because nothing was impossible and nothing was
fixed. The conquests of grace were boundless, and women were able
to triumph naturally in such combats.
This was a central issue in Madame de
Sta~l's
works, one through
which she expressed the ideas she shared with Benjamin Constant. By us–
ing the condition of women as a striking example, she memorably
showed that, however perfect modern emancipation is, it never realizes
its full promise because the liberated individual is never fully happy and
never overcomes his or her own anxiety. As Hegel, the master theorist of
reconciliation, would later put it, woman always remains the "eternal
irony of the community."
Madame de Stael, the most reasonably liberal woman writer of the
nineteenth century, never renounced herself either to the (male) heroic
imaginings of the revolution, or to embellished memories of the court.
Nonetheless, the "courtesan" and "heroic" models of love continued
throughout nineteenth-century French literature, as we see both in a
quasi-Jacobin like Stendhal and a more conservative artist like Flaubert.
In Stendhal, whose political radicalism was matched with a certain dis–
trust for what might be called "American-style" democracy, young men
love the aristocratic qualities of women, who, in return, love in them
