Staël, Germaine de

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STAËL, GERMAINE DE

STAËL, GERMAINE DE (1766–1817), French writer.

Madame de Staël was one of the best known female writers and intellectuals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in France and across Europe. Born to Swiss Protestant parents in Paris on 22 April 1766 as Ann Louise Germaine Necker, she became a champion of the liberal revolutionary cause in France and later an ardent opponent of the Napoleonic regime. Her father was renowned French Finance Minister Jacques Necker, and through his service to the French monarchy and her mother Suzanne's salon in Paris, young Germaine Necker became intimately familiar from an early age with intellectual currents and political developments in France on the eve of the Revolution. In 1786, she was married to a Swedish diplomat living in Paris, Eric Staël von Holstein. Their relationship was not a particularly close one, and Germaine soon became involved in the types of amorous dalliances so characteristic of the contemporary European aristocracy.

At her own salon in Paris, Madame de Staël hosted many leading French thinkers and early revolutionaries, among them the abbé Sieyès, and her salon became a central hub of political discussion in the capital. During the Revolution, de Staël advocated a moderate liberal path for France, envisioning a constitutional monarchy adhering to the principle of equality under the law. Meanwhile, she attempted to advance the political career of her lover, Louis de Narbonne, who indeed became, albeit only briefly, the French Minister of War starting in December 1791.

Her moderate political position, her continued loyalty to the monarchy, and her status as a woman made Madame de Staël increasingly

vulnerable as the Revolution embarked upon its more radical course in the 1790s, and she left Paris in September 1792. Spending much of the next four years at Coppet, her parents' estate near Geneva, Germaine continued to write and discuss political matters. She criticized the excesses of the Reign of Terror and its neglect of civil liberties and freedoms. During these same years, her liaison with Narbonne came to an end, and she became romantically involved with Benjamin Constant. Their stormy relationship endured for well more than a decade.

The most turbulent and dangerous years for de Staël, however, were those of Napoleon Bonaparte (r. 1804–1814/15). The early nineteenth century would see her greatest literary successes as well, namely the novels Delphine (1802) and most notably Corinne, or Italy (1807), both of which hinge upon independent-minded heroines who meet with misfortune and suffering. Although her writings were not always overtly critical of the French government, the Napoleonic regime found much to dislike in these and other works by Germaine de Staël, for her writings displayed the shortcomings of authoritarianism, exalted the cause of liberty, and pointed to the inequities of contemporary society in matters such as marriage and divorce. In 1803, Madame de Staël was ordered to leave Paris. She spent the next decade largely in exile, but this allowed an opportunity to travel to places such as Germany, Italy, and Russia, where she was often well received by courts and aristocrats for her literary fame and her outspoken opposition to Napoleon. Her observations about the places she visited were recorded in such works as On Germany (1813) and the posthumously published Ten Years of Exile (1820). These years also proved full of change and upheaval in de Staël's personal life. Her husband died in 1802, but she took much harder the news of her beloved father's death in 1804. Her relationship with Benjamin Constant finally came to an end largely due to de Staël's relationship with a young Swiss, John Rocca, with whom she became romantically involved in 1810 and secretly married in 1816. Less than three years after returning to Paris in 1814, Germaine de Staël suffered a stroke in February 1817, and died on Bastille Day, 14 July 1817.

Madame de Staël's ideas were to have a profound impact on literary and political developments in the nineteenth century. Her ambitious and wide-ranging writings in many ways helped to usher in Romanticism in France, the modern study of comparative literature, and even the age of nationalism—in particular, Corinne helped to enliven the Italian unification movement. Additionally, her numerous writings relating to the French Revolution and her vision of a society of civil liberties and freedoms provided one of the foundations for French liberalism.

See alsoConstant, Benjamin; Feminism; France; Napoleon; Romanticism.