The French-Swiss woman of letters and novelist Germaine de Staël [full name Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne de Staël-Holstein, historically referred to as Madame de Staël] (1766-1817) greatly influenced European thought and literature with her enthusiasm for German romanticism.

Germaine de Staël was born Anne Louise Germaine Necker in Paris on April 22, 1766. Her father was Jacques Necker, a man of modest origins, who had risen to become Louis XVI's finance minister. Her mother Suzanne, though stiff and cold, entertained the leading intellectuals and politicians of the day in her famous salon. Staël's natural genius was thus nurtured from her infancy. The child adored her father - to the point of deploring that she was born too late to marry him - and he adored and pampered her. Madame Necker was intensely jealous of their mutual adoration; she and Staël bitterly resented one another. The three were bound together by a complex web of passions and hostilities, and their family life was characterized by emotional frenzy.

When she was 20 years old, Staël made a loveless marriage to the Swedish ambassador to France, Baron Erik Magnus de Staël-Holstein. Though he grew to love her, she lived with him only at strategic intervals when the origin of a child she was carrying might arouse suspicion. Only one of her five children was fathered by him.

Staël did, however, profit from her husband's diplomatic immunity by remaining in Paris during most of the French Revolution. Her salon became a center of political intrigue for those who favored a modern constitutional monarchy and a bicameral legislature. During the Terror she courageously arranged and financed the escape of numerous constitutionalist friends.

Although Staël was not considered a woman of traditional beauty, her brilliance and wit attracted some of the leading intellectuals and political figures of her day. Her love affairs were continuous, intense, and simultaneous. She never ended a love affair, and often as many as five lovers lived with her. She spent much of her life in exile, always surrounded by a small court of French émigrés and admirers. Her first lover was Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, and another was August Wilhelm von Schlegel, the German scholar and poet. But it was Benjamin Constant, a French-Swiss writer, who became the passion and torment of her life. They lived together for 12 turbulent years. Constant's novel Adolphe examines their relationship.

In 1797 Staël welcomed Napoleon Bonaparte to Paris as France's deliverer; within a few years she grew to detest him. Napoleon resented both her interference in politics and her unorthodox views. He repeatedly confiscated her manuscripts and banished her from Paris.

Her Works

Staël's first publication was Lettre sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It appeared in 1788, and in it she identified herself with enlightenment and reason. Her book De l'Influence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des nations was issued in 1796. In it she expressed her belief in a system that considered the absolute liberty of the moral being the most essential element in his welfare and his most precious and inalienable right.

In 1800 Staël advanced her "theory of lights" in De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales. In this book she held the belief that there was a constant progression of literature toward the light of perfection. In 1802 she published a novel, Delphine. An immediate success, it related the life of a beautiful and intelligent woman who sought happiness through love. Napoleon was enraged by Delphine because it praised liberalism, divorce, the British, and Protestantism. He declared it immoral, antisocial, and anti-Catholic. Staël was banished from Paris. Making a trip to Germany, she immersed herself in the society and culture of that country.

Continuing her travels into Italy, Staël found inspiration for her second novel there, Corinne ou l'Italie, published in 1807. At once a love story and a guidebook to Italy, this novel's heroine, as in Delphine, was a beautiful and brilliant woman who became a victim of society.

The fruits of Staël's sojourn in Germany appeared in 1810. De l' Allemagne ranked as one of the seminal works of early romantic thought. In it she made a famous distinction between two types of literature: that of the north (Germany, England, and Scandinavia) she found romantic, original, and free; that of the south (France and Italy) she found classical, formal, and conventional. In De l'Allemagne Staël examined the history, culture, and national character of Germany. She encouraged the rise of German consciousness and held it up as a model for France. Her book ended with a plea for enthusiasm and sentiment, which she understood to be the original "fact" of the human soul.

Napoleon was incensed by this call for German nationalism. He labeled the book "anti-French," destroyed the first edition, and exiled Staël to her home, the Château Coppet on Lake Geneva. At Coppet her activities were closely watched, and her mail was intercepted.

Staël's only comfort in despair was a new romance. Her husband had died, and in 1811 she married a 24-year-old Italian lieutenant named Rocca. In 1812 she escaped from Coppet and traveled to Russia, Sweden, and England. In 1814, after the fall of Napoleon, she returned to Paris. The Restoration disappointed her. Opium and insomnia, too many years on the edge of hysteria, and unending "enthusiasm" had all taken their toll. On July 14, 1817, paralyzed from a stroke, Staël died in her sleep.

Literary historians and critics have traditionally characterized Staël's work as providing a transition between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, but recent scholarship has provided new insights into its originality and historical importance. Staël's novels have been reinterpreted as expressions of a uniquely female literary vision. Her work has also been viewed as the struggle of an exceptional intellect to transcend the social and creative constraints imposed on the women of her time.

Further Reading

See Vivian Folkenflik, An Extraordinary Woman: Selected Writings of Germaine de Staël Columbia University, 1995; Madelyn Gutwirth, Madame de Staël, Novelist: The Emergence of the Artist as Woman Books on Demand, 1994; John Isbell, The Birth of a European Romanticism: Truth and Propaganda in Staël's De L-Allemagne Cambridge University, 1994; Gretchen Besser, Germaine de Staël: Revisited Maxwell Macmillan, 1994; Charlotte Hogsett, The Literary Existence of Germaine de Staël Southern Illinois University, 1987; ed. Madelyn Gutwirth et. al., Germaine de Staël: Crossing the Borders Rutgers, 1991; and ed. Eva Sartori, French Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Source Book, Greenwood, 1991. Maurice Levaillant's informed and readable The Passionate Exiles: Madame de Staël and Madame Récamier (1956; trans. 1958) gave a broad picture, while J. Christopher Herold, Mistress to an Age: A Life of Madame de Staël (1958) described the author of Corinne with a just mixture of irony and compassion. Also useful were David G. Larg, Madame de Staël: Her Life as Revealed in Her Work 1766-1800 (1924; trans. 1926), a good if pedantic treatment, and Wayne Andrews, Germaine: A Portrait of Madame de Staël (1963).

For more information on Germaine de Staël, visit Britannica.com.

Staël, Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, Madame de (1766-1817). Novelist, essayist, literary critic, and precursor of the modern comparative study of cultures.

Born the daughter of Jacques Necker and Suzanne Curchod, Germaine Necker grew up in the world of her mother's literary salon. There she acquired a great facility and brilliance in conversation for which she was noted all her life, and a familiarity with the philosophical ideas of her time. In 1786 she entered into a loveless marriage with the Swedish ambassador to Paris, baron de Staël: of her three children by him only one survived to adult years, Auguste, who was to edit her Œuvres complètes in 1820. She held a salon at her home in the rue du Bac and in 1788 published privately Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractère de J.-J. Rousseau, which aroused fierce controversy by its vigorous defence of La Nouvelle Héloïse.

From 1790 she spent part of each year with her father at his chateau at Coppet on the Lake of Geneva. During the Terror she made courageous efforts to rescue friends from the guillotine, and had a love-affair with a Swedish exile Count Ribbing in 1793. On 18 September 1794 she met Benjamin Constant, who fell in love with her. Although it was some time before she returned his love, their intellectual and emotional intimacy was to be of central importance in their lives and also the source of great suffering. Both were fervent supporters of the moderate republican cause, and from 1795 onwards, in Paris and at Coppet, they worked together for political progress, founding the Club Constitutionnel in 1797. In the same year Germaine de Staël gave birth to a daughter, Albertine, possibly Constant's daughter. This was a period of prolific writing: De l'influence des passions (1796), Des circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la Révolution (published only in 1988), and De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (1800). In 1800 she was officially separated from her husband, who died in 1802.

Her opposition to the tyranny of the military dictator Bonaparte became ever stronger, and in 1802, following the publication of her novel Delphine, which incurred the First Consul's anger, she was banned from living in Paris. She visited Weimar with Constant, met Goethe, Schiller, and Wieland, and employed August Wilhelm von Schlegel as tutor to her children. Gradually the Groupe de Coppet formed around her: A. W. von Schlegel and his brother, Bonstetten, Sismondi, and the historian Prosper de Barante, all with an interest in comparative cultural history. After touring Italy in 1805 she wrote her best-known novel, Corinne ou l'Italie, completed in 1806 and published in 1807 as Constant was beginning Adolphe, with which it has often been compared. In 1807 she set about the publication of her most celebrated work of non-fiction, De l'Allemagne, which was immediately seized by Napoleon's minister of police, who ordered her into exile. In 1812, after the autobiographical Dix années d'exil (1811), she fled to London (via Vienna, Moscow, St Petersburg, and Stockholm), from where she continued her work in opposition to Napoleon. After his overthrow she spent much time at Coppet, meeting Lord Byron in the summer of 1816 and marrying her lover John Rocca secretly in October 1816. Her Considérations sur la Révolution française were published posthumously in 1818.

Germaine de Staël occupies a curious position in French literary history. Her style, sometimes diffuse and prolix, has often been criticized and compared unfavourably to Constant's, for example. Nevertheless, the originality of her perceptions is remarkable, and on many matters she was in advance of her time. Well travelled and open to new ideas, in De la littérature she surveys the literature of the past and of other cultures and points to the close relationship between literature and thought and the society in which they grow—a relatively original idea at the time [see Literary History]. France is caught between the old pagan world of Greece and Rome, with its stress on form and clarity, and the new imaginative world of the Germanic peoples of Christian northern Europe where ‘romantic’ literature, characterized by enthusiasm and feeling, has developed. In De l'Allemagne she introduces French readers to modern German writers such as Goethe and Schiller. The plot of Corinne, while similarly resting on an opposition between northern and southern Europe, may also reflect to some degree the novelist's sense of isolation as a woman and an artist in a male-dominated society.

[Dennis Wood]

Bibliography

• S. Balayé, Madame de Staël: lumières et liberté (1979)
• G. de Diesbach, Madame de Staël, 1983

Staël, Anne Louise Germaine, Baronne de (Paris, 1766-1817, Paris), née Necker, was the daughter of the Swiss-born banker J. Necker (1732-1804) called in by Louis XVI to retrieve the financial situation of the French monarchy. In 1792 Madame de Staël took refuge from the French Revolution at Coppet, Switzerland. She published De la littérature, her first important work, in 1800. She toured Europe and in 1804 visited Weimar, meeting the celebrities Goethe, Schiller, and Wieland, and also Berlin, where she made the acquaintance of A. W. von Schlegel, who thereafter accompanied her on her travels and lived with her at Coppet. In 1810 she published her book on Germany (De l'Allemagne) which was confiscated by order of Napoleon. It was reprinted in London in 1813 and translated into German in 1814 (Über Deutschland). Madame de Staël was particularly impressed and influenced by German Romanticism (see Romantik). Her novel Corinne ou l'Italie (1807), translated into German by D. von Schlegel, was widely read throughout Europe.

Staël, Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, Mme de (1766-1817) French writer. Mme de Staël was the daughter of the financier Jacques Necker, and became one of the great salonistes, whose political, philosophical, and literary career was closely entwined with Romanticism. She was exiled after her father's downfall in the French revolution, and again in 1804 by Napoleon, returning to Paris in 1814. Her principal philosophical work was De l'influence des passions sur le bonheur des individuels et des nations (1796, trs. as A Treatise on the Influence of the Passions on the Happiness of Individuals and of Nations, 1798), in which she develops the theme of the inseparable connection between thought and feeling. Her De l'Allemagne (‘On Germany’, 1813, published in London) was an important instrument for introducing German Romanticism to the French and the English.

(zhĕrmĕn' də stäl) , 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).

Quotes:

"The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man."

"The sense of this word among the Greeks affords the noblest definition of it; enthusiasm signifies God in us."

"Genius is essentially creative; it bears the stamp of the individual who possesses it."

"When a noble life has prepared old age, it is not decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality."

"Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notion of time; effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end."

"We cease loving ourselves if no one loves us."

See more famous quotes by Germaine De Stael