lavish ball organized in Paris to celebrate the Emperor’s wedding. When she wrote to tell
Constant the news, his response was merely to prolong his stay on the Loire.^51 Eventually
he returned on 14 July and husband and wife spent the rest of that exceptionally wet and
dreary summer together at Les Herbages.
All summer Germaine de Staël was busy preparing her book on German culture for
publication. She completed the third and final volume as she was correcting the proofs of
the first volume sent to her by the publisher Nicolle. That first volume was passed by
Napoleon’s censors in May, the second in August. Rumour and speculation were rife in
the capital that the finished work would be critical of the government. By 15 September
most of Volume III was in proof and in the hands of the censors. Then, like a bolt from
the blue, on 26 September 1810 Germaine’s son Auguste brought her the devastating
news that the Duc de Rovigo, the new Minister of Police, had ordered that the proofs and
manuscript of De l’Allemagne be seized and that she herself leave the country.^52 Rovigo
ignored the censors’ approval of the work: the seizure was a punishment for her conduct
in recent months, her proud refusal to bend the knee to Rovigo’s master either when at
what amounted to a rival court at Chaumont or in her letters. Napoleon wrote to Rovigo
on 8 September 1810:
I have sent you back Madame de Staël’s book. Is she entitled to call
herself ‘Baroness’? Has she used that title in the works she has
published up to now? Suppress the passage about the Duke of
Brunswick, and three quarters of the passages where she praises
England. Such misplaced enthusiasm has already done us enough
harm.^53The peevish despot who had lately founded his own ersatz dynasty deeply
resented Madame de Staël’s flamboyant insolence and her genuine claim
to nobility—nobility, one might say, in every sense of the word.
Germaine’s sons Auguste and Albert fought a vain rearguard action to have the ban
lifted. Rovigo demanded to know why their mother had nowhere mentioned in her book
either the Emperor Napoleon’s name or the eighteen years of war which France had been
waging against Germany since 1792. Her book was un-French and unpatriotic for
proposing another—and defeated—nation as a model, and she must now embark for
America without further delay. De l’Allemagne did indeed praise German literature of the
Sturm und Drang for its freedom from rules and received ideas, its freshness and
reluctance to imitate the Greco-Roman classics. It not only revealed contemporary
German literature and culture to the French in a way that had never been done before: it
would shortly reveal Germany to the Germans. Perhaps finally that was the real danger
that De l’Allemagne represented, rather than its implicit critique of the staleness of
French culture under Napoleon—it might rally a subject people against its unworthy new
master. Constant can only have felt pride at Madame de Staël’s refreshing openness to
another and hitherto despised culture and her praise of the freedom of expression which
German culture encouraged: those were the things that Coppet had stood for.^54
On 11 October 1810 Rovigo sent his myrmidons round to the printing shop of the
unfortunate Mame and had the printing plates smashed; on 14 and 15 October the proofs
Benjamin constant 208