This chapter looks at Staël’s 1807 novel, Corinne ou l’Italie, her most-studied work. Victor at Lodi and Marengo, Napoleon had been proclaimed king of Italy on March 17, 1805. In Corinne ou l’Italie, Staël focused on Italy in her turn, making a Faustian bargain with her newly expanding Romantic public and subsequently paying the price. She did this by putting her female creator, Corinne, front and center, subsuming herself into her protagonist much as her friend Byron was to do with Childe Harold five years later. Her reward was international impact; her price, at once and over the next two centuries, was lack of separation from her creation. The novel’s genesis and plot are reviewed in the following sections.
Corinne ou l’Italie: Composition and Publication
While in Weimar in 1803, Staël saw an opera based on Friedrich de La Motte-Fouqué, Die Saalnixe, which also inspired Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. Staël’s journal and letters note the inspiration she found here for Corinne, and the opera’s knight and river nymph leave traces in her realist novel of a second, magical story, a subtext that we could call Romance d’Oswald le preux et de la fée Corinne. Many Romantic texts exist in two versions, real and magical, which happen to fill the same pages, and much of this novel’s love story is best understood in those terms. Staël then returned to Coppet on Lake Geneva and found her father, Jacques Necker, dead. Grief-stricken, she wrote a homage to him and left for Italy in December 1804. At the Palazzo Borghese, her Roman journal notes “une sybille [sic] du Dominiquin de la plus grande beauté, sa coiffure en turban, son manteau rouge” (CV 184): a visual stimulus to anchor her new plot. She returned in June 1805, year of Trafalgar and Austerlitz, to begin Corinne ou l’Italie.1
On November 12, 1806, hard at work on his own Histoire des républiques italiennes, Jean-Charles-Léonard Sismondi tells Staël, “Que vous êtes bonne de m’admettre au petit conseil qui délibérera sur ces épreuves.” Benjamin Constant, her partner for seventeen years, had just begun his masterpiece Adolphe, about a man too weak to leave the woman he has stopped loving, and their two great novels are certainly linked. We have 3,500 pages of Staël’s three manuscripts, a nuisance for those who believe the woman didn’t revise; the three sets of proofs she requested are lost. Staël’s publisher Gabriel-Henri Nicolle paid 7,200 francs for her text, a sum that reflects her fame: He probably began typesetting as she revised the last manuscript, and Corinne ou l’Italie came out on May 1, 1807, after her friend Charles-Victor de Bonstetten’s Voyage dans le Latium.2
The twenty-part novel is set in Italy and England, 1794–1803, with a brief remembered liaison in revolutionary France that echoes Pierre Choderlos de Laclos and oddly presages William Wordsworth’s The Prelude. Oswald, Lord Nelvil, comes to Rome from England in 1794, after his father’s death (like Necker’s) during Oswald’s absence in France. Here, he meets Corinne, a raven-haired poetess of genius and beauty: The Roman people are crowning her at the Capitol, as they crowned Torquato Tasso. Despite falling under her spell, Oswald hesitates, given Corinne’s magical air and mysterious past, and also the thought of his blonde bride-to-be, Lucile, in England. Corinne reveals, after much delay, that she is herself half English and Lucile’s half sister: She left England, where she could not breathe, after her own father’s death, reinventing herself without any man’s patronymic. Oswald returns to England to prepare their marriage, succumbs to convention, and marries Lucile instead. He returns, after four years in the Indies, to an Italy veiled by memory and loss, with his blonde bride and their raven-haired daughter Juliet; he and Lucile drift increasingly apart; Corinne dies of grief and Oswald survives to remember, alone and palely loitering like John Keats’s famous hero.
Bizarrely, Staël thought Corinne ou l’Italie might get her back to imperial Paris: She is indeed a master of the Enlightenment game of discreet allusion, but her politics is there for any alert eye as she looks at Napoleon’s conquered Europe and calls for its revolt. The text praises England, keeps a series of parallels to Nelson and Lady Hamilton in Oswald’s and Corinne’s story, and stresses troublesome details like the death of the old Venetian Republic, handed by Napoleon to Austria in 1797. Staël restores to their original owners all the Italian paintings she herself saw in the Louvre, where Napoleon had assembled them. Sismondi remarked that she consciously avoided “toute action, toute parole qui fût un hommage à la puissance”; her novel does not mention the French “liberation” of Italy after 1796, in which Napoleon took particular pride (xv). The Emperor’s shackled press was milder than for Delphine, but he renewed her order of exile, and Constant was outraged enough by press reviews to publish a reply. “Une femme qui se distingue par d’autres qualités que celles de son sexe,” wrote one critic, “contrarie les principes d’ordre general”; Staël herself often colluded with such attempts to make of her public discourse a purely domestic debate, as we have seen, favoring a demure Romantic persona that is still visible today. All Staël’s works were weapons, and weapons have no business in the private sphere to which women authors were, in the nineteenth century, so thoroughly restricted. Writing to François Gaudot, Staël is more forthright: “Il y avait deux nations hors de mode en Europe, les Italiens et les Allemands; j’ai entrepris de leur rendre la réputation de sincérité et d’esprit.” Compare Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, in December 1818: “The sciences have always owed their origin to some great spirit. Smith created political economy; Linnaeus, botany; Lavoisier, chemistry; and Madame de Staël has, in like manner, created the art of analyzing the spirit of nations and the springs which move them.” Staël’s new “science of nations” contributed to her success, as she praised the Italy that Klemens von Metternich in 1847 would call a geographical concept.3
Corinne ou l’Italie saw thirty-two French editions in forty years, 1830–1870: It figures among European Romanticism’s seminal texts, a posthumous victory of sorts over Staël’s rival and enemy Napoleon. The Bibliothèque nationale in Paris has two Corinne drames from the 1830s; Corinne reappears in music from Gioachino Rossini’s Viaggio a Reims, which borrows her name, companions, and snatches of her plot, to Bob Dylan’s Corinna Corinna; in literature, from Honoré de Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin, with its vase featuring “de toutes les priapées romaines la plus grotesquement licencieuse, délice de quelque Corinne,” to an 1895 tale of slavery by the Black author Mrs. A. E. Johnson, entitled Clarence and Corinne; or, God’s Way. In art, Eugène Delacroix’s La Liberté guidant le peuple has arguable structural debts to François Gérard’s Corinne au Cap Misène, a painting Stendhal praised in 1824: two mythic images of strong women leaders. Corinne prompted odes by Jane Taylor and Felicia Hemans; Isabel Hill’s 1833 translation, with iambics by Letitia Landon for Corinne’s improvisations, saw over twenty-five editions by 1900 with at least fifteen publishers, despite three rival translations. There are debts to Corinne in Little Women, Jane Eyre, and The Mill on the Floss. Clearly Corinne offered posterity a powerful symbol of something. The novel’s sales in the 1830s are also double those of all Staël’s other works, as if it gave a window on the rest: Curiously, and rather romantically, Staël’s recent feminist rediscovery has echoed this anomaly, with a gathering body of excellent work on Corinne and somewhat less on Staël’s other writings.4
Corinne and Her Country
In 1830 as today, one phenomenon stands out in sharp relief when assessing the book’s powerful impact on its readers: the heroine’s capacity to subsume her semi-eponymous novel. The act of naming illustrates this reduction; myths wear smooth with constant use, and the name Corinne, handy shorthand for “suffering heroine” in the case of Mrs. Johnson – a signifier at the midpoint on the path to meaninglessness – is simply a pretty name for a daughter in modern France. But children and heroines were not christened “Italy,” and we call the text Corinne when we discuss it; hence the oddity today of Constant’s review of the novel, focused entirely on the figure of Oswald instead. Charlotte Hogsett brilliantly argues that Staël uses Europe’s countries as allegorical veils to continue discussing women; whatever Staël’s intentions, the story of Corinne ou l’Italie’s reception makes that identification explicit. Staël may indeed have wanted just this triumph; but her triumph has a price. Corinne has led a mythic life independent of her creator and her text, much as Frankenstein’s unfortunate creation has taken his creator’s name in popular mythology. This perceived symbiosis of novel and heroine raises four overriding questions: How does Staël encourage this symbiosis; why does she; what does she gain from it; and what does she lose?5
How and why can perhaps be answered together and from a new perspective, with the new social contract running like a red thread through all Staël’s works. With it, Staël combines two Protestant – indeed Genevan – traditions in a fruitful synthesis, the philosophers’ social contract theory she found in Rousseau above all and the bankers’ theory of public credit she found in her father Necker’s revolutionary career. It is a contract of representation: From the nation’s fertile soil arises the inspired national genius or public hero, who represents the silent millions by speaking with their voice. Corinne is Italy, the genius of her nation, just as George Washington or Simón Bolívar were the Americas, and Necker, Napoleon, Staël herself were France. Hence Staël’s dedication of her novel Delphine to “la France silencieuse.” Prescient and incisive, Staël traces this contract of representation in art, politics, and economics, at a watershed moment in world history – because the contract shapes our modern world. It determines the salaries of our superstars; it takes us to the polling booths; it gives us paper banknotes in return for the nation’s gold. Moreover, with this contract Staël goes two steps beyond Rousseau. Rousseau’s Du contrat social in 1762 calls representation a false idol and demands Spartan direct democracy; thinkers since Staël and Constant have linked that archaic impossibility to the Terror, answering it with the simple distinction between positive liberty – we all get to vote – and negative liberty – but nobody can make us – that Isaiah Berlin still found central to modern liberalism. But modern “negative” liberty, with the separate spheres ideology it implies, may suggest domestic slavery to a thinking woman, and Staël pillories it in Corinne. In these terms, Staël’s new social contract allows her to move back out from oikos to polis without opening the door on Robespierre.6
From the yoked title onward – echoing Rousseau’s Emile ou de l’éducation or Voltaire’s Candide ou l’optimisme – Corinne ou l’Italie is arguably Staël’s most extended presentation of the symbiosis she seeks between nation and public genius; the French word nationalité is launched in this text (Corinne 360), and we stand here at the birth of modern nationalism. The Corinne–Italy link, which may seem self-evident to readers, is in fact food for thought. Associating Corinne with England, for instance, might seem comical, but Corinne is also half English, and her Italian mother is unheard, unlike her English father. So how does the text establish this link’s self-evidence? Six devices stand out, so obvious as to be invisible. First, Corinne has chosen Italy as she never chose England, as Staël and Necker chose France, as a less cosmopolitan citizen cannot: It is Corinne’s “patrie d’élection.” Second, the text stresses international polyphony, with characters representing Europe’s nations and their traits. Erfeuil travels abroad and sees only France, thanks to his cultural “grande muraille de la Chine” (172); Oswald and blonde Lucile are English, so dark-haired Corinne cannot be. Third, as the title suggests, Corinne is a femme-pays, conquered Italy’s spokeswoman and advocate, spending 600 pages speaking for her silent nation as Alexander Pushkin or Charles de Gaulle spoke for theirs: “ce beau pays, que la nature semble avoir paré comme une victime” (67). Fourth, the populus surrounds Corinne wherever she appears in public on Italian soil, from her native Rome to then-foreign Naples or Venice, where her fame evidently precedes her. In an echo of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, we hear the Roman crowd discussing her bloodless triumph before she even appears on stage. Fifth, the Corinne figure profits from the French Revolution’s thorough reworking of an age-old tradition, using embodied women to represent abstract concepts, often grammatically feminine nouns like la Liberté, la Révolution, la Vertu, la France, la Femme, l’Italie. Corinne is all of these in some measure, and there is elegant work on this question; Corinne must die, for instance, because the Revolution and liberty died, in a text haunted by the dead that actually says “il n’y a plus de France” (302) just as Napoleon conquered Europe. Sixth, apart from short reviews of Corinne’s public fame or of national heroes like Dante and Vittorio Alfieri, Corinne enacts Staël’s new nation–genius symbiosis as a self-evident truth. With that lack of analysis, Corinne’s Italian identity is naturalized all the more.7
How Staël’s nation–genius symbiosis works is new ground. Why she encourages this link in 1807 is more familiar; the novel is more than an appeal, it is propaganda, a weapon, directed like all weapons at shaping the future. Corinne ou l’Italie’s battles are woven throughout Staël’s career: battles with Napoleon for the soul of conquered Italy, of liberty, of the Revolution, of France itself – “[I]l n’y a plus de France”; with Europe’s postrevolutionary dispensation and its imprisonment of women in the domestic sphere – here curiously linked to England, not France; and with Staël’s own private sorrows, from which this novel helps to free her. Such parallel battles may encourage us to see Staël’s fiction and nonfiction as one continuous text, and it can be liberating to treat her as the last of the philosophes, working within an eighteenth-century discourse – like, say, Rousseau or Denis Diderot – that makes Corinne impossible to recuperate in nineteenth-century discipline and genre terms. Many of Corinne’s devices recur throughout Staël’s nonfiction, from her early political treatises to De l’Allemagne and her Considérations sur la Révolution française, linking Germany and France to heroic figures like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Necker; and Staël’s late nonfiction, with its expanded first-person voice, also brings her suffering heroine through fiction’s mirror to draw on myth’s explosive energy, like Byron or Victor Hugo. Are Staël’s novels then just her brilliant ersatz for pure politics, her home-built weapon to fight Napoleon whenever her public voice was silenced? Or do Staël’s novels and treatises allow her a dual voice, male and female, throughout her whole career, as Hogsett argues? Both these arguments may in fact be true; but we have our duties to esthetic specificity, and this fiction’s special answers deserve attention.8
Corinne ou l’Italie’s major contribution to Staël’s nation–genius link lies perhaps in its openness to indeterminacy. The self-baptized Corinne is a floating signifier as her author can never be, and as only fiction can allow. Corinne’s splendid indeterminacy allows Staël to fight her different battles at a blow, just as it offered her readers, men and women both, a mythic figure they could read as they liked. Giacomo Leopardi and Margaret Fuller, “the Yankee Corinna,” were thus overwhelmed by two quite different Corinnes, inhabiting the same textual space; and this fact seems crucial in accounting for the novel’s impact, as with so much of Staël’s work. Meanwhile, other allegorical gains are more precise. Certain tactical aspects of Staël’s battles gain from personalizing her nation–genius link: First, Corinne’s allegorical suffering both sidesteps Napoleon’s political censors and embodies the nation’s sorrows, whether Italy or France, while Corinne’s niece Juliet survives her as a figure of hope and political rebirth; second, Corinne’s nature lends beauty, dignity, and coherence of purpose to peoples and phenomena who lacked all three qualities in 1807; third, Corinne’s very presence creates from Italy’s conquered and divided lands the organic totality we associate with nationhood. Moreover, just as Corinne gives Italian lands a unity they conspicuously lacked, so Italy gives Corinne a mythic weight that Staël’s earlier heroine Delphine for instance cannot hope to equal.9
If these are above all the gains of Corinne as allegory, some gains are more literal. Rarely elsewhere in European literature before George Sand or George Eliot – except perhaps in Hannah More, Mary Wollstonecraft, Felicia Hemans, or Sydney Owenson, some might argue – could readers encounter a successful heroine with a public voice. By and large, Europe’s Romantic heroines are domestic. In fact, almost nothing before Corinne ou l’Italie had put any exceptional creative genius, man or woman, so gloriously center stage: Even Faust is no artist. Ossian, Rousseau, Goethe’s Tasso hint at it, Byron completes the process; but Byron wrote Childe Harold in 1812, five years after Corinne. Did Staël then invent the Romantic hero, and do so in the feminine? Consider her superb pages on suffering and mediocrity. As with Byron and a host of imitators, Staël’s fame lends credit for her readers to her heroine’s vatic genius, and the prestige of author and heroine is mutually reinforced. Staël’s conscious elaboration of this personal myth, of her own star status, is a fascinating subject; strangers, friends, and Staël herself routinely called her Corinne after 1807. Reusing that mythic status in Dix années d’exil and the Considérations, Staël can postulate herself and Napoleon as sibling rivals, two voices for revolutionary Europe struggling over its soul. Madame de Chastenay notes the saying in 1814 that there were three powers in Europe: England, Russia, and Madame de Staël. Victor Hugo and others borrow this claim that their exiled artist’s voice speaks for their silenced nation: “Wo ich bin, ist deutsche Kultur,” announces Thomas Mann from exile.10
Upon reflection, the gains of myth in art seem likely to outweigh its losses; but losses there are, and the two may be inseparable. Indeterminacy, to begin with: It is curious that the Romantic myth of Napoleon, launched in Saint Helena, shows clear affinities to Corinne’s myth of suffering genius, which nations who had read Corinne could recuperate all the more easily, in a posthumous alliance that neither Staël nor Napoleon could prevent. Equally oddly, two other losses caused by Staël’s nation–genius link in Corinne serve instead to reduce or eliminate the novel’s polyphony for its readers: making Corinne herself less complex as a character and deleting what stands around her in the text. The price is very high, for here lies the kernel of two centuries of légende noire, alleging that Corinne is univocal, and naively self-indulgent, women’s work. Staël’s esthetic distance from her creation vanishes.
The Character Corinne
Let us begin with Corinne, who is more ambiguous – starting with her English father – than tradition suggests. The attributes of this “la plus charmante des étrangères” (44) include a dark past, exotic present, and knowledge of art, history, and three languages at twenty-six. If she is a magical being, is she muse, fairy bride, or succubus? Lucile must guess Oswald’s thoughts, while Corinne knows them. In an endnote, Staël mentions Corinna, the poetess and muse who inspired Pindar, father of poetry; but Oswald is no Pindar. Moreover, just as Delphine revisits an authorial self who died around 1794, so Corinne, if we listen carefully, shows more naive passion than her author and narrator, and though her myth may embody virtue, she is in fact guilty of several things. Echoing the suspense erotics of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, and all Staël’s heroines from Pauline to Corinne’s evil double Madame d’Arbigny, Corinne keeps Oswald by hiding her guilty past. She also misunderstands him, manipulates him through sacrifices, and talks of wanting marriage after having rejected it, as her author did with Constant. Finally, after his marriage to her silent blonde sister Lucile, Corinne arranges a quasi-vampiric conclusion, secretly educating her raven-haired niece as her own illegitimate daughter, and asking – only, as she puts it – that Oswald should never feel emotion without thinking of Corinne beyond the grave. This is the embryo of Edgar Allan Poe’s Ligeia, in which the dark-haired first wife returns from the dead to possess the narrator’s new blonde bride.11
Noting the spotlight Staël turns on Corinne’s and Oswald’s demure public hideouts, or the word jealous, invisible for Corinne while much-repeated for Lucile, we might argue that Staël here obeyed psychic pressures beyond her control. That ad feminam argument is standard; yet with a male author, one would begin by reading ambiguity as the product of art and proof of that esthetic distance between author and text of which Jean Starobinski once claimed Staël was incapable. In these terms, we might observe that Staël bracketed Corinne ou l’Italie’s publication in April 1807 with a two-part review, in the journal Le Publiciste, of her friend Bonstetten’s epistemological analysis of the new Romantic imagination she embodied in Corinne as fiction: A critical discourse thus frames Staël’s heroine. Feminist jokes mark both this new esthetic distance and Staël’s own growing strength of vision; back in 1802, other people’s gossip and the heroine’s irrevocable monastic vows caused Delphine’s catastrophe, and Staël now ironizes both devices in order to stress Corinne as a free agent. Corinne pointedly invites people she likes to come up and see her, over Oswald’s priggish objections, and she enters a Roman convent for a one-week visit, then walks back out a free woman into the streets of Rome.12
The character Corinne tends also to subsume her surroundings. Even our routine deletion of half the title can only encourage claims like Starobinski’s, hiding the fact that a generation used the novel as a guidebook, besides the harmonic counterpoint between plot and description that Staël works hard to establish and that Simone Balayé has retraced. Corinne gazes into a moonlit Roman fountain and Oswald’s reflection appears; Lucile asks Oswald which he prefers, Domenichino’s sibyl or Antonio da Correggio’s Madonna (507); Oswald’s fortress-prison mirrors his mind as Corinne’s airy studio mirrors hers: Throughout the novel, art and nature echo the life of the soul. Corinne’s Italy is both real and a hermetic space, from the opening scenes where the ocean reflects the sky, to Vesuvius, where earth, fire, and air are in elemental dialogue, retracing “l’harmonie universelle de la nature” (210). Staël’s Baudelairean correspondences – “les sons imitent les couleurs, les couleurs se fondent en harmonie” (37) – fuse Louis Claude de Saint-Martin and the German Romantics: Staël’s text borrows Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laokoön and Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet, Goethe, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling on architecture as frozen music (203–204, 263, 75); her endnotes quote Goethe in German, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and both Schlegels. Rome too is almost as present as the Renaissance, in this land of ruins: Staël quotes Propertius, Tibullus, and Pliny in Latin, while two recognition scenes with Lucile pay homage to the Oresteia. This rich texture marks a radical break with two dominant novelistic traditions of the age, the short récit and the epistolary novel, neither of which tend to stress local color or the picturesque. Corinne on the contrary moves from set piece to set piece, rather in the vein of the tableaux vivants the eighteenth century favored; Corinne’s bulk may even have helped to make the weighty tomes of Hugo and Herman Melville possible. Certainly, the book cries out to be put on film.13
Staël’s authorial endnotes offer some insight into this complexity. German and Latin authors join Vincenzo Monti, Alessandro Verri, Ippolito Pindemonte, and Alfieri, Staël’s father Necker, her friends François-Joseph Talma, Sismondi, Madame Récamier, and the Dane Friederike Brun; she cites the Romantic, or neoclassical, painters Jacques-Louis David, François Gérard, Pierre Narcisse Guérin, Germain-Jean Drouais, Friedrich Rehberg, and John George Wallis, from France, Germany, and England; she adds anecdotes about the city of Ancona, a child she met in Rome, and the Castel Sant’Angelo, sketching out her own Italian journey. Staël footnoted throughout her career, allowing her an authorial voice reminiscent of Balzac’s, but the effect within a novel like Corinne is curious. First, it establishes Staël’s first-name familiarity with the great names of Europe; her discourse is anchored in a circle of friends and a concert of nations. Second, it outlines a striking, female authorial persona, stressing Staël’s learning and humor while further melting her into Corinne. Third, like most framing devices, it opens a maze of arguments about narrative realism: Do Staël’s endnote realia make Corinne’s parallel universe more or less real? Unusual for Staël’s prose works in having no preface, Corinne also has perhaps her only postface or appendix, subtly shifting the erotics of the text and its harsh ending.
Like the text’s endnotes and its neglected German Romantic discourse, so the figure of Oswald illustrates our reliance on Corinne. Constant’s focus on Oswald has a certain logic to it, when he reviews this novel that opens and closes with Oswald, not with Corinne as we might believe; and when his focus on Oswald surprises us, our surprise itself deserves a closer look. There is in fact strong evidence that this novel’s shifting viewpoint stands closer to Oswald than to his female companion: We hear Corinne, while we share Oswald’s mental reactions, and one reason Corinne seems so physically present is that we’re looking at her through Oswald’s eyes. If this is so, then the force of Staël’s new symbiosis was powerful enough to bury those markers for two centuries of readers – this despite Oswald’s wound, an echo of Tristan or Guigemar, his trial by fire at Ancona, and his other knightly attributes. We have, in a sense, a male Romantic récit in the René–Adolphe tradition, complete with a weak male narrator and dying heroine, but exploded from within by the heroine’s vitality.14
In fact, Oswald speaks directly for a whole book of the novel, but our ad hoc reader’s focus on the mythic figure of Corinne can leave a taste of monologue that raises some intriguing questions. If Corinne is univocally the voice of her nation, then where are Montesquieu’s checks and balances? How is Staël’s political stand then different from Robespierre’s or Stalin’s? Three answers occur. First, the sibyl’s splendor lies in her alert receptivity to voices other than her own; and in Corinne’s triumph at the Capitol, she is carried, like Isaac Newton, by others’ hands. Second, Staël praises legislators and executors who abdicate after acting: Solon in Athens, Rousseau in Poland, Necker or George Washington, that modern Cincinnatus. Third, Corinne’s actual text is built around dialogue and Bakhtinian polyphony – Oswald and Corinne, two Staël avatars, check and balance each other – and the Considérations in particular insists that nations need an opposition party. And yet, Corinne’s mythic symbiosis retains a life of its own. Nationalism was born in hope of a new dawn for the oppressed, but the same is true of Victor Frankenstein’s sad creation; time and again, the world’s revolutionary nationalists, from Robespierre and Bolívar onward, have spoken for the people while in opposition, then arrived at power believing that this voice brooks no dissent. Vox populi vox dei: The people’s voice is the voice of God.15
It seems, in short, that Staël saw a Faustian bargain in Corinne ou l’Italie – as we have argued – took it and paid the price; its triumphs and failures thus stand or fall together. What Staël gained was mythic power; what she lost was the ability to control its fate. Corinne’s political impact in Europe and America, standing as it does at the birth of modern nationalism, is both real and unquantifiable – witness the coinage nationalité, part of the larger impact of Staël’s ideas on national genius, reflected in Blackwood’s praise of her in 1818 as the creator of the science of nations. The novel’s esthetic impact on a century of readers, from Leopardi to Mrs. A. E. Johnson, is both fascinating per se and somewhat easier to assess, an invitation to future study already made in 1825 by Stendhal, in a neglected remark from Racine et Shakespeare: “Je ne vois réellement que Corinne qui ait acquis une gloire impérissable sans se modeler sur les anciens.”16
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