Reappropriating Honnêteté: Madame de Staël's comte d'Erfeuil and National Character in Post-Revolutionary France

Germaine de Staël's novel Corinne ou l'Italie, written at the dawn of the age of romanticism and set at the end of the eighteenth century, underscores the virtues of old regime France at a time when many Europeans were evaluating the domestic and international legacies of the Revolution. The novel depicts a dialectical relationship between power and ineffectiveness through a "stereotypical" Frenchman character who transcends national boundaries. The count of Erfeuil represents an image of the Frenchman as he was seen throughout Europe in the old regime: an incarnated juxtaposition of true masculine elegance and destructive effeminacy. Staël's work redeems the Frenchman's image in the transnational context as she uses this character to portray the ways in which an exemplary man should and should not act in an idealized, post-revolutionary, and cosmopolitan world. Staël's narrative ultimately helps forge the path for the old regime man of fashion to transform into the nineteenth-century man of leisure.