Germaine de Stael

Germaine de Staël , 1766-1817, French-Swiss woman of letters, whose full name was Anne Louise Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein. Born in Paris, the daughter of Jacques and Suzanne Necker, she early absorbed the intellectual and political atmosphere of her mother's salon. In 1786 she married Baron Staël-Holstein, a Swedish diplomat. Though moderately sympathizing with the French Revolution, she left France in 1792. Returning to Paris under the Directory, she made her salon a powerful political and intellectual center. She separated, amicably, from her husband and became intimately associated with Benjamin Constant. Her love life remained, to the end, both complicated and unconventional. In 1803 her spirited opposition to Bonaparte caused her exile from Paris. Mme de Staël retired to her estate at Coppet, on the Lake of Geneva, where she attracted a brilliant circle. Already the author of a successful novel, Delphine (1802), and of a study of the influence of social conditions on literature ( De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales, 1800), she was inspired by a trip to Italy to write the novel Corinne (1807). Her principal work, De l'Allemagne (1810), was the result of a tour through Germany. Napoleon, who resented the book as an invidious comparison between German and French culture and mores, ordered the destruction of the entire first edition (1811) on the ground that it was "un-French." Threatened by Napoleon's police, Mme de Staël fled to Russia and England; in 1815 she returned to Coppet. Republished, De l'Allemagne tremendously influenced European thought and letters, which became imbued with Mme de Staël's enthusiasm for German romanticism. Among her other works are Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution française (1818) and the autobiographical Dix Années d'exil (1818). There are English translations of most of her works.

Bibliography: See her correspondence (tr. 1970); her memoirs (new ed. 1968); biography by C. Herold (1964); and M. Levaillant, The Passionate Exiles (1958, repr. 1971).

Richier, Germaine (1902–1959). French sculptor, born at Grans, near Arles, the daughter of a vineyard owner. She had a traditional training as a carver, studying first at the École des Beaux-Arts, Montpellier, 1922–5, and then privately under Bourdelle in Paris, 1925–9. However, from about 1940 she began to create a distinctive type of bronze sculpture. Her figures became long and thin, combining human with animal or insect (and sometimes vegetal) forms. The surfaces of these powerful and disquieting works have a tattered and lacerated effect, creating a macabre feeling of decomposition, and she was one of the pioneers of an open form of sculpture in which enclosed space becomes as important and alive as the solid material. Such figures were extremely difficult to cast and she showed great technical resourcefulness in bringing them to completion. The public sometimes found her work shocking, especially her Crucified Christ (church of Notre-Dame-de-Toute-Grâce, Assy, 1950), which caused a storm of controversy. Nevertheless, her international prestige grew steadily in the postwar years and in 1951 she won the Sculpture Prize at the São Paulo Bienal. In 1947 she began to make engravings, from 1951 she made a few sculptures with coloured backgrounds painted by Hans Hartung or other artists, and in the last two years of her life she took up painting herself. She died of cancer. Her first husband, whom she married in 1929, was the Swiss sculptor Otto Bänninger (1897–1973) and during the Second World War she lived in Switzerland; her second husband, whom she married in 1955, was the French writer René de Soulier, whose books include L'Art fantastique (1961).