Anne-Louise-Germaine de Staël (Paris 1766 – Paris 1817) was the daughter of the Swiss financier and economist Jacques Necker, briefly Louis XVI’s Minister of Finance, and grew up as a precocious intellectual in the salon atmosphere at the close of the Ancien Régime; the family spent its time between Paris and the family estate at Coppet, near Geneva. Her literary taste was influenced by Rousseau and by German pre-Romanticism (Klopstock, Goethe’s Werther); she made her literary debut in the 1780s with a Romantic history drama (Jeanne Grey, 1787). By this time she had married a Swedish diplomat; her career was made under her married name as “Madame de Staël”. Politically she was a Patriot, supporting the constitutionalists and some Girondists, which necessitated her flight from Paris in 1792. After a sojourn in Coppet and England she returned to Paris under the Directoire, becoming a leading intellectual with her essays, notably Sur la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (1800), a pioneering work in literary sociology. It was also a vindication of Romantic literature, associated with Ossian, northern Europe, and individual liberty, against the conformism of classicism. Her own Romanticism was expressed in woman-centred novels, Delphine (1802) and, most importantly, Corinne (1807), in the style of the German aesthetic romance and with a Byronic (wandering, misunderstood) heroine.
By this time a rift with Napoleon had once again forced her out of Paris. Her Coppet salon became a think tank of emerging anti-Napoleonic Romanticism, with house guests such as Sismondi and, most importantly, August Wilhelm Schlegel. Schlegel became her great mediator with the leading German Romantics of the day (the intellectual “Jena” generation, rather than the younger, poetical “Heidelberg” school); in turn, she herself became the great mediator between German Romanticism and the wider European readership. Her De l’Allemagne combined a cultural travelogue on the German lands, introducing its leading authors, with a moralistic critique of France, much in the style of Tacitus’s Germania. Romantic, free-spirited, speculative, and inquisitive Germany, politically powerless but rich in culture, was implicitly contrasted with a Napoleonic France that was in all respects its total opposite. Napoleon had the first Parisian edition of 1810 destroyed; the London edition of 1813 became a European classic, fixing the ethnotypical and moral opposition between Latinate-absolutist-classicist France and tribal-democratic-Romantic Germany for decades to come, and in effect canonizing the national and aesthetic self-image of the German Romantic nationalists as a Pan-European template.
The influence of the book was boosted by the fame of the author of Corinne; Staël was by now a celebrity, a female Byron, notorious for her strong-minded and sexually uninhibited persona as much as for her writings, and famous for the wandering exile that she had been forced into by Napoleon’s persecution. Her odyssey led by way of St Petersburg to London; she returned to France after Napoleon’s downfall, in the entourage of Wellington, and died shortly afterwards.
