Marie d'Agoult

Images wanted Marie Catherine Sophie de Flavigny, Vicomtesse de Flavigny (December 31, 1805 - March 5, 1876), was a French author and historian, known also by her married name and title, Marie, Comtesse d'Agoult, and by her pen name, Daniel Stern.

She married Colonel Charles Louis Constant d’Agoult, Comte d'Agoult (1790-1875), twenty years her senior, thereby becoming the Comtesse d'Agoult. They had two daughters, Louise (1828-1834), and Claire (1830-1912). They were divorced on August 19, 1835.

From 1835 to 1839 she lived with virtuoso pianist and composer Franz Liszt, who was five years younger and a rising concert star. Marie d'Agoult had three children with Liszt, but they did not marry, maintaining their independent views and other differences, while Liszt was busy composing and touring throughout Europe.

Their children were Blandine (1835-1862), who was the first wife of Émile Olivier but died at the age of 28; Cosima (1837-1930) (who married Richard Wagner, the composer, the second marriage for them both); and Daniel (1839-1859), who was already a promising pianist and gifted scholar when he died of tuberculosis at age 20.

Marie d'Agoult began her career in 1839 as a writer and in 1846 published Nélida, a semi-autobiographical novel. She was friends with female novelist George Sand for a time and shared many of the same views on morals, politics, and society. They lived together with their lovers for a time, she with Liszt, and George with Chopin. Chopin dedicated his second set of piano études to Marie d'Agoult.

She created a salon where the outstanding writers, thinkers, and musicians discussed the ideas that culminated in the Revolution of 1848. Her writings include Lettres républicaines (1848); Histoire de la révolution de 1848 (1850–53); a play, Jeanne d'Arc (1857); and a dialog, Dante et Goethe (1866). Her Mes Souvenirs 1806–1833 (1877) was followed by Mémoires, 1833–1854, published posthumously in 1927, these two volumes gave insights on the social, literary, and musical circles of the time.

She died, aged 71, in Paris, and was buried in Division 54 of Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Her life

She was born in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, the daughter of Alexander Victor François de Flavigny (1770-1819), a footloose emigré French aristocrat, and his wife Maria-Elisabeth Bethmann (1772-1847), a Jewish German banker's daughter whose family had converted to Catholicism. The young Marie spent her early years in Germany and completed her education in a French convent after the Bourbon Restoration. She entered into an early marriage of convenience with Charles Louis Constant d’Agoult, Comte d'Agoult (1790-1875) on May 16, 1827, thus she became the Comtesse d'Agoult. They had two daughters, Louise (1828-1834), (whose early death devastated Marie), and Claire (1830-1912).

Marie d'Agoult was raised in an aristocratic culture during the period just prior to the French Revolution. This was a time when society began to shift, especially concerning the rights of women. Mary Wollstonecraft wrote the Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792, which stimulated many women, including Marie, to reconsider the life she was living.

Previously, philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau had written that women were notably different creatures than men and should be educated for only one job, marriage and motherhood, where the husband was absolute ruler over his family. After the French Revolution, these paternalistic ideas again gained prominence. The emancipation of women, especially those of Marie's social class, would have to begin with maternal and property rights.

She was not happy in her arranged marriage, but she found spiritual and intellectual sustenance in the religious teachings of the Abbé de Lammenais and in the company of a new generation of Romantic artists like Hugo, Vigny, Lamartine, Chopin, and Rossini, among others. She began to study different topics of interest including art, philosophy, and politics. Marie began to examine the writings of the thinkers of this period and thus developed a critical mind and opinions about various topics. Through her self-education she became a respected critical thinker among her friends.

Franz Liszt, the great love of her life

Marie met Hungarian Franz Liszt, in 1833 in Paris. He was an upcoming composer and musician, yet a man below her social standing. Their friendship developed based on books that they shared and discussed together beginning with the Bible, Shakespeare, Goethe, Chateaubriand, Balzac, Nerval and George Sand. She shared her newest interests with him: Volupté, by Sainte-Beuve and Oberman, by Senancour.

While Liszt was somewhat uncultured and not as intellectual, Marie tried to educate him and they shared exciting discussions which brought them closer together. They exchanged many letters over the time of their relationship.

Liszt, actually, was an Utopian, who studied the Sainte-Simonian socialist thinkers, which he introduced to Marie. She was unaware of the great physical misery experienced by the common people who lived outside of her limited aristocratic world. She was moved by the force, clear thoughts and justice taught by Eugene Rodriguez, and Pierre Leroux. In this area Liszt became her teacher and through this exchange of ideas, Marie's intellectual horizons expanded. Liszt's egalitarian views fed Marie's romanticism and they fell in love.

Liszt believed that, "The artist is the living expression of God, of nature, and of humanity." Through art, one could experience God, he said. Marie, longed for fulfillment through love and Liszt began to become the object of her passions and thoughts.

In the spring of 1833, Marie's family moved to Croissy and she could not see Liszt. Only their letters kept their relationship alive. The emotions expressed in their letters were of high hope and passion, and deepest despair. They longed to be together yet were blocked by her marriage and social standing.

She wrote to him,

...whatever my future sufferings you need not cry over them, because you have done me more good than you can ever do me harm. You have managed to break all the lines that still attach me to the world [of high society], and you have awakened in me the feelings of my own personal unhappiness, which I was offering ceaselessly to God as a sacrifice, believing that resignation was the only virtue possible for me.

She feared never seeing him again, and wrote, "I am alone, alone with one great thought, and that thought is you. I love you with all my heart." In the autumn of 1834 her family returned to Paris and they became lovers.

Later she wrote, "The need for exclusiveness, this need to be loved totally, has dominated all the feelings of my life." Marie struggled with keeping their affair secret. She was haunted by melancholy and even madness, with worry about the scandal their affair would cause to her family and society. Liszt, a free thinker, told her that up till now she had been keeping secret all the passions and ideas that were "pure" withing herself and that it was a decision between herself and God as to eloping with him, taking holy orders (to calm their passions) or staying with her husband.

Liszt wrote to her in response to her question about past affairs, "don't you know that you have the right of life and death over me...for you alone I feel myself young and a man." And in another letter he wrote, "Marie, place your hand on my heart, your heart on my breast. I am naked and cold, clothe me entirely with your love, make me burn again with infinite ardor, deliver me for a time from the miseries of the age, resurrect my soul."

Their love relationship developed into greater intensity and in August, 1835 her husband granted her a divorce. Her family disowned her and she suffered from being separated from her children, as woman had to rights to their children after a divorce in the nineteenth century.

Marie took the gigantic step of living openly with Franz Liszt, cutting herself off from her family and social connections. She was shunned by her family and was the source of much gossip from the aristocratic circles she had been accustomed to.

They traveled Europe together as he composed and performed and had three children together. They lived with female author George Sand and her lover Frédéric Chopin for awhile. They gathered thinkers, writers, artists, musicians and eventually revolutionaries in their salon wherever they lived, encouraging the free expression of ideas.

Their creativity, passion and love of ideas kept them together even though they were two very different people. But Liszt's protracted absences and well-publicized philandering brought an end to their tumultuous affair in 1839 with the final split in 1844.

Career as a writer

Marie's studies and articulate intellectual discussions with friends and acquaintances created an environment where her thoughts and ideas developed into powerful arguments. Her friend and admirer, Thèophile de Ferriere encouraged her to write. (Originally wanting to be close to her, he later devoted himself to supporting their couple, he arranged for Liszt to play the organ in Notre Dame at midnight and Marie, dressed in man's clothing, attended. When word got out about the event the public talked about the scandal for months.) Thèophile challenged her about her lack of confidence and pushed her to write. She had been inspired by another woman writer, George Sand, Amandine Dupin, Baronne Dudevant, who wrote Lélia, a story about a woman demanding the right to fulfillment in marriage.

During her frequent travels with Liszt in Switzerland, France and Italy she made the acquaintance of George Sand who was living with Chopin, and Marie figures in the Lettres d'un voyageur as "Arabella." Marie was encouraged to write through her friendship with George and eventually took the pen name, Daniel Stern. George Sand eventually betrayed Marie by revealing Marie's breach with Liszt — under a very slight disguise — in George's novel Nélida (1845). George was competitive, sometimes jealous (perhaps because Chopin dedicated his second set of piano études to Marie d'Agoult), and challenged society's norms by wearing men's clothing, and even smoking in public. George's betrayal hurt Marie greatly, but from this pain she began to rely on her own self judgment in furthering her writing.

On her return to Paris in 1841 she began to write art critiques for the liberal journal, La Presse, Marie also became a frequent contributor to the French liberal opposition press of the 1840s. After Marie's affair with Liszt finally ended in 1844 she began a serious career as a journalist, under the guidance of Emile de Girardin, editor of the La Presse. She contributed to the Revue des deux Mondes (World Revue) writing articles on Bettina von Arnim and Heinrich Heine. But her unique views were not accepted by the editor, and Marie, as Daniel Stern, moved to become a contributor to the Revue Indépendante (Independent Revue). She wrote her most important works under her pen name, Daniel Stern, which were her political and historical essays: Lettres republicaines (Republican Letters) (1848), Esquisses morales et politiques (Questions on Morals and Politics) (1849), Histoire de la Revolution de 1848 (History of the Revolution) (3 vols., 1850-1853), and Histoire des commencements de la Republique aux Pays-Bas (History of the beginning of the Republic of a weak country)(1872). Her Histoire de la Révolution de 1848, was her best-known work, and is still considered by many historians to be a balanced and accurate contemporary treatment of events in France. In 1857 she produced a national drama, Jeanne D'Arc, which was translated into Italian and presented with success at Turin.

Through her writings she introduced the French reading public to a number of foreign authors, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Georg Herwegh, and Bettina von Arnim. She regularly attended parliamentary debates and as a result wrote political commentary. She published Nelida, in 1846 which was a thinly-veiled fictional account of her affair with Liszt. Nelida caused a scandal and was very successful, but Marie realized her talents were more in analysis and commentary and gave up fiction writing. Her journalism earned her good respect, and Essai sur la liberté, (1847) won her the praise of numerous critics including Sainte-Beuve, and she became recognized as a proponent of women's rights in the company of Mary Wollstonecraft and Madame de Stael.

She continued to write newspaper political reports and showed herself as a staunch supporter of the fledgling republic against the conservative reaction. Her articles published between May and December of 1848 were later collected and put out as Lettres Républicaines in Esquisses morales et politiques (1849) which included "pencil-portraits" of leading members of the national assembly, editorials on the presidential campaign, and analyses of the different socialist schools of thought. Marie blamed the June insurrection on poverty and the machinations of ambitious sectarians, and she strongly criticized the presidential candidate Louis-Napoleon, "the obscure nephew of a great man."

Marie published her three volumes of Histoire de la Révolution de 1848 during 1850 to 1853. Based on long hours of eye-witness reports especially at the national assembly, painstaking investigation, and personal involvement in the unfolding drama of 1848, Marie wrote primarily on Parisian political personalities, but also included first-hand descriptions of demonstrations and street battles that shaped government policy and public opinion. She wrote incisive portraits of political leaders, and clear analysis of the social factors which influenced the outcome of the revolution. Her 'histoire' had a deep impact on future writings of the events of 1848.

Despite the personal tragedy of losing two of her children to early deaths, Marie continued to write about politics after Louis-Napoleon's coup d'état, primarily for the Revue Germanique, a journal dedicated to promoting Franco-German relations.

She was critical of conservative leaders like Louis-Philippe and Louis Napoleon and for political incompetence and authoritarian rule. While championing democracy and social justice, and the plight of the poor and disenfranchised she remained politically moderate. She finally rejected the utopian-socialism of the Saint-Simonians and Cabetists because it was ineffectual, and Louis Blanc and Pierre Proudhon's "sectarian" socialism as "irrational and anarchistic." She supported state-sponsored initiatives to reduce poverty and the idea of "states man's socialism," toward a universal political enfranchisement.

Her 'feminism,' like many nineteenth-century women writers, advocated improved education for women, but like the Saint-Simonians, not in absolute equality with men but in "complementarity." She agreed that men should occupy the public world of political and economic action, and women the private sphere, to exercise a civilizing influence on the moral and spiritual realms. She rejected the ideas of radical feminism and considered gentle persuasion and moral fortitude tools toward the gradual change of the condition of women. Currently, with the advent of feminist studies, she is remembered as being among the most notable French intellectuals of her day. And her 'histoire' set the standard for future historians.

Works

Her first stories (Hervé, Julien, Valentia, Nélida) were published in 1841-1845. Her best-known work (written as "Daniel Stern") is the Histoire de la Révolution de 1848 (appearing from 1850-53, in 3 volumes). Marie d'Agoult's other works include Lettres Républicaines in Esquisses morales et politiques (1849, collected articles), Trois journées de la vie de Marie Stuart (1856), a play, Jeanne d'Arc (1857); Florence et Turin (1862), a dialog, Dante et Goethe (1866), Histoire des commencements de la république aux Pays-Bas (1872), and Mes souvenirs (1877, posthumously) which she had been working on at the time of her death in 1876. They were published as Mes Souvenirs, 1806-1833 (1877) and Mémoires, 1833-1854 (1927).

Marie had been raised a Catholic, but through the forces of literary and political liberalism during the revolution and upheavals in France, and left-leaning politicians, social theorists, and foreign exiles she converted into a republican and freethinker during the 1840s. She also helped her lover, Franz Liszt, write several works under his name.

Her salon

Marie created a Paris salon for thinkers, and musicians of her day. It became a multilingual center of European artists, writers, and revolutionaries. Through their discussions she wrote about the great events of her lifetime, eventually writing her authoritative account of France's 1848 revolution.

She was an ardent apostle of the ideas of 1848, and from this date her salon, which had been literary and artistic, took on a more political tone; revolutionists of various nationalities like liberal Republicans, Hippolyte Carnot, Jules Simon, Alphonse de Tocqueville, and the young Emile Olivier (who would later marry Blandine Liszt, one of Marie's daughters) were welcomed by her, and she had an especial friendship and sympathy for Daniele Manin.

During the Second Empire her salon once again became a center of liberal opposition and discussion.

In later life, her friends called her, "an Amazon of thought." She became one of nineteenth-century France's free and independent women long before feminism fully developed.

Legacy

Marie d'Agoult, alias Daniel Stern, established herself as a respected writer and critic in a time when nineteenth century women were beginning to awaken to the need for women's rights. She advocated a complimentarity with men's education and occupation, stating that women could occupy the more internal world from where they could civilize society and the spiritual sphere and leave men to the more public sphere of politics and religion. Her "histoire" is considered an excellent resource of information and insights to the events of the 1840's by most historians.

She stands as a woman who was driven to sacrifice everything for love in her scandalous affair with Franz Liszt. Thus causing her to be disowned by her family and separated from her children with Comte d'Agoult, and to be ostracized by the society of her time. Yet, through their relationship, and the liberal exchange and discussions in her salons, her intellect and confidence grew to help her become the great thinker and writer she is now recognized as. In the end, she realized that the romantic ideals of love would not sustain her but self-reliance and self-realization would.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Cronin, Vincent. Four Women in Pursuit of an Ideal. London: Collins, 1965; also published as The Romantic Way. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966. ASIN B0000CMPJS
• d'Agoult, Marie. Nélida, State University of New York Press, 1846, 2003 edition. ISBN 0-7914-5912-8
• Stern, Daniel (Marie d'Agoult). Histoire de la révolution de 1848, Balland, 1851, 1985 edition. ISBN 2-7158-0500-4
• _____________. Esquisses morales; pensées, réflexions et maximes, J. Techener, 1859.
• Stock-Morton, Phyllis. The life of Marie d'Agoult, alias Daniel Stern. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. ISBN 0-8018-6313-9.
• Walker, Alan. Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years 1811-1847. Cornell University Press, 1983. ISBN 0-8014-9421-4

External Links

• Encyclopedia of 1848 Revolutions www.ohiou.edu Retrieved June 19, 2008.

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