Defending the queen: Wollstonecraft and Stael on the politics of sensibility and feminine difference.(Mary Wollstonecraft, Germaine de Stael)

I shall therefore only speak of that verdict, analyzing the political, in telling what I have seen, what I know of the queen, and in depicting the hideous circumstances which have led to her condemnation. (1)

GERMAINE DE STAEL, Reflections on the Trial of the Queen, by a Woman, August 1793

STAEL'S essay in defense of Marie Antoinette at the time of her trial was initially published anonymously as authored only "by a woman." Stael's identification of herself as a woman is significant. The Revolutionary criminal Tribunal, consisting of a male jury and nine male judges, ultimately decided Marie Antoinette's fate, yet the lower-class women of Paris were among her most notorious and vicious enemies. Indeed, the first time that women organized politically was to march to Versailles in October 1789 to demand that the royal couple guarantee bread to the people and approve the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the citizen. The direct confrontation between the Queen of France and the mostly lower-class Parisian women who marched to Versailles to capture the queen serves as a political moment peculiarly open to a variety of readings. In this essay, I am particularly interested in analyzing the readings of the two female political theorists who write about this event, Mary Wollstonecraft and Germaine de Stael.

As a feminist working in the field of political theory, I am drawn to specific historical moments and literary metaphors that function within theoretical texts as sites where ideas of femininity (as well as masculinity) are (re)produced and mediated. I have isolated the October 1789 Women's March to Versailles and the August 1793 trial of Marie Antoinette to be studied here because the status of femininity and women's role in politics are at the center of each event. The Women's March was the first moment in the Revolution that women came together as a group of women in order to act politically and make demands of their sovereigns. (2) One of these sovereigns is a woman who herself will be slandered and executed for stepping outside the role of proper femininity. In the bill of indictment against Marie Antoinette at her trial, she is accused of squandering public monies, siphoning money to Austria, and most outrageously, of engaging in incest with her son. A host of contemporary feminist scholars have studied the ways in which Marie Antoinette's status as queen symbolized, for revolutionaries, the feminization and corruption of the Old Regime. Propaganda at the time painted Marie Antoinette as woman, foreigner, prostitute, adulteress, and coquette. (3) And indeed, her trial and execution in August 1793 marks the moment after which all possibilities for women's formal participation in politics were closed off.

Thus, we see the interpretive and political perils of these historical events for writers who sought to advance women's potential role in the New Republic. Marie Antoinette, the female victim said to symbolize the feminine excess of the aristocracy, is attacked by lower-class market women testing and enacting their newly found political power. How was the woman writer to understand the potential role of women in politics and notions of the feminine when faced with such contradictory behavior of women and diverse meaning attached to the feminine? To attempt to analyze the role of "women" in these events, one becomes increasingly drawn into an eighteenth-century discursive dynamic that Gunther-Canada has called the "politics of sense and sensibility" (4) Simply put, sensibility was identified with female virtues of sympathetic feeling, empathetic behavior, and romanticism; sense was associated with masculine rational discourse as exemplified in Enlightenment philosophy. Negotiating the gendered politics of sens e and sensibility proved to be significant challenge for women who wished to see gender inequality alleviated. To continue to view women and define the feminine self through the lens of sensibility was to run the risk of identifying women with the very qualities that had been said to justify their exclusion from politics in the first place. To turn the tables and claim that women could indeed be associated with sense, just as well as men, was to risk reifying a masculine model of political discourse rendering sexual difference incompatible with democratic politics.

Mary Wollstonecraft and Germaine de Stael boldly entered into this debate. Wollstonecraft, a woman writer of the middle classes who wrote to earn her keep, firmly forged her allegiance with the common people in analyzing the conditions of the majority, claiming that women faced the most wretched circumstances of all. Wollstonecraft is most famous for two early political essays. Her Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) (5) was written in defense of the principles of the French Revolution in response to Edmund Burke's attack on the Revolution; the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) (6) was written to persuade Talleyrand, French Minister of Education at the time, that a national education program should include girls alongside boys. While these two essays were written from England, An Historical and Moral Overview of the French Revolution (1794) (7) was authored by Wollstonecraft after she came to Paris to experience the Revolution for herself. She arrived in time to see Louis XVI being taken off to pr ison and to witness the beginning of the Terror. Yet, despite the increasing radicalization of the Revolution, until her death in 1797, Wollstonecraft remained committed to the view of the "French Revolution [as] part of the human destiny for improvement" and sought to secure the rights of her sex through democratic politics. (8)

In contrast, Germaine de Stael, daughter of Jacques Necker, Finance Minister on the eve of the Revolution, and Suzanne Necker, Parisian salonniere, was an aristocrat by birth and initially sought to prepare herself to preside over a salon and "exert an influence in the manner appropriate to women of the aristocracy." (9) Initially loyal to the idea of an enlightened constitutional monarchy, Stael became a committed republican. Genevieve Fraisse calls Stael "the most visible woman of her generation" (Fraisse 1994,103). Swept up into the center of revolutionary events by her father's position, Stael remained fascinated by politics, and especially the role of women, throughout her life and put these concerns at the forefront of her work. Though the lives of women were central to almost everything Stael wrote, she was most interested in the lives of exceptional women and never explicitly made the case for politically empowering every woman. After the fall of the monarchy, Stael took refuge in Switzerland, returne d to France in 1795, eventually became a forceful opponent of Napoleon and was exiled in 1803. Her three-volume treatise, Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution, (10) was left unfinished in 1817 upon her death and published one year later. My primary analysis in this essay will be of Stael's work, especially the 1793 short essay, Reflections on the Trial of a Queen, by a Woman, using Woll-stonecraft's work written in 1794 (at roughly the same time as Stael's essay) as a comparison. (11) In my comparison of these two women authors, I am particularly concerned with how the two negotiate the politics of sense and sensibility, analyzing the twin perils of reifying a masculine model versus essentializing the feminine.

THE "QUERELLE DES FEMMES"

Throughout the revolutionary period, interpretations of femininity, what it meant to be a woman, and what that might signify politically and socially, were continually in flux. The changing roles of women throughout the various stages of the Revolution have been studied extensively. Dena Goodman notes that the "querelle des femmes, or 'woman question,' raged throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries." (12) In the Old Regime, upper-class women like Germaine de Stael's mother, Suzanne Necker, presided over salons where ideas were freely exchanged and opinions circulated. Goodman notes that the salonniere's role "as civilizer was the historical key to the realization of sociability and civilization" (Goodman 1994, 5). These salons played a central role in the Old Regime's reputation as a feminized space. As salonnieres rarely published anything, their speech was not seen as dangerous or …