Staël’s Philosophy of the Passions: Sensibility, Society, and the Sister Arts ed. by Tili Boon Cuillé and Karyna Szmurlo (review)

Tili Boon Cuillé’s Introduction situates Staël in relation to Enlightenment thinkers and their treatments of sensibility as it pertains to politics, art, and relations between the two. It presents Staël’s philosophy of the passions both as a culmination of an eighteenth-century tradition that yields an ‘affective revolution’ (p. 2) and as an alteration of that tradition that transposes an ‘Enlightenment project […] into a Romantic ideal’ (p. 9). Only Nanette Le Coat’s ‘The Virtuous Passion’ fulfils the promise of this perspective, carefully laying out Staël’s ‘reconfiguration of the semantic field of the passions’ (p. 51). Amid too many discussions of Corinne (and redundant plot recapitulations across the essays), C. C. Wharram’s ‘Aeolian Translation’ stands out for its interest in ‘De l’esprit de la traduction’ and De la littérature. Almost all the contributions in the volume derive from papers presented at an International Germaine de Staël Symposium that the editors organized in 2009. This would account for the seemingly haphazard collection of essays here, which, taken together, unfortunately fail to do the work that Cuillé’s Introduction invites us to expect: a substantial reassessment of the importance of Staël for nineteenth-century French intellectual, political, and aesthetic culture. Readers will learn some interesting things: what Corinne owed to ‘The Wild Irish Girl’, an 1806 tale by Sydney Owenson (M. Ione Crummy), British legacies of Corinne (Kari Lokke), the specific virtues of the glass harmonica for Staël and romanticism generally (Fabienne Moore), and subtle differences between painted portraits of Staël (Mary D. Sheriff). But without a powerful sense of this figure’s capital importance within the context of an emergent romanticism in the wake of the French Revolution, these insights appear scattered, even incidental. When Napoleon, before he exiles her, asks Staël what she wants, hoping to appease her political resistance by an appeal to her self-interest, she replies that what matters is not what she wants but what she thinks. This strong sense of her thought — philosophical, political, social, as well as literary — is too slight here. We need a clearer sense of why the nineteenth century would not have been the same without her (consider Staël’s impact on Guizot, Hugo, and Constant, for a start). The two editors have made crucially important contributions to the advancement of Staël studies, and their generous encouragement of young scholars, who are well represented here, is exemplary. However, a volume is yet to be written that invites us to consider how Staël the thinker and writer confronts unprecedented historical change — almost a decade of revolutionary activity in which the foundations of all extant social and political institutions in France were radically altered — with powerful ideas for inventing the future, ideas that remain vital in the comparably unprecedented circumstances that we find ourselves in today as we enter the Anthropocene age.