During her exile, she fostered the Coppet group, a network that spanned across Europe, positioning herself at its heart. Her literary works, emphasizing individuality and passion, left an enduring imprint on European intellectual thought. De Staël's repeated championing of Romanticism contributed significantly to its widespread recognition.[6]
While her literary legacy has somewhat faded with time, her critical and historical contributions hold undeniable significance. Though her novels and plays may now be less remembered, the value of her analytical and historical writings remains steadfast.[7] Within her work, de Staël not only advocates for the necessity of public expression but also sounds cautionary notes about its potential hazards.[8]
Her father "is remembered today for taking the unprecedented step in 1781 of making public the country's budget, a novelty in an absolute monarchy where the state of the national finances had always been kept secret, leading to his dismissal by the King in May of that year."[13] The family eventually took up residence in 1784 at Château Coppet, an estate on Lake Geneva. The family returned to the Paris region in 1785.[9]
Marriage
The Swedish Embassy, Hôtel de Ségur, later Hôtel de Salm-Dyck
Aged 11, Germaine had suggested to her mother that she marry Edward Gibbon, a visitor to her salon, whom she found most attractive. Then, she reasoned, he would always be around for her.[14] In 1783, at seventeen, she was courted by William Pitt the Younger and by Comte de Guibert, whose conversation, she thought, was the most far-ranging, spirited and fertile she had ever known.[15] When she did not accept their offers Germaine's parents became impatient. With the help of Marie-Charlotte Hippolyte de Boufflers, a marriage was arranged with BaronErik Magnus Staël von Holstein, a Protestant and attaché of the Swedish legation to France. The wedding took place on 14 January 1786 in the Swedish embassy at 97, Rue du Bac; Germaine was 20, her husband 37. On the whole, the marriage seems to have been workable for both parties, although neither seems to have had much affection for the other. Madame de Staël continued to write miscellaneous works, including the three-act romantic drama Sophie (1786) and the five-act tragedy, Jeanne Grey (1787). The baron, also a gambler, obtained great benefits from the match as he received 80,000 pounds and was confirmed as lifetime ambassador to Paris.[16]
Revolutionary activities
On 4 and 5 May 1789 Germaine de Staël watched the assembly of the Estates-General in Versailles, where she met the young Mathieu de Montmorency."Dix Août 1792. Siege et prise du Chateau des Tuileries": French soldiers (volunteers) and citizens storming the Tuileries Palace to capture the royal family and end the monarchy.
In 1788, de Staël published Letters on the works and character of J.J. Rousseau.[17] De Staël was at this time enthusiastic about the mixture of Rousseau's ideas about love and Montesquieu's on politics.[18]
In December 1788 her father persuaded Louis XVI to double the number of deputies at the Third Estate in order to gain enough support to raise taxes to pay for the excessive costs of supporting the revolutionaries in America. This approach had serious repercussions on Necker's reputation; he appeared to consider the Estates-General as a facility designed to help the administration rather than to reform the government.[19] In an argument with the king, whose speech on 23 June he didn't attend, Necker was dismissed and exiled on 11 July. Her parents left France on the same day in unpopularity and disgrace. On Sunday, 12 July the news became public, and an angry Camille Desmoulins suggested storming the Bastille.[20] On 16 July he was reappointed; Necker entered Versailles in triumph. His efforts to clean up public finances were unsuccessful and his idea of a National Bank failed. Necker was attacked by Jean-Paul Marat and Count Mirabeau in the Constituante, when he did not agree with using assignats as legal tender.[21] He resigned on 4 September 1790. Accompanied by their son-in-law, her parents left for Switzerland, without the two million livres, half of his fortune, loaned as an investment in the public treasury in 1778.[22][23][24]
During this time of her political thoughts, de Staël was focused on the problem of leadership, or the perceived lack of it. In her later works she often returned to the idea that "the French Revolution has been characterized by a surprising absence of eminent personalities".[25] She experienced the death of Mirabeau, accused of royalism, as a sign of great political disorientation and uncertainty.[citation needed]
After her flight from Paris, de Staël moved to Rolle in Switzerland, where Albert was born. She was supported by de Montmorency and the Marquis de Jaucourt, whom she had previously supplied with Swedish passports.[38] In January 1793, she made a four-month visit to England to be with her then-lover, the Comte de Narbonne, at Juniper Hall. (Since 1 February, France and Great Britain had been at war.) Within a few weeks, she was pregnant; it was apparently one of the reasons for the scandal she caused in England. According to Fanny Burney, the result was that her father urged Fanny to avoid the company of de Staël and her circle of French Émigrés in Surrey.[4] De Staël met Horace Walpole, James Mackintosh, Lord Sheffield, a friend of Edward Gibbon, and Lord Loughborough, the new Lord Chancellor.[4] She was not impressed with the condition of women in English society.[4] Individual freedom was as important to her as were abstract political liberties.[39]
Benjamin Constant by Lina VallierIn 1797 de Staël and Benjamin Constant lived in the remains of the Abbey of Herivaux.
In the summer of 1793, de Staël returned to Switzerland, probably because De Narbonne had cooled towards her. She published a defence of the character of Marie Antoinette, entitled, Réflexions sur le procès de la Reine, 1793 ("Reflections on the Queen's trial"). In de Staël's view, France should have adapted from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy as was the case in England.[40] Living in Jouxtens-Mézery, farther away from the French border than Coppet, Germaine was visited by Adolph Ribbing.[12][38] Count Ribbing was living in exile, after his conviction for taking part in a conspiracy to assassinate the Swedish king, Gustav III. In September 1794, the recently divorced Benjamin Constant visited her, wanting to meet her before he committed suicide.
In May 1795, de Staël moved to Paris, now with Constant in tow, as her protégé and lover.[41] De Staël rejected the idea of the right of resistance – which had been introduced into the never implemented French Constitution of 1793, and was removed from the Constitution of 1795.[42] In 1796, she published Sur l'influence des passions, in which she praised suicide, a book which attracted the attention of the German writers Schiller and Goethe.[43]
"Passionate love is natural to human beings and to yield oneself to love will not result in abandoning virtue".[44]
Still absorbed by French politics, de Staël reopened her salon.[45] It was during these years that Mme de Staël arguably exerted most political influence. For a time she was still visible in the diverse and eccentric society of the mid-1790s. However, on the 13 Vendémiaire the Comité de salut public ordered her to leave Paris after accusations of politicking, and put Constant in detention for one night.[46] De Staël spent that autumn in the spa of Forges-les-Eaux. She was considered a threat to political stability and mistrusted by both sides in the political conflict.[47] She corresponded with Franciso de Miranda whom she wished to see again.[48] The couple moved to Ormesson-sur-Marne where they stayed with Mathieu Montmorency. In Summer 1796 Constant founded the "Cercle constitutionnel" in Luzarches with de Staël's support.[49] In May 1797, she was back in Paris and eight months pregnant. She organized the Club du Salm in Hôtel de Salm.[50] De Stael succeeded in getting Talleyrand from the list of Émigrés and on his return from the United States to have him appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs in July.[51] From the coup of 18 Fructidor it was announced that anyone campaigning to restore the monarchy or the French Constitution of 1793 would be shot without trial.[52] Germaine moved to Saint-Ouen, on her father's estate and became a close friend of the beautiful and wealthy Juliette Récamier to whom she sold her parents' house in the Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin.
De Staël completed the initial part of her first most substantial contribution to political and constitutional theory, "Of present circumstances that can end the Revolution, and of the principles that must found the republic of France".[13]
On 6 December 1797 de Staël had the first meeting with Napoleon Bonaparte in Talleyrand's office and met him again on 3 January 1798 during a ball. She made it clear to him that she did not agree with his planned invasion of Switzerland. He ignored her opinions and would not read her letters.[53] In January 1800, Napoleon appointed Benjamin Constant a member of the Tribunat; not long after, Constant became his enemy. Two years later, Napoleon forced him into exile on account of his speeches which he took to be actually written by Mme de Staël.[44] In August 1802, Napoleon was elected first consul for life. This put de Staël into opposition to him both for personal and political reasons. In her view, Napoleon had begun to resemble Machiavelli's princes in The Prince (in fact tyrants); while for Napoleon, Voltaire, J.J. Rousseau and their followers were the cause of the French Revolution.[54] This view was cemented when Jacques Necker published his "Last Views on Politics and Finance" and his daughter, her "De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales". It was her first philosophical treatment of the Europe question: it dealt with such factors as nationality, history, and social institutions.[55] Napoleon started a campaign against her latest publication. He did not like her cultural determinism and generalizations, in which she stated that "an artist must be of his own time".[44][56] In his opinion a woman should stick to knitting.[57] He said about her, according to the Memoirs of Madame de Rémusat, that she "teaches people to think who had never thought before, or who had forgotten how to think".[58] It became clear that the first man of France and de Staël were not likely ever to get along together.[59]
"It seems to me that life's circumstances, being ephemeral, teach us less about durable truths than the fictions based on those truths; and that the best lessons of delicacy and self-respect are to be found in novels where the feelings are so naturally portrayed that you fancy you are witnessing real life as you read."[60]
De Staël published a provocative, anti-Catholic novel Delphine, in which the femme incomprise (misunderstood woman) living in Paris between 1789 and 1792, is confronted with conservative ideas about divorce after the Concordat of 1801. In this tragic novel, influenced by Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther and Rousseau's Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, she reflects on the legal and practical aspects on divorce, the arrests and the September Massacres, and the fate of the émigrés. (During the winter of 1794 it seems De Staël was pondering a divorce and whether to marry Ribbing.) The main characters have traits of the unstable Benjamin Constant, and Talleyrand is depicted as an old woman, herself as the heroine with the liberal view of the Italian aristocrat and politician Melzi d'Eril.[61]
When Constant moved to Maffliers in September 1803 de Staël went to see him and let Napoleon know she would be wise and cautious. Thereupon her house immediately became popular again among her friends, but Napoleon, informed by Madame de Genlis, suspected a conspiracy. "Her extensive network of connections – which included foreign diplomats and known political opponents, as well as members of the government and of Bonaparte's own family – was in itself a source of suspicion and alarm for the government."[62] Her protection of Jean Gabriel Peltier – who plotted the death of Napoleon – influenced his decision on 13 October 1803 to exile her without trial.[63]
Years of exile
For ten years, de Staël was not allowed to come within 40 leagues (almost 200km) of Paris. She accused Napoleon of "persecuting a woman and her children".[64] On 23 October, she left for Germany "out of pride", in the hope of gaining support and to be able to return home as soon as possible.[65][66]
With her children and Constant, de Staël stopped off in Metz and met Kant's French translator Charles de Villers. In mid-December, they arrived in Weimar, where she stayed for two and a half months at the court of the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach and his mother Anna Amalia. Goethe who had become ill hesitated about seeing her. After meeting her, Goethe went on to refer to her as an "extraordinary woman" in his private correspondence.[67] Schiller complimented her intelligence and eloquence, but her frequent visits distracted him from completing William Tell.[68][69] De Staël was constantly on the move, talking and asking questions.[70][44] Constant decided to abandon her in Leipzig and return to Switzerland. De Staël travelled on to Berlin, where she made the acquaintance of August Schlegel who was lecturing there on literature. She appointed him on an enormous salary to tutor her children. On 18 April they all left Berlin when the news of her father's death reached her.
Mistress of Coppet
On 19 May, de Staël arrived in Coppet now its wealthy and independent mistress. She spent the summer at the chateau sorting through his writings and published an essay on his private life. In April 1804, Friedrich Schlegel married Dorothea Veit in the Swedish embassy. In July Constant wrote about de Staël, "She exerts over everything around her a kind of inexplicable but real power. If only she could govern herself, she might have governed the world."[71] In December 1804 she travelled to Italy, accompanied by her children, August Wilhelm Schlegel, and the historian Sismondi. There she met the poet Monti and the painter, Angelica Kauffman. "Her visit to Italy helped her to develop her theory of the difference between northern and southern societies..."[4]
De Staël returned to Coppet in June 1805, moved to Meulan (Château d'Acosta), and spent nearly a year writing her next book on Italy's culture and history. In Corinne ou l'Italie (1807), her own impressions of a sentimental and intellectual journey, the heroine appears to have been inspired by the Italian poet Diodata Saluzzo Roero.[72][73] She combined romance with travelogue, showed all of Italy's works of art still in place, rather than plundered by Napoleon and taken to France.[74] The book's publication acted as a reminder of her existence, and Napoleon sent her back to Coppet. Her house became, according to Stendhal, "the general headquarters of European thought" and was a debating club hostile to Napoleon, "turning conquered Europe into a parody of a feudal empire, with his own relatives in the roles of vassal states".[75] Madame Récamier, also banned by Napoleon, Prince Augustus of Prussia, Charles Victor de Bonstetten, and Chateaubriand all belonged to the "Coppet group".[76][77] Each day the table was laid for about thirty guests. Talking seemed to be everybody's chief activity.
For a time de Staël lived with Constant in Auxerre (1806), Rouen (1807), Aubergenville (1807). Then she met Friedrich Schlegel, whose wife Dorothea had translated Corinne into German.[78] The use of the word Romanticism was invented by Schlegel but spread more widely across France through its persistent use by de Staël.[79] Late in 1807 she set out for Vienna and visited Maurice O'Donnell.[80] She was accompanied by her children and August Schlegel who gave his famous lectures there. In 1808 Benjamin Constant was afraid to admit to her that he had married Charlotte von Hardenberg in the meantime. "If men had the qualities of women", de Staël wrote, "love would simply cease to be a problem."[81] De Staël set to work on her book about Germany – in which she presented the idea of a state called "Germany" as a model of ethics and aesthetics and praised German literature and philosophy.[82] The exchange of ideas and literary and philosophical conversations with Goethe, Schiller, and Wieland had inspired de Staël to write one of the most influential books of the nineteenth century on Germany.[83]
Return to France
Pretending she wanted to emigrate to the United States, de Staël was given permission to re-enter France. She moved first into the Château de Chaumont (1810), then relocated to Fossé and Vendôme. She was determined to publish De l'Allemagne in France, a book about German culture and in particular German Romanticism in which she called French political structures into question, so indirectly criticizing Napoleon. Constrained by censorship, she wrote to the emperor a letter of complaint.[84] The minister of police Savary had emphatically forbidden her to publish her "un-French" book.[83] In October 1810 de Staël was exiled again and had to leave France within three days. August Schlegel was also ordered to leave the Swiss Confederation as an enemy of French literature. She found consolation in a wounded veteran officer named Albert de Rocca, twenty-three years her junior, to whom she got privately engaged in 1811 but did not marry publicly until 1816.[44]
The operations of the French imperial police in the case of de Staël are rather obscure. She was at first left undisturbed, but by degrees, the chateau itself became a source of suspicion, and her visitors found themselves heavily persecuted. François-Emmanuel Guignard, De Montmorency and Mme Récamier were exiled for the crime of visiting her. She remained at home during the winter of 1811, planning to escape to England or Sweden with the manuscript. On 23 May 1812, she left Coppet under the pretext of a short outing, but journeyed through Bern, Innsbruck and Salzburg to Vienna, where she met Metternich. There, after some trepidation and trouble, she received the necessary passports to go on to Russia.[85]
During Napoleon's invasion of Russia, de Staël, her two children, and Schlegel travelled through Galicia in the Habsburg empire from Brno to Łańcut where de Rocca, having deserted the French army and having been searched by the French gendarmerie, was waiting for her. The journey continued to Lemberg. On 14 July 1812 they arrived in Volhynia. In the meantime, Napoleon, who took a more northern route, had crossed the Niemen River with his army. In Kyiv, she met Miloradovich, governor of the city. De Staël hesitated to travel on to Odessa, Constantinople, and decided instead to go north. Perhaps she was informed of the outbreak of plague in the Ottoman Empire. In Moscow, she was invited by the governor Fyodor Rostopchin. According to de Staël, it was Rostopchin who ordered his mansion in Italian style near Winkovo to be set on fire.[86] She left only a few weeks before Napoleon arrived there. Until 7 September, her party stayed in Saint Petersburg. According to John Quincy Adams, the American ambassador in Russia, her sentiments appeared to be as much the result of personal resentment against Bonaparte as of her general views of public affairs. She complained that he would not let her live in peace anywhere, merely because she had not praised him in her works. She met twice with the tsar Alexander I of Russia who "related to me also the lessons a la Machiavelli which Napoleon had thought proper to give him."[87]
"You see," said he, "I am careful to keep my ministers and generals at variance among themselves, in order that each may reveal to me the faults of the other; I keep up a continual jealousy by the manner I treat those who care about me: one day one thinks himself the favourite, the next day another, so that no one is ever certain of my favour."[88]
For de Staël, that was a vulgar and vicious theory. General Kutuzov sent her letters from the Battle of Tarutino; before the end of that year he succeeded, aided by the extreme weather, in chasing the Grande Armée out of Russia.[89]
After four months of travel, de Staël arrived in Sweden. In Stockholm, she began writing her "Ten Years' Exile", detailing her travels and encounters. She did not finish the manuscript and after eight months, she set out for England, without August Schlegel, who meanwhile had been appointed secretary to the Crown Prince Carl Johan, formerly French Marshal Jean Baptiste Bernadotte (She supported Bernadotte as the new ruler of France, as she hoped he would introduce a constitutional monarchy).[90] In London she received a great welcome. She met Lord Byron, William Wilberforce, the abolitionist, and Sir Humphry Davy, the chemist and inventor. According to Byron, "She preached English politics to the first of our English Whig politicians ... preached politics no less to our Tory politicians the day after."[91] In March 1814 she invited Wilberforce for dinner and devoted the remaining years of her life to the fight for the abolition of the slave trade.[92] Her stay was severely marred by the death of her son Albert, who as a member of the Swedish army had fallen in a duel with a Cossack officer in Doberan as a result of a gambling dispute. In October John Murray published De l'Allemagne both in French and English translation, in which she reflected on nationalism and suggested a re-consideration of cultural rather than natural boundaries.[93] In May 1814, after Louis XVIII had been crowned (Bourbon Restoration) she returned to Paris. She wrote her Considérations sur la révolution française, based on Part One of "Ten Years' Exile". Again her salon became a major attraction both for Parisians and foreigners.
When news came of Napoleon's landing on the Côte d'Azur, between Cannes and Antibes, early in March 1815, de Staël fled again to Coppet, and never forgave Constant for approving of Napoleon's return.[94] Although she had no affection for the Bourbons she succeeded in obtaining restitution for the huge loan Necker had made to the French state in 1778 before the Revolution (see above).[95] In October, after the Battle of Waterloo, she set out for Italy, not only for the sake of her own health but for that of her second husband, de Rocca, who was suffering from tuberculosis. In May her 19-year-old daughter Albertine married Victor, 3rd duc de Broglie in Livorno.
The whole family returned to Coppet in June. Lord Byron, at that time in debt, left London in great trouble and frequently visited de Staël during July and August. For Byron, she was Europe's greatest living writer, but "with her pen behind her ears and her mouth full of ink". "Byron was particularly critical of de Staël's self-dramatizing tendencies".[96][97] Byron was a supporter of Napoleon, but for de Staël Bonaparte "was not only a talented man but also one who represented a whole pernicious system of power", a system that "ought to be examined as a great political problem relevant to many generations."[98] "Napoleon imposed standards of homogeneity on Europe that is, French taste in literature, art and the legal systems, all of which de Staël saw as inimical to her cosmopolitan point of view."[97] Byron wrote she was "sometimes right and often wrong about Italy and England – but almost always true in delineating the heart, which is of but one nation of no country, or rather, of all."[99]
Despite her increasingly ill health, de Staël returned to Paris for the winter of 1816–17, living at 40, rue des Mathurins. Constant argued with de Staël, who had asked him to pay off his debts to her. A warm friendship sprang up between de Staël and the Duke of Wellington, whom she had first met in 1814, and she used her influence with him to have the size of the Army of Occupation greatly reduced.[100]
De Staël became confined to her house, paralyzed since 21 February 1817 following a stroke. She died on 14 July 1817. Her deathbed conversion to Roman Catholicism, after reading Thomas à Kempis, was reported[citation needed] but is subject to some debate. Wellington remarked that, while he knew that she was greatly afraid of death, he had thought her incapable of believing in the afterlife.[100] Wellington makes no mention of de Staël reading Thomas à Kempis in the quote found in Elizabeth Longford's biography of the Iron Duke. Furthermore, he reports hearsay, which may explain why two modern biographies of de Staël – Herold and Fairweather – discount the conversion entirely. Herold states that "her last deed in life was to reaffirm in her 'Considerations, her faith in Enlightenment, freedom, and progress'."[101] Rocca survived her by little more than six months.
Besides two daughters, Gustava Sofia Magdalena (born July 1787) and Gustava Hedvig (born August 1789), both died in infancy, de Staël had two sons, Ludwig August (1790–1827), Albert (1792–1813), and a daughter, Albertine, baroness Staël von Holstein (1797–1838). It is believed Louis, Comte de Narbonne-Lara was the father of Ludvig August and Albert, and Benjamin Constant the father of red-haired Albertine.[102] With Albert de Rocca, de Staël then aged 46, had one son, the disabled Louis-Alphonse de Rocca (1812–1842), who married Marie-Louise-Antoinette de Rambuteau, daughter of Claude-Philibert Barthelot de Rambuteau,[44] and granddaughter of De Narbonne.[103] Even as she gave birth, there were fifteen people in her bedroom.[104]
After the death of de Staël's husband, Mathieu de Montmorency became the legal guardian of her children. Like August Schlegel he was one of her intimates until the end of her life.
Legacy
Albertine Necker de Saussure, married to de Staël's cousin, wrote her biography in 1821, published as part of the collected works. Auguste Comte included Mme de Staël in his 1849 Calendar of Great Men. Her political legacy has been generally identified with a stout defence of "liberal" values: equality, individual freedom, and the limitation of state power by constitutional rules.[105] "Yet although she insisted to the Duke of Wellington that she needed politics in order to live, her attitude towards the propriety of female political engagement varied: at times she declared that women should simply be the guardians of domestic space for the opposite sex, while at others, that denying women access to the public sphere of activism and engagement was an abuse of human rights. This paradox partly explains the persona of the "homme-femme" she presented in society, and it remained unresolved throughout her life."[106]
Comte's disciple Frederic Harrison wrote about de Staël that her novels "precede the works of Walter Scott, Byron, Mary Shelley, and partly those of Chateaubriand, their historical importance is great in the development of modern Romanticism, of the romance of the heart, the delight in nature, and in the arts, antiquities, and history of Europe."
Precursor of feminism
Recent studies by historians, including feminists, have been assessing the specifically feminine dimension in de Staël's contributions both as an activist-theorist and as a writer about the tumultuous events of her time.[107][108] She has been called a precursor of feminism.[109][110][111]
De Staël is credited in Tolstoy's epilogue to War and Peace as a factor of the 'influential forces' which historians say led to the movement of humanity in that era.[112]
The popular wrestling compilation series Botchamania has referenced her on several occasions saying One must choose in life, between boredom and suffering which is normally followed by a humorous joke.
On the popular HBO television show, The Sopranos, character Meadow Soprano quotes Madame de Staël in Season 2, Episode 7, D-Girl, when she says, "Madame de Staël said, 'In life one must choose between boredom or suffering.'"
Mme de Staël is used several times to characterize Mme de Grandet in Stendhal's Lucien Leuwen.
Mme de Staël is mentioned several times, always approvingly, by Russia's national poet, Alexander Pushkin. He described her in 1825 as a woman whose persecution distinguished her and who commanded respect from all of Europe, and gave her a positive portrayal in his unfinished 1836 novel Roslavlev.[113] Her high stature in Russia is attested by Pushkin's warning to a critic: "Mme de Staël is ours, do not touch her!"[114]
Pushkin's friend Pyotr Vyazemsky was also an admirer of her life and works.[115]
Mme de Staël is frequently quoted by Ralph Waldo Emerson and she is credited with introducing him to recent German thought.[116]
Herman Melville considered de Staël among the greatest women of the century and Margaret Fuller consciously adopted de Staël as her role model.[117]
Danish radical Georg Brandes gave pride of place to de Staël in his survey of Emigrantlitteraturen and highly esteemed her novels, particularly Corinne, which was also admired by Henrik Ibsen and used as a guidebook for his travels through Italy.[118]
Talleyrand observed with his customary cynicism that Germaine enjoyed throwing people overboard simply to have the pleasure of fishing them out of the water again.[119]
Sismondi accused De Staël of a lack of tact, when they were travelling through Italy and wrote Mme De Staël was easily bored if she had to pay attention to things.
For Byron she was "a good woman at heart and the cleverest at bottom, but spoilt by a wish to be–she knew not what. In her own house she was amiable; in any other person's, you wished her gone, and in her own again".[121]
Sophie ou les sentiments secrets, 1786 (published anonymously in 1790)
Jane Gray, 1787 (published in 1790)
Lettres sur le caractère et les écrits de J.-J. Rousseau, 1788[122]
Éloge de M. de Guibert
À quels signes peut-on reconnaître quelle est l'opinion de la majorité de la nation?
Réflexions sur le procès de la Reine, 1793
Zulma: fragment d'un ouvrage, 1794
Réflexions sur la paix adressées à M. Pitt et aux Français, 1795
Réflexions sur la paix intérieure
Recueil de morceaux détachés (comprenant: Épître au malheur ou Adèle et Édouard, Essai sur les fictions et trois nouvelles: Mirza ou lettre d'un voyageur, Adélaïde et Théodore et Histoire de Pauline), 1795
Essai sur les fictions, translated by Goethe into German
De l'influence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des nations, 1796[123]
Des circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la Révolution et des principes qui doivent fonder la République en France
De la littérature dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales, 1799
Delphine, 1802 deals with the question of woman's status in a society hidebound by convention and faced with a Revolutionary new order
Vie privée de Mr. Necker, 1804
Épîtres sur Naples
Corinne ou l'Italie, 1807 is as much a travelogue as a fictional narrative. It discusses the problems of female artistic creativity in two radically different cultures, England and Italy.
Agar dans le désert
Geneviève de Brabant
La Sunamite
Le capitaine Kernadec ou sept années en un jour (comédie en deux actes et en prose)
Considérations sur les principaux événements de la révolution française, depuis son origine jusques et compris le 8 juillet 1815, 1818 (posthumously)[125]
Dix Années d'Exil (1818), posthumously published in France by Mdm Necker de Saussure. In 1821 translated and published as Ten Years' Exile. Memoirs of That Interesting Period of the Life of the Baroness De Stael-Holstein, Written by Herself, during the Years 1810, 1811, 1812, and 1813, and Now First Published from the Original Manuscript, by Her Son.[126]
Lettres de Madame de Staël à Madame de Récamier, première édition intégrale, présentées et annotées par Emmanuel Beau de Loménie, éditions Domat, Paris, 1952.
Lettres sur les écrits et le caractère de J.-J. Rousseau. – De l'influence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des nations. – De l'éducation de l'âme par la vie./Réflexions sur le suicide. – Sous la direction de Florence Lotterie. Textes établis et présentés par Florence Lotterie. Annotation par Anne Amend Söchting, Anne Brousteau, Florence Lotterie, Laurence Vanoflen. 2008. ISBN978-2745316424.
Correspondance générale. Texte établi et présenté par Béatrice W. Jasinski et Othenin d'Haussonville. Slatkine (Réimpression), 2008–2009.
Madame de Staël ou l'intelligence politique. Sa pensée, ses amis, ses amants, ses ennemis…, textes de présentation et de liaison de Michel Aubouin, Omnibus, 2017. ISBN978-2258142671 commentaire biblio, Lettres de Mme de Staël, extraits de ses textes politiques et de ses romans, textes et extraits de lettres de Chateaubriand, Talleyrand, Napoléon, Benjamin Constant. This edition contains extracts from her political writings and from letters addressed to her by Chateaubriand, Talleyrand, Napoleon and Benjamin Constant.
Jacques Necker was a Genevan banker and statesman who served as finance minister for Louis XVI. He was a reformer, but his innovations sometimes caused great discontent. Necker was a constitutional monarchist, a political economist, and a moralist, who wrote a severe critique of the new principle of equality before the law.
Henri-Benjamin Constant de Rebecque, or simply Benjamin Constant, was a Swiss political thinker, activist and writer on political theory and religion.
Mathieu Jean Felicité de Montmorency, duc de Montmorency-Laval was a French statesman during the French Revolution and Bourbon Restoration. He was elected as the youngest member of the National Assembly in 1789. He is also known for his military expertise and his relation with Mme de Staël. When France became a republic, Montmorency turned into an ultra-royalist. Napoleon regarded him as a member of the Catholic opposition. During the Restoration, he became Minister of Foreign Affairs.
Jeanne Françoise Julie Adélaïde Récamier, known as Juliette, was a French socialite whose salon drew people from the leading literary and political circles of early 19th-century Paris. An icon of neoclassicism, Récamier cultivated a public persona as a great beauty, and her fame quickly spread across Europe. She befriended many intellectuals, sat for the finest artists of the age, and spurned an offer of marriage from Prince Augustus of Prussia.
A salon is a gathering of people held by a host. These gatherings often consciously followed Horace's definition of the aims of poetry, "either to please or to educate". Salons in the tradition of the French literary and philosophical movements of the 17th and 18th centuries are still being carried on today.
Delphine is the first novel by Germaine de Staël, published in 1802. The book is written in epistolary form and examines the limits of women's freedom in an aristocratic society. Although de Staël denied political intent, the book was controversial enough for Napoleon to exile the author.
Albert Jean Michel de Rocca was a French lieutenant during the Napoleonic Wars. He was also the second husband of Anne Louise Germaine de Staël.
Charles-Julien Lioult de Chênedollé was a French poet.
Baron Erik Magnus Staël von Holstein, was a Swedish diplomat, soldier and courtier best known for being Sweden's Ambassador to France during the end of the Ancien Regime and the early years of the French Revolution, as well as being the husband of Madame de Staël. Erik Magnus assisted Gustav III during the Swedish Revolution of 1772 and was later named Chamberlain to Queen Sophia Magdalena. In 1783, he was appointed chargé d'affaires to the Court of France, and in 1785 he was named Ambassador. On 21 January 1786, he married the daughter of the French Minister of Finance, Jacques Necker, mademoiselle Anne Louise Germaine Necker, who was to achieve fame as "Madame de Staël".
Dorothea Friederike von Schlegel was a German novelist and translator.
Albertine Adrienne Necker de Saussure was a Genevan and then Swiss writer and educationalist, and an early advocate of education for women.
Charles François Dominique de Villers was a French philosopher. He was mainly responsible for translating the philosophy of Immanuel Kant into the French language.
Hortense Allart de Méritens was an Italian-French feminist writer and essayist. Her novels, based on her adventures, did not have much success, except for Les enchantements de Prudence, Avec George Sand (1873), which had a succès de scandale.
Louise de Broglie, Countess d'Haussonville was a French essayist and biographer, and a member of the House of Broglie, a distinguished French family. A granddaughter of the novelist Germaine de Staël, she was considered independent, liberal, and outspoken. Her 1845 portrait by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, which took three years to complete, has been exhibited in the Frick Collection in New York City since the 1930s.
Claude Hochet was a French journalist, author and civil servant who was secretary-general of the Conseil d'État from 1816 to 1839. He is best known as a friend of Madame de Staël, Benjamin Constant, Abel-François Villemain and Prosper de Barante. Their letters to him have been preserved, and are a valuable record of the intellectual life of the First French Empire.
Julie Talma, born Louise-Julie Careau, was a French dancer at the Paris Opera who became a courtesan in the years before the French Revolution. She had three sons by three different fathers. She used the gifts from her protectors to make a small fortune in real estate speculation. She married the well-known tragic actor François-Joseph Talma a few days before giving birth to twin sons. Her husband was unfaithful and ruined her. They separated and eventually divorced. Julie Talma was charming, intelligent, strong-willed, rational and a firm republican. She held an influential salon before and during the revolution and at the start of Napoleon's rise to power, and became a close friend of Benjamin Constant. Their lengthy correspondence has been preserved.
Amélie Suard was a French writer and salonnière. Her letters provide a valuable source of information on life in France before the French Revolution of 1789. The Suards remained loyal to the Bourbon regime and experienced difficulty during the revolutionary years, but resumed their salons in 1800 under Napoleon.
The Coppet group, also known as the Coppet circle, was an informal intellectual and literary gathering centred on Germaine de Staël during the time period between the establishment of the Napoleonic First Empire (1804) and the Bourbon Restoration of 1814–1815. The name comes from Coppet Castle in Switzerland.
On Germany, also known in English as Germany, is a book about German culture and in particular German Romanticism, written by the French writer Germaine de Staël. It promotes Romantic literature, introducing that term to readers in France and other parts of Europe. The book was published in 1813, after the first edition of 10,000 copies, printed in 1810, had been destroyed by order from Napoleon. The book had a major impact on Romanticism in France and elsewhere.
Corinne, or Italy, also known as Corinne, is a novel by the Genevan and French writer Germaine de Staël, published in 1807. It relates a love story between an Italian poet, Corinne, and Lord Oswald Nelvil, an English nobleman. The novel includes both observations and reflections on Italy, its history, its culture and the customs of its inhabitants. Influenced by Enlightenment thought, the novel is part of the French romanticism movement. The novel is Madame de Staël's most famous work, and is the first aesthetic romance not written in German.
References
↑ Wilkinson, L.R. (2017). Hibbitt, Richard (ed.). Other Capitals of the Nineteenth Century An Alternative Mapping of Literary and Cultural Space. Palgrave Macmillan. pp.51–67.
↑ Simon, Sherry (2003). Gender in Translation. Routledge. pp.61–62. ISBN978-1134820863.
↑ It was Tallien who announced the September Massacres and sent off the famous circular of 3 September to the French provinces, recommending them to take similar action.
↑ Panizza, Letizia; Wood, Sharon. A History of Women's Writing in Italy. p.144.
↑ The novel prompted, none too inspiringly, The Corinna of England, and a Heroine in the Shade (1809) by E. M. Foster, in which retribution is wreaked on a shallowly portrayed version of the French author's heroine.
↑ Schlegel and Madame de Staël have endeavoured to reduce poetry to two systems, classical and romantic.
↑ Ferber, Michael (2010) Romanticism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0199568918.
↑ Madame de Staël et Maurice O’Donnell (1805–1817), d’apres des letters inédites, by Jean Mistler, published by Calmann-Levy, Editeurs, 3 rue Auber, Paris, 1926.
↑ Goodden, Angelica (2007). "The Man-Woman and the Idiot: Madame de Staël's Public/Private Life". Forum for Modern Language Studies. 43 (1): 34–45. doi:10.1093/fmls/cql117.
↑ Marso, Lori J. (2002). "Defending the Queen: Wollstonecraft and Staël on the Politics of Sensibility and Feminine Difference". The Eighteenth Century. 43 (1). University of Pennsylvania Press: 43–60. JSTOR41468201.
↑ Moore, L. (2007). Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France.
↑ Popowicz, Kamil (2013). Madame de Staël (in Polish). Vol.4. Warsaw: Collegium Civitas.
↑ Casillo, R. (2006). The Empire of Stereotypes: Germaine de Staël and the Idea of Italy. Springer. p.1. ISBN978-1403983213.
Garonna, Paolo (2010). L'Europe de Coppet – Essai sur l'Europe de demain (in French). Le Mont-sur-Lausanne: LEP Éditions Loisirs et Pėdagogie. ISBN978-2606013691.
Hilt, Douglas. "Madame De Staël: Emotion and Emancipation". History Today (Dec 1972), Vol. 22 Issue 12, pp.833–842, online.
Hofmann, Étienne, ed. (1982). Benjamin Constant, Madame de Staël et le Groupe de Coppet: Actes du Deuxième Congrès de Lausanne à l'occasion du 150e anniversaire de la mort de Benjamin Constant Et Du Troisième Colloque de Coppet, 15–19 juilliet 1980 (in French). Oxford, The Voltaire Foundation and Lausanne, Institut Benjamin Constant. ISBN0729402800.
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