Chapter 5 - When the Light of Reason Fails

Summary

Staël responded to the Terror with De l’influence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des nations. Chapter 5 has two parts. First, I review Staël’s use of her sources: her private life, France’s public Revolution, and the texts of the moral philosophers. Cathartic for herself as a woman, Staël’s book is also a public stand on the Terror and a manifesto for the French Republic’s future. It draws on a startling range of texts, from Cicero through Condorcet. These sources reveal above all what Staël does not do; she systematically transforms them, reading, then flouting, two millennia of passion theory to construct her own new moral vision. Second, I review what Staël offers the French Republic: a way out of ping-pong coups d’état by grounding the Directoire in coalition and moral principle, precisely the vision of her partner Constant’s simultaneous brochures, on which we know she quietly collaborated.