Marie d'Agoult Au Printemps des Dieux: Correspondence inedite
de la Comtesse Marie d'Agoult et du poète Georges Herwegh,
1843-1867. Marcel Herwegh ed. Paris: Gallimard, 1929.
Marie d'Agoult Esquisses morales et politiques Paris:
Pagnerre, 1849.
Marie d'Agoult Essai sur la liberté Paris: Librairie
d'Amyot, 1847.
Marie d'Agoult Histoire de la Révolution de 1848. 3 vols.
Paris: G. Sandre, 1850-1853.
Marie d'Agoult Mémoires, 1833-1854 Daniel Ollivier
(ed.) Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1883.
Marie d'Agoult Mes souvenirs, 1806-1833. Paris:
Calmann-Levy, 1877.
Marie d'Agoult Nelida. Brussels: Meline, Cans et
Compagnie, 1846.
Haldane, Charlotte. The Galley Slaves of Love: The Story of
Marie d'Agoult and Franz Liszt. London: Harvill Press,
1957.
Monod, Marie Octave. Daniel Stern, Comtesse d'Agoult: De La
Restauration à la IIIe République. Paris:
Plon, 1937.
Rabine, Leslie. "Feminist Writers in French Romanticism"
Studies in Romanticism XVI (Fall 1977): 491-507.
Vier, Jacques. La Comtesse d'Agoult et son temps 5
vols. Paris: A. Colin, 1955-62.
JGC revised this file
(http://www.ohiou.edu/~chastain/ac/agoult.htm) on
October 14, 2004.
Please E-mail comments or suggestions to chastain@www.ohiou.edu
© 1999, 2004 James Chastain.
MARIE D'AGOULT, née Marie-Catherine-Sophie de Flavigny;
married name the Comtesse d'Agoult; pen name Daniel Stern; born on
December 31, 1805, at Frankfurt-on-Main; died March 5, 1876, in
Paris. Writing under the pen name Daniel Stern, Marie d'Agoult was
a frequent contributor to the French liberal opposition press of
the 1840s. Her three volume Histoire de la Révolution
de 1848 remains her best-known work, and is still considered
by many historians to be a balanced and accurate contemporary
treatment of events in France. The daughter of Comte
Alexandre-Victor de Flavigny, an intransigent French emigré,
and Marie-Elisabeth Bethmann, a wealthy German banker's daughter,
Marie d'Agoult spent her early years in Germany. After the Bourbon
Restoration her family resettled in France and d'Agoult completed
her education at the Sacré-Coeur convent. In
1827 she was married to the Comte Charles d'Agoult. In the waning
years of the Restoration, the young Comtesse d'Agoult became a
leading Parisian hostess. 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 (Hugo, Vigny,
Lamartine, Chopin, and Rossini, among others). In 1833 d'Agoult met
and fell in love with the Hungarian composer and virtuoso pianist
Franz Liszt. Rather than carry on a discreet affair, d'Agoult
deserted her husband and lived openly as Liszt's mistress. She was
ostracized by the polite society of the Faubourg-Saint-Germain for
making a spectacle of her infidelity, but she avenged herself by
entertaining an intellectual and artistic aristocracy of painters,
writers, musicians and political thinkers at the various residences
she and Liszt shared. D'Agoult and Liszt's union produced three
children, but Liszt's protracted absences and well-publicized
philandering brought an end to the affair in 1844. At this time
d'Agoult began a serious career as a journalist, under the guidance
of Emile de Girardin, editor of the liberal journal La
Presse. She introduced the French reading public to a
variety of foreign authors, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Georg
Herwegh, and Bettina von Arnim, and she drafted political
commentary based on regular attendance at parliamentary debates. In
1846 she published Nelida, a thinly-veiled fictional
account of her affair with Liszt. Nelida was a
succes de scandale, but d'Agoult recognized that her
talents lay more in analysis and commentary, and she quickly
forswore fiction.
Her journalism earned her considerable respect,
and her Essai sur la liberté, published in
1847, was well received, winning the praise of numerous critics
(including Sainte-Beuve), and establishing her as a feminist
thinker in the mold of Mary Wollstonecraft and Madame de Stael.
D'Agoult greeted February of 1848 with enthusiasm and took an
active part in Parisian events. Her salon became a meeting-place
for liberal Republicans like Hippolyte Carnot, Jules Simon,
Alphonse de Tocqueville, and the young Emile Olivier (who would
later marry Blandine Liszt, one of d'Agoult's daughters). She
continued to write newspaper reports on the political scene,
establishing herself as a staunch supporter of the fledgling
republic in the face of conservative reaction. The articles
d'Agoult published between May and December of 1848 were later
collected and put out as Lettres Républicaines
in Esquisses morales et politiques (1849). Written in
the heat of the moment--"fragmentary at the heart of the
struggle"--these reports covered a broad range of topics, and
included pencil-portraits of leading members of the national
assembly, editorials on the presidential campaign, and analyses of
the various socialist schools of thought. D'Agoult expressed dismay
over the June insurrection, which she blamed on poverty and the
machinations of ambitious sectarians, and she was merciless in her
criticism of the presidential candidate Louis-Napoleon, "the
obscure nephew of a great man." D'Agoult published the three
volumes of her Histoire de la Révolution de
1848 in the years 1850 to 1853. Based on eye-witness
reports, painstaking investigation, and personal involvement in the
unfolding drama of 1848, this historical work was intended as a
dispassionate and impartial account. Having spent long hours
observing the national assembly at work, d'Agoult focused largely
on Parisian political personalities, but she also provided
detailed, carefully researched descriptions of the demonstrations
and street battles that helped to shape governmental policy and
public opinion. Her incisive portraits of political leaders, and
her reasoned analysis of the social factors influencing the outcome
of the revolution, would have a profound impact on many subsequent
treatments of 1848. Despite personal tragedy, including the deaths
of two of her children, d'Agoult continued to be involved in
politics after Louis-Napoleon's coup d'état.
During the Second Empire her salon once again became a center of
liberal opposition. She continued to write, notably for the
Revue Germanique, a journal dedicated to promoting
friendly Franco-German relations. At the time of her death in 1876,
she had been preparing her memoirs for publication. They were
published posthumously as Mes Souvenirs, 1806-1833
(1877) and Mémoires, 1833-1854 (1927). D'Agoult
had been raised a legitimist and a Catholic, but her native
affinity with the nascent forces of literary and political
liberalism, and her association with left-leaning politicians,
social theorists, and foreign exiles (Mickiewicz, Teleki, Daniel
Manin), converted her into a republican and a freethinker during
the 1840s. Her contempt for conservative leaders like
Louis-Philippe and Louis Napoleon was buttressed by her
aristocratic distaste for parvenus, but it also reflected her
disdain for political incompetence and authoritarian rule. If her
writing sometimes betrayed a hint of noblesse oblige,
her dedication to democracy and social justice, and her sympathy
for the poor and the disenfranchised, was never open to question.
D'Agoult's politics were always moderate. She rejected the
utopian-socialism of the Saint-Simonians and Cabetists as charming
but ineffectual, and she rejected the "sectarian" socialism of
activists like Louis Blanc and Pierre Proudhon as irrational and
anarchistic. Her support went to what she called "states
man's socialism," a liberal republicanism based on universal political
enfranchisement and including state-sponsored initiatives aimed at
reducing poverty through gradual reform. D'Agoult's feminism bore
the marks of her liberal politics and romantic leanings. Like
eighteenth-century feminists, she was a strong advocate of improved
education for women, but like the Saint-Simonians and other of her
contemporaries, she believed not in absolute equality between the
sexes, but in complementarity. While man's place was the public
world of political and economic action, woman's place was the
private sphere, from which she might exercise her civilizing
influence on the moral and spiritual realms. D'Agoult rejected
feminist radicalism as impolitic--she had no patience with the
Vesuviennes, female clubistes, and femmes
libres of 1848--and looked to gentle persuasion and moral
fortitude as agents in the gradual and judicious amelioration of
woman's condition. Unlike her more colorful countrywoman George
Sand, d'Agoult has received surprisingly little attention from
historians. Best known through her personal association with Liszt,
and as the mother of Cosima Wagner, her own writings and political
influence have been left in virtual oblivion in recent years.
Kathleen M. Nilan
Bibliography