An early dissident: Madame de Stael.

There is a world elsewhere. --Coriolanus Act III, scene iii

Exile is a terrible fate, a source of bitterness and grief since the time of the ancient Hebrews as they sat down by the waters of Babylon and wept. In our own tormented era, a great many people have felt what it means to be forcibly cut off, perhaps forever, from their treasured familiar culture. On this theme, Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Mme. de Stael (1766-1817), the great forerunner of the modern literary and political dissidents, still has much of value to communicate. For a woman as highly strung and imaginative as she was, exile figured as grimly as death itself -- and she was by no means the first to think in that way. She often remembered that, nearly a hundred years earlier, the statesman and writer Viscount Bolingbroke had associated exile and death. Her thoughts also turned to the Roman poet Ovid sent into exile by the Emperor Augustus and left to bemoan his fate among the Scythians on the shores of the Black Sea, where he died.

Tradition has it that Ovid was exiled for a poem that gave offense as well as for involvement in a sexual-cum-political scandal. Mme. de Stael's fault in the eyes of the leaders of the Committee of Public Safety in 1795, of the Directory in 1799, and, most potently, of Napoleon Bonaparte from 1800, was not sexual (though her private life and her numerous love affairs were a source of prurient gossip). It was literary and political. Napoleon condemned her to banishment from Paris and to internal exile under constant surveillance in the French provinces (so that eventually she felt driven to flee abroad). This was because she had offended him with her outspoken criticism and her writings which, he felt, undermined directly or obliquely the policies of his personal rule. Having grown accustomed to sycophancy, he was absolutely furious because she not only failed to praise his mighty exploits, but also she omitted to mention them in her books. She was used to the freedom of talk that had flourished under the ancien regime in the days immediately before the French Revolution of 1789, and so she thought she could criticize his dictatorship in private and in society with similar impunity. Whatever her virtues -- and she was certainly courageous -- prudence was not among them. For a long time, she did not comprehend that in Napoleon she was dealing with a new phenomenon. It was one that would prefigure many of the authoritarian tendencies familiar to the modern era.

Her indiscreet remarks and her sometimes defiant actions were perfectly well known to Napoleon through his ubiquitous spies. Even when in Germany or Russia, busily engaged in the wars, he took the trouble to be well informed about her sayings and doings. He would find time to write to Joseph Fouche the supreme spymaster, then minister of police, urging him to tighten measures against "this real bird of ill omen," "this whore," as Napoleon graciously called her. Since she often conversed with his actual or putative enemies at home and abroad, in his eyes she was a seriously tiresome troublemaker, and he suspected her of actively plotting against him. He said that people always left her salon plainly less well disposed toward himself. She had offended him, and that was sufficient cause for punishment. There could be no redress against giving offense to an absolute ruler, she once observed.

She soon came to realize that others did not regard exile as so dreadful a fate. As early as 1803, she had written to a friend that "people will get used to my exile and will be surprised at my whim to extricate myself from it." That elevated and self-regarding writer, Chateaubriand, visited her at Coppet, her handsome family mansion near the shores of Lake Geneva. He expressed astonishment that a person of large means like herself, who resided in a beautiful house, attended by servants and with all the amenities of unspoiled nature around her, could be so unhappy at her banishment from Paris. He was drawn to conclude that, whereas he would be well content with the pleasures of solitude in such conditions, there were others of different temperament who could not be reconciled to it.

It was in a state of near collapse and terror that, on May 23, 1812, Mme. de Stael left Coppet, and carrying only her fan entered her carriage, ostensibly to go for a drive with her daughter Albertine. Riding alongside for a short distance was her son Auguste, who tried to cheer her with the thought that she was going (of necessity secretly and circuitously) to England, a land she had long idealized as the seat of freedom. Coppet had fallen under Napoleon's rule some fourteen years earlier when he invaded Switzerland. For many months, the local prefet had been limiting her movements to a few miles from her home, so that she was virtually under house arrest.

The few close friends who had ventured to visit her were in their turn punished with internal exile. (They were not always as apolitical as she averred.) Others warned her that she might well suffer the same fate as Mary Queen of Scots, who had been imprisoned for almost two decades by Queen Elizabeth I, and then beheaded. After all, it was only a few years since the duc d'Enghien had been kidnapped on foreign soil and hastily executed at Vincennes -- a crime famously judged by a cynic to be a "mistake," and one sufficiently extraordinary at the time to linger in the collective memory. Indeed, her own arrest was a distinct possibility, and her fears were not illusory. In 1811 the zealous local prefet informed General Rene Savary (who had succeeded Fouche as minister of police) that the order for her arrest had not been issued "for the moment." Clearly, the authorities had imprisonment in view. It can readily be imagined how furious Napoleon and his bureaucratic underlings were when they discovered that she had managed to escape their long surveillance and constant harassment. After months of secret planning and diversionary tactics, she was embarking on the first stage of a momentous journey that was to take her across war-torn Europe, through Austria, Poland, Russia, Sweden, to her ultimate goal, freedom in England, Napoleon's bitterest foe.

Out of that perilous journey would come one of the most fascinating books of the nineteenth century, Dix annees d'exil. The ten years of exile to which the title alludes, from 1803 to 1813, were in fact only one part of the story because she had known banishment earlier. This splendid work is a broken monument, for it is unfinished. It was written at different periods, separated by an interval of some five years. She did not live to correct the manuscript, although it was her custom to make many drafts. Part of it she removed and inserted into one of her major works, her reflections on the French Revolution, later published by her son Auguste in the year following his mother's untimely death in 1817. Her health had been deteriorating, not just through her intense emotional overdrive in her often stormy personal relationships, through a difficult pregnancy when in her mid forties, and her abuse of opium, but also as a result of the constant agitation and mental stress caused by persecution and banishment.

Auguste eventually decided to publish also her account of her years of exile, but he took it upon himself to modify the style, alter the text, and cut passages that might have some risky current political implication or that referred to persons who were still living. This is the version that has largely been available until now, superseded at last by a superb new edition that is unlikely to be surpassed.(1) It even includes the "disguised manuscripts" where, fearing discovery, she concealed her views beneath allusions to the history of England so that, for instance, Mary Queen of Scots stands for the duc d'Enghien. Now, for the first time we can read the work more or less as it came from Mme. de Stael's hand.

Why is this incomplete work so telling even today? Here is a gripping personal memoir of her meetings with General Bonaparte in 1797, when he returned to Paris crowned with laurel as the great republican hero and liberator, the heir of the Revolution -- an image that some could never bring themselves to renounce. (She would be distressed by the enduring admiration for Napoleon, war or no war, displayed by blinkered British fellow travelers, on meeting them in London in 1813.) In those early days, however, she also was under the spell of Bonaparte the military genius, in a manner more imaginatively and romantically intense than she was later prepared to admit. He did not respond, treating her -- as he did many women whom he considered unlikely to be of use to him -- with soldierly coarse and brutal misogyny. Master of the apparently sightless stare, he intimidated her to such a degree that, although she was renowned for her fascinating talk and witty repartee, she was reduced to silence. It did not help if she prepared in advance what she was going to say.

The work also tells of her growing awareness of the First Consul's monarchical ambitions and his drive to absolute power. From 1800, when she encouraged Benjamin Constant to stand up for free speech in the Tribunate, and was ostracized for her pains, she kept to her principles in mingled pride and dread. Moreover, she describes vividly the persecution she endured at Bonaparte's hands, not only in France but also in the realms he conquered and wherever fears of his displeasure predominated. Her words ring down the ages: "If tyranny only had its direct advocates on its side, it would never prosper. The astounding thing, and one that above all bears witness to the depths of human abasement, is that most mediocre men are at the service of the event...." This inclination she attributed not only to weakness of character but also to the fact that mankind has a sort of :need to prove fate right, in order to live in peace with it. She remarked that there are always those who are able to find philosophical reasons to be content with the powers that be.

As to the constant harassment she endured, known today down to the last petty detail from the patient research of scholars into police archives, she does not reveal the half of it. All the same, what she does relate is powerful enough in its indictment of the abuse of power. The book aims to encompass Napoleon's downfall and the establishment of a new republican regime in France. And, along the way, it is a kind of travel book whose depiction of Russia in 1812 remains memorable. She crossed the Russian frontier at Brody in Galicia shortly after the invading French armies traversed the river Niemen, and she was one of the last independent foreign observers to see Moscow before the inhabitants defiantly put it to the torch.

The fact was that her exile, however painful, opened her mind to new and fruitful experiences. Because of the French invasion of Russia, she was obliged to make a large detour via Kiev before she could reach Moscow. Although the country was struggling against the French invader, she was surprised at the kindness and hospitality shown her. However, she soon became aware of the vast difference between the "Asiatic" magnificence of the princes and aristocrats who entertained her in such an extravagant manner and the miserable existence of the serfs. There is no third estate here, she remarked, noting the absence of a middle class concerned with culture and enlightenment as she had known it in France. Her Russian hosts kept silent on serious matters, she reflected, because they knew that it was dangerous to express a personal opinion.

In St. Petersburg, she conferred with British agents like Lord William Bentinck; with diplomats like Baron Heinrich von Stein, one of the leading German opponents of Napoleon's regime, whom she inspired; and John Quincy Adams, future president of the United States. Czar Alexander I and his family welcomed her as an honored guest, and he discussed public affairs with her as an equal. He was in his liberal phase, and he assured her that he intended to improve the condition of the serfs at an opportune moment. Later, in London, when a lady ill-advisedly spoke to her about the existence of a free society in Russia, Mme. de Stael swiftly countered that she had never known freedom to coexist with serfdom. Her book is more flattering to Alexander than her true opinions would suggest. In general, her comments were acute. She observed that though there was much imitation of French, German, and British modes and manners, it was only skin deep.

What lay at the root of her opposition to Napoleon's regime? He once said that he found the French crown lying on the ground and that he quite simply picked it up. Crowned emperor in 1804, he created a Bonapartist aristocracy and a court, and placed his brothers and sisters on the thrones of Europe. That was not what the daughter of Jacques Necker -- Louis XVI's reformist minister of finance, whom she had seen welcomed with ecstasy by the populace in 1789 -- ever anticipated. What need was there now, after the regime of the Bourbons had been abolished at such a high cost in blood, for a new royalty and a new caste? Some of her friends among the old nobility had hastened to renounce their privileges at the beginning of the Revolution. She would remain faithful to the generous libertarian ideals that had inspired them and that had been betrayed by the Jacobin Terror of 1793-4. Then there were Napoleon's endless wars with their terrible casualties. When thousands of his soldiers lay dead on the battlefield, she heard how Napoleon had insouciantly remarked that one night in Paris would make up the numbers. He liked to shock with his brutal remarks and let everyone know who was master.

The Corsican-born General Bonaparte did not care for intellectuals and thinkers in general (ideologues as some were then known), whereas for Mme. de Stael the ability to think for oneself was preeminent. When advised to be more discreet, she replied, "It is the truth, it is what I think and I shall say so." He particularly disliked women who took an interest in political affairs, and that distaste necessarily embraced Mme. de Stael, who was fascinated by politics. As a very young girl, she had listened intently to the eminent political figures and the leading philosophes who frequented her mother's salon. Even then, she had contributed not a little to the conversation, much to the disapproval of Mme. de Genlis, that critic of her upbringing and stickler for social niceties.

The art of conversation, supreme refinement of eighteenth-century French civilization, as Mme. de Stael knew it in the salons of Paris, was as necessary to her as the air she breathed. It was not to be mistaken for mere idle chatter or regarded simply as a diversion, entertaining though it might prove. Without concern for distinctions of rank, gifted people met together in the salons to discuss with ease and wit every kind of topic. She knew men who were not great readers but who became knowledgeable and cultivated through their contact with the salons. Napoleon was familiar with each person's weakness, and he had no trouble in finding hers. Most people he could win by their desire for preferment, by awarding them lucrative posts and high-sounding titles. Mme. de Stael could not be corrupted in that way. Her real weakness, though, was her acute susceptibility to boredom and melancholy that made her long for the company of her friends, for discourse and discussion. These helped to cover the dark chasm of nothingness that might appear at any moment. By condemning her to live forty leagues from Paris, in some provincial town like Auxerre that she called a veritable Scythia, Napoleon found exactly how to make her suffer.

She was open to attack, too, on the ground of nationality. Born in Paris, naturally she always considered herself to be French. Many French people, though, did not regard her as one of themselves, and journalists (who were mostly on Napoleon's payroll) encouraged them in their prejudice. That kind of disinclination to accept certain categories of people born in France as genuine citizens was to persist into the Vichy regime and beyond. Her parents were both Swiss-born Protestants long resident in France. Her father had loyally served the Catholic crown without too much ado about his nationality and religion, even if these were sometimes called into question. Matters were complicated for her when, on her marriage to a Swedish diplomat, she became Swedish herself. Sometimes, of course, she found it expedient to make use of this when in a tight corner. It enabled her to help friends to escape to Switzerland during the Terror.

On her husband's death, as the French-born widow of a foreigner, she should have been able to revert to being French. In her manner and outlook, she was French to her fingertips, as writers who met her, like Goethe and Schiller and others in Weimar or Berlin, or Byron in London, were agreed. Yet this Corsican general, born "Buonaparte" in Ajaccio in 1769 (a mere three months after the French finally defeated the Corsican patriots), ruled indisputably over France. There was galling irony here in the fact that, though born in Paris, she was forced to flee by order of a man "less French than I."

Besides, she could not believe that she, Neckers daughter, the celebrated author of novels like Delphine and Corinne, of influential works on literature and on the passions, writings that had created a great stir throughout Europe, could be treated in this cruel way. She had mistakenly believed that her fame was her defense. She was a child of the Enlightenment, after all: she believed in reason and progress, in the high ideals of freedom and fairness that had inspired the eighteenth-century movement for the reform of many abuses. In benighted quarters today, the Enlightenment is under attack as the purlieu of self-interested imperialist white males, despite the fact that -- however imperfect, like all human endeavors -- it sought disinterestedly to promote toleration and justice for all. Often purchased at great personal cost, these were, and remain, the values of a civilized society. In their light, the authoritarian regime of Napoleon seemed to Mme. de Stael to be an aberration. Surely Bonaparte must be amenable to reasoned argument.

Such a notion has endured as the great liberal delusion. There are always those who are not amenable to reason, or who choose evil as their good. Following Ovid, who addressed poems of complaint to Rome (and has been criticized for self-pity as a result), she went on writing embarrassing letters of self-justification, presenting her case -- not without a certain casuistry at times -- in a manner that seemed eminently reasonable to her. True, the situation was not simple and clear-cut. There were people she knew well in Napoleon's entourage whom she engaged to intercede on her behalf, notably his elder brother Joseph, her lifelong friend (who, she says in Dix annees d'exil in farfetched partisanship, was forced against his will to be king of Spain). All such effort proved vain: the emperor was adamant.

A woman of penetrating insight, gifted as she well knew with an analytical mind and the impressive ability to deduce general ideas from her observations, she was also the victim of blindness where Napoleon was concerned. For a long time, she thought he just wanted to frighten her into submission. Indeed, not until 1810, when Napoleon personally gave orders for the destruction of all copies of De l'Allemagne, her epoch-making book on German culture, did she begin to realize that his aim was to silence her, or worse. It was not so much a question of the nature and significance of his form of authoritarianism, which she understood and made evident better than most: it was rather, for a while, her failure to grasp the full extent of it.

This combination of insight and blindness would eventually lead her to an impasse. France was at war, yet she believed that she could now fight Napoleon while, as it were, separating him and his supporters from the fate of France itself. It was as if, despite all her criticism of their baseness and barbarity, she could ultimately ignore his numerous committed followers. Napoleon's wholehearted adherents must be "Corsicans" or "Africans" like him, not true Frenchmen. As she saw it, the allies would defeat the tyrant, and France would at once return to the body of civilized nations, rather as though the entire Napoleonic era and its wars had not intervened. She did not see that in victory the Allies would exact an extremely heavy price in reparations, and that France would suffer defeat as well as Napoleon.

It was at a lavish entertainment on Prince Naryshkin's country estate overlooking the gulf of Finland, when a toast was proposed to Anglo-Russian victory over the French, that she suddenly realized her view was not shared. She protested, and would drink only to the defeat of the Corsican despot. She did not foresee the consequences of her fight to topple Napoleon. Given her distaste for the Bourbons, she did not want their return. Consequently, she ardently promoted the cause of General Bernadotte, now Crown Prince of Sweden, as the republican leader of integrity to replace Napoleon. Despite her advocacy, few were converted for long to the cause of the procrastinating Bernadotte, and in 1814 the Allies restored the Bourbons to the French throne in the person of Louis XVIII. In a sense, then, her passionate practical activity was to be frustrated, and on her return to France one of the bitterest shocks of her life was to see the Cossacks encamped on the Champs-Elysees. Her more lasting contribution lay elsewhere as she battled against political fanaticism. She envisaged a body of intellectuals united across frontiers in "the cult of truth." Until recently, the values for which she strove formed an essential part of the civilized humane ideal.

Napoleon later remarked to his recalcitrant younger brother Lucien: "I was wrong. Mme. de Stael raised more enemies against me during her exile than she would have done in France." In her book, she presents herself as the victim, not as the tireless active opponent, but Napoleon himself knew better, and it was not often that he admitted having made a mistake. She provoked the lion. He pushed her beyond endurance. They are like two models of the endlessly repeated struggle between imagination and humanity on the one hand, and the abuse of power on the other. In the conflict between sword and spirit, it is the writer who ultimately emerges as the moral victor. In that light, passing fantasies about the nonexistence of the author and modish nihilistic theories about truth that undermine humanist values pale into insignificance.

(1) Dix annees d'exil, by Mme. de Stael, edited by Simone Balaye and Mariella Vianello Bonifacio; Artheme Fayard, pages 588, 180 FF.

Renee Winegarten's profile "Women & Politics: Madame de Tencin" appeared in our October 1997 issue.