Conflict With Napoleon
The date of the beginning of what Mme de Staël's admirers call her duel with Napoleon is not easy to determine. Judging from the title of her book Dix annees d'exil ("Ten years of exile"), it should be put at 1804; judging from the time at which it became pretty clear that the first man in France and she who wished to be the first woman in France were not likely to get on together, it might be put several years earlier. Napoleon said about her, according to the Memoirs of Mme. de Remusat, that she "teaches people to think who never thought before, or who had forgotten how to think."
It displeased Napoleon that Mme de Staël should show herself recalcitrant to his influence. But it probably pleased Mme de Staël to quite an equal degree that Napoleon should apparently put forth his power to crush her and fail. Both personages had a curious touch of theatricality. If Mme de Staël had really desired to take up her struggle against Napoleon seriously, she need only have established herself in England at the peace of Amiens. But she lingered on at Coppet. There, she was shadowed by Napoleon's spies due to her tendency to defy Napoleon's orders, firstly that she keep away from Paris, and later out of France altogether, leaving her restless and lonely in rural Switzerland and constantly yearning after her beloved Paris.
In 1802, she published the first of her noteworthy books, the novel Delphine, in which the femme incomprise was in a manner introduced to French literature, and in which she herself and not a few of her intimates appeared in transparent disguise. In the autumn of 1803, she returned to Paris. Had she not made her anxiety about exile so public, it remains unclear whether Napoleon would have exiled her; but, as she began at once appealing to all sorts of persons to protect her, he seems to have thought it better that she should not be protected. She was directed not to reside within 40 leagues of Paris, and after considerable delay she determined to go to Germany.
Read more about this topic: Germaine De Staël
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