Romantic Aesthetics and Abolitionist Activism: African Beauty in Germaine de Staël's Mirza ou Lettre d’un voyageur

Abstract

In 1786, long before the definitive end of slavery in France, a young Germaine de Staël penned Mirza ou Lettre d’un voyageur, an African tale of love and the slave trade recounted by a European narrator. In this novella, Staël boldly challenges neoclassical ideals of beauty through the story of two black Senegambians, Mirza and Ximéo, from warring ethnicities in the Kingdom of Cayor. Through these characters, Staël presents to the European reader a new concept of beauty, a contagious beauty, that she hopes will move her or him to pity and recognition of the basic humanity of slaves. In addition, via this new beauty, Staël hopes to dispose the reader to arguments in favor of abolition, both of the slave trade and slavery. Mirza ou Lettre d’un voyageur, a work heretofore largely ignored, can thus be read as the presentation of Romantic beauty as central to Staël's political views and especially to her abolitionist agenda.

Keywords:

• abolition
• beauty
• Mirza ou Lettre d’un voyageur
• neoclassical
• romantic
• slavery
• slave trade
• Germaine de Staël

Notes

1. Although the buying and selling of slaves, the “slave trade,” was finally abolished in France in 1830, the practice of slavery, namely the use of slaves on plantations, continued until 1848.

In this novella, Staël makes reference to the Jaloffes and the Kingdom of Cayor. The Kingdom of Cayor (1566–1886) was situated between the Senegal and Saloum Rivers in Northwest Senegal. This kingdom was inhabited by the Jaloffes (referred to today as Wolofs) and several other ethnic groups. In this story, Mirza is a Jaloffe whereas Ximéo is of another unspecified ethnicity.

Staël undoubtedly drew her inspiration for this novella from an encounter that her father certainly had and that she may have had with the Chevalier de Boufflers, governor of Senegal. As Claire de Duras belonged to the same social circles as Staël and her father, Mirza ou Lettre d’un voyageur surely served as a model for Duras's best-selling Ourika. For more on the encounter between Staël and Boufflers, see Miller 144, and for Staël's influence on Duras, see Miller 159.

2. In her conclusion to De l’influence des passions (1795) and after having lived the horrific Reign of Terror, Staël elevates pity to the highest moral disposition, a position that will later become second only to living in accord with one's conscience: “Une belle cause finale dans l’ordre moral, c’est la prodigieuse influence de la pitié sur les coeurs” (245).

3. Staël dedicates her whole work De la littérature to the definition and propagation of the perfectibility of the human species. For an overview of Staël's definition of the perfectibility of the human species, and especially with regard to the woman writer's role in this movement, see de Bruin, “Melancholy,” and Lotterie. For a brief introduction to the importance of the perfectibility of the human species to De la littérature, see Gengembre and Goldzink's introduction to the 1991 Flammarion edition of De la littérature, 7–47.

4. Staël fully formulates her conception of this new literature, what we now call Romantic literature, in her two later works De la littérature (1800) and De l’Allemagne (1810).

5. Here I am making reference to Adam Smith's argument against slavery to which I will return later in this study. See Larrère.

6. In Delphine, M. de Lebensei condemns on multiple occasions civil and political slavery. For a detailed analysis of Staël's condemnation of slavery in Corinne, ou l’Italie, see Kadish,”Patriarchy and Abolition.”

7. For detailed historical analyses of the extent to which Staël's family participated in the abolitionist movement, see Aurenche and Isbell.

8. See, for example, Sismondi's De l’intérêt de la France à l’égard de la traite des nègres or Constant's speeches against slavery.

9. See, for example, Aurenche. See also Jennings 1–23.

10. See Kadish and Massardier-Kenney and both works by Kadish. See also Miller 99–108, 141–157.

11. Nineteenth-century economist Henry Higgs confirms Necker's orthodox mercantilist position in his study entitled The Physiocrates 121.

12. Ximéo states: “puisse mes infortunés compatriotes renoncer à la vie sauvage, se vouer au travail pour satisfaire vos avides désirs, et contribuer à sauver quelques-uns d’eux de la plus horrible destinée !” (26).

13. Jean Ehrard reminds us of the Catholic Church's doctrinal position on slavery and the slave trade: “En 1764 le théologien Bellon de Saint-Quentin, dans une Dissertation sur la traite et le commerce des nègres, démontre methodiquement que la possession et le commerce d’esclaves ne sont contraires ni ‘à la loi naturelle, ni à la loi Divine écrite, ni même à la loi de l’Évangile’” (101).

14. The narrator states: “J’appris à Gorée […] que M. le gouverneur avait déterminé une famille nègre à venir demeurer à quelques lieux de là, pour y établir une habitation pareille à celles de Saint-Domingue, se flattant sans doute, qu’un tel exemple exciterait les Africains à la culture du sucre; et qu’attirant chez eux le commerce libre de cette denrée, les Européens ne les enlèveraient plus à leur patrie pour leur faire souffrir le joug affreux de l’esclavage” (23).

15. For a discussion of the evolution of Staël's liberal philosophy, see Craitu.

16. The narrator of Saint-Lambert's Ziméo is an English merchant, of Protestant persuasion, who is visiting Jamaican plantations. Like the narrator of Mirza ou Lettre d’un voyageur, he is not an abolitionist although he is schooled in Enlightenment thought and is sensitive to the working and living conditions of the slaves.

17. Jean-Baptiste Bon Boutard, founder of the Journal des Débats, wrote of African faces in 1800: “Ces visages africains sont, par la nature, si uniformement laids, qu’il est impossible à l’art de leur donner aucune espèce de beauté” (Grigsby 325).

18. The physical portrait of Staël's character Ximéo is largely inspired by Saint-Lambert's hero, Ziméo. Saint-Lambert describes Ziméo in the following manner: “Ziméo était un jeune homme de vingt-deux ans: les statues d’Apollon et de l’Antinoüs n’ont pas de traits plus réguliers et de plus belles proportions. Je fus frappé sur-tout de son air de grandeur. Je n’ai jamais vu d’homme qui me parût comme lui né pour commander aux autres” (55). However, contrary to the heroic portrayal of Ziméo, typical of the “great man” representations of the eighteenth century, Staël sketches an antiheroic portrait that accentuates Ximéo's melancholy rather than his capacity to command.

19. In Ian Balfour's fascinating analysis of the manner in which Burke and Kant gender the concepts of beauty and the sublime, he poses the question with regard to Burke's own slippage in A Philosophical Enquiry: “if the male is aligned with the sublime and the female with the beautiful, what happens when the distinction between the sublime and the beautiful blurs?” (331).

20. For an analysis of the manner in which Staël represents the (feminine) sublime in Corinne, ou l’Italie, see de Bruin “Melancholy,” and for the (feminine) sublime in Delphine, see de Bruin, La Femme supérieure 149–94.

21. Staël is making reference to Cato the Younger (95 BC–46 BC) who famously opposed the corruption of Caesar and in a last act of rebellion stabbed himself with his own sword.

22. For more on Staël's vision of the role of women in the moral revolution of men, see de Bruin, “The Helm and the Compass.”