Women Authors, Political Propaganda and the Salon: Arbiters of Cultural Exchange and Liberty during the Napoleonic Wars

Sharon Worley

During the Napoleonic Wars an important group of women authors and salon hostesses emerged. They were educated in the Enlightenment and appreciated the new Romantic style in art and literature. Their activities represent a new political activism for women who took a stand on the issue of democracy in contrast with the imperialism of Napoleon. They used literature and art as a means of patriotic social propaganda that reinforced their goals of liberty and the defeat of Napoleonic hegemony. Members of the aristocracy, or closely associated with them through the forum of the salon, their contribution is all the more remarkable in creating a new orientation for social and political change. Some of them were identified as subversive elements by Napoleon, and forced to live in exile. There they actively advocated an end to the empire, and promoted literary archetypes in art and the novel as contemporary social role models that reinforced their goal. In addition, these literary archetypes, having their origins in Neoclassical role models and children’s literature, and following the example of instruction in Rousseau’s Emile, were used to create an iconic semiotic language to address public morals and orchestrate political change through the aesthetic response, and its association with moral values. De Staël’s trip to Germany and her survey of German Romantic culture, On Germany, created a pivotal link with the German resistance movement behind the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon. She maintained close social ties with leading members of the German nobility and Romantic circle who actively promoted political propaganda in support of the Wars of Liberation using the similar propaganda strategies. In the propaganda of the Napoleonic Wars, culture became the medium of exchange as Napoleon’s troops moved into Italy and Germany, and sought to appropriate cultural hegemony in support of Imperial ambitions. Neoclassicism, Romanticism and Imperialism drew on Classical and Medieval culture, and its heroes and heroines became actors on a social stage that reinforced the goals of patriotism in Republican or Imperial Rome, and feudal medieval Germany, serving as role models for contemporary political propaganda.

The women in France include Germaine de Staël, author of Corinne (1807) and On Germany (1810), whose politically active salon was forced to move from Paris to Coppet, Switzerland, and Stephanie Genlis, governess of the future Louis-Philippe and author of Athenais set at de Staël’s chateau Coppet, and children’s literature like Adélé and Theodore, as well as the famous beauty and salon hostess Juliette Récamier. All three were intimately acquainted and frequented de Staël’s Paris and Coppet salons together with leading intellectuals and politicians, such as Chateaubriand and Benjamin Constant. In Berlin, Germany, Jewish women including Dorothea Schlegel, wife of Friedrich Schlegel, a leading Romantic critic, and Rebecca Friedländer (Regina Frohberg) were closely associated with the politically active Romantic Berlin salons of Rahel Levin and Henrietta Herz. Dorothea Schlegel, author of Florentin (1801), was acquainted with de Staël through her brother-in-law August Wilhelm Schlegel, who moved to de Staël’s Coppet estate as a tutor for her children. Regina Frohberg, the former wife of David Friedländer, was the author of numerous novels including Schmerz der Liebe (1810) about a woman artist commissioned to paint the portrait of a nobleman. Finally, in Italy, Louis Stolberg, the former wife of the last Stuart Pretender to the English throne, Charles Edward Stuart, maintained an active anti-Napoleonic salon in Florence with the Italian Neoclassical playwright, poet and Medici historian Vittorio Alfieri that included André Chénier and Francois-Xavier Fabre, a pupil of the Neoclassical painter David. Stolberg also maintained close contacts with members of de Staël’s literary Coppet salon, author Charles Bonstettan and Italian historian J.C.L. Sismondi. When de Staël researched her novel Corinne, she stayed with Stolberg, and included her heroine’s dramatic visit to the Medici tombs at San Lorenzo in Florence in the final chapters of her novel where Corinne dies.

By focusing on the forum of the salon as a political entity in which contact was facilitated between French, German and Italian salons, the common goals of political freedom and liberty emerge in its participants. My scholarship is new in that it emphasizes the common goals held by these women, and examines their literary activism in the context of the political transition from the Revolution to Empire, and resulting Wars of Liberation, and the styles of Neoclassicism and Romanticism. My research emphasizes those styles as form of political propaganda that draws on literary archetypes of heroes and heroines as contemporary role models for social change, and implements propaganda through existing models of aesthetics and semiotics, and makes their joint contribution as politically active women the focus of scholarship for the first time. My semiotic interpretation builds on the research of the French Revolution by Lynn Hunt and Joan Landes, and identifies a systematic semiotic approach among literary heroic archetypes as a propaganda program designed to rally support for the Wars of Liberation in Germany.