Germaine de Staël, in full Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, Baronne (baroness) de Staël-Holstein, byname Madame de Staël was a French-Swiss woman of letters, political propagandist, and conversationalist, who epitomized the European culture of her time, bridging the history of ideas from Neoclassicism to Romanticism. She also gained fame by maintaining a salon for leading intellectuals.
Background
She was born Anne Louise Germaine Necker on April 22, 1766, in Paris, of French-Swiss, Protestant parents. Her father, the banker Jacques Necker, became Louis XVI's minister of finance; her mother, Suzanne Curchod Necker, conducted an intellectual salon in which Anne Louise grew up on familiar terms with such celebrities as Denis Diderot, Jean d'Alembert, Edward Gibbon, and the Comte de Buffon.
Career
At the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, her salon became an influential political center. She supported the moderate liberal policies of her father, whom she worshiped until her death. After Necker's final dismissal in 1790 she allied herself with the "Constitutionalist" party and late in 1791 was instrumental in the nomination of her lover, Narbonne, to his short but eventful term as minister of war. She helped him escape to England a few days before the September Massacres of 1792, and after giving birth to her second son, joined him there early in 1793. In May of that year, probably under pressure from her father, she returned to Necker's estate at Coppet, near Geneva, Switzerland, where she was to spend much of her life. Her first important work, De l'influence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des nations (1796; "Concerning the Influence of the Passions on the Happiness of Individuals and of Nations"), was written under the double impact of her desertion by Narbonne and of the Reign of Terror in France, from which she helped rescue many of her friends. Robespierre's downfall made possible her return to Paris in 1795, in the company of the politician and polemicist Benjamin Constant, whose stormy liaison with her endured until 1810. Although she regained considerable influence for brief periods of time, her constant opposition to all political regimes in France, from the Directory to the Bourbon Restoration, brought repeated banishment upon her; her exile from Paris became permanent in October 1803, when Napoleon Bonaparte forbade her to approach within 40 leagues of the city. Coppet, where she received the intellectual and social elite of her time, became a focus of anti-Bonaparte opinion. She traveled in Germany (1803 - 1804), meeting Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, and the leaders of the romantic movement; in Italy (1805); in France (1806 - 1807 and 1810); and in Austria and Germany (1808). Two of her most celebrated works, the novel Corinne (1807), in which she portrayed herself, and her account of Germany, De l'Allemagne, were in part the result of her travels. The latter work, which introduced German literature and philosophy of the romantic era to France, was seized by Napoleon's police before its scheduled publication in 1810; it was considered "un-French" and subversive and was not published until 1813, in London. Increasingly persecuted by Napoleon's agents, Mme. de Stael fled from Coppet to London in 1812. In 1813, by her friendship with General J. B. J. Bernadotte, heir apparent to the Swedish throne, she helped bring Sweden into the coalition against Napoleon. She returned to Paris in 1814 after Napoleon's downfall. Probably her most important work was Considerations sur les principaux evenements de la revolution francaise (1816; "Reflections on the Chief Events of the French Revolution"), an interpretation of the French Revolution that set the tone for all subsequent liberal historians. Her other writings include the partly autobiographical novel Delphine (1803) and De la Litterature consideree dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (1800; "On Literature Considered in Its Relations with Social Institutions"), which attempts to place intellectual change in a sociological setting and to formulate a new theory of progress. Regarded as the foremost woman of her time, Mme. de Stael not only was acquainted with many of the most celebrated of her contemporaries but also exerted a strong influence on such friends as the historians A. G. P. B. de Barante and J. C. L. de Sismondi and the German critic, translator, and poet August Wilhelm Schlegel. She died in Paris on July 14, 1817.
Achievements
Views
Quotations:
"Poetry is the apotheosis of sentiment. "
"The greatest happiness is to transform one's feelings into action. "
"Of all human sentiments, enthusiasm creates the most happiness; it is the only sentiment in fact which gives real happiness, the only sentiment which can help us to bear our human destiny in any situation in which we may find ourselves. "
"Scientific progress makes moral progress a necessity; for if man's power is increased, the checks that restrain him from abusing it must be strengthened. "
"The human mind always makes progress, but it is a progress in spirals. "
Connections
In 1786 she was married to Baron Eric Magnus de Stael-Holstein, the Swedish ambassador to France, from whom she soon became estranged. Disappointed in her marriage, she gave her affections to a succession of other men, beginning with Talleyrand and the Vicomte Louis de Narbonne-Lara.
In 1811 she married a young officer of Swiss origin named Albert de Rocca, twenty-three years her junior.