Ten Years' Exile (Paperback, New edition)

In 1802 Napoleon decided that there was no room in France for both himself and Madame de Stael, and he therefore sent into exile the woman whose intelligent liberal views were potentially dangerous for him. At first she was banished from Paris, and later, after the suppression of her book on Germany, from France. She began to write her memoirs, and was so carefully watched by Napoleon's agents that she even had to change the names of many people she mentioned, substituting English for French names in the manuscript. She stayed in Switzerland, travelled through Germany and Austria, and later through Poland into Russia. After she had stayed in Kiev, Moscow and St Petersburg, Napoleon began his ill-fated expedition to Russia. She left the country in haste for Sweden, and it was there that much of this book was written. In his introduction to it her eldest son, Auguste, explains how he edited the manuscript and draws attention to the fact that his mother's remarks about Napoleon were extremely bitter because they were written when the author had been suffering most deeply from censorship and exile. The modern reader may be intrigued by other aspects of this book, including Madame de Stael's analysis of Bonaparte's psychological make-up, but most of all perhaps by her description of her stay in Russia, after a long wait for a passport, and by her remarks about the Imperial family and the Russian character in general. The quality of the writing is personal, straightforward and readable, as in all her other books. The reader can almost hear her discussing Napoleon with the Tsar Alexander, and is taken with her on a conducted tour of the Kremlin, the city streets of Moscow and the Russian countryside. Her remarks about Russia are often relevant today: "What characterizes this people, is something gigantic of all kinds: ordinary dimensions are not at all applicable to it". And, at the other end of the scale, "What the English call comforts are hardly to be met with in Russia".