Staël, Germaine de
Staël, Germaine de
(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 NeckerNecker, Jacques, 1732–1804, French financier and statesman, b. Geneva, Switzerland. In 1750 he went to Paris and entered banking. He rose rapidly to importance, established a bank of his own, and became a director of the French East India Company.
..... Click the link for more information. and Suzanne NeckerNecker, Suzanne (Curchod)
, 1739–94, French writer; wife of Jacques Necker and mother of Mme de Staël. Her salon was frequented by celebrated Frenchmen and foreign visitors. A hospital that she founded c.1776 is still in existence.
..... Click the link for more information. , 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 sympathetic to the French RevolutionFrench Revolution,
political upheaval of world importance in France that began in 1789. Origins of the Revolution
Historians disagree in evaluating the factors that brought about the Revolution.
..... Click the link for more information. , 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 ConstantConstant, Benjamin
(Henri Benjamin Constant de Rebecque) , 1767–1830, French-Swiss political writer and novelist, b. Lausanne. His affair (1794–1811) with Germaine de Staël turned him to political interests.
..... Click the link for more information. . Her love life remained, to the end, both complicated and unconventional. In 1803 her spirited opposition to NapoleonNapoleon I
, 1769–1821, emperor of the French, b. Ajaccio, Corsica, known as "the Little Corporal." Early Life
The son of Carlo and Letizia Bonaparte (or Buonaparte; see under Bonaparte, family), young Napoleon was sent (1779) to French military schools at
..... Click the link for more information. 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), Mme. de Staël was inspired by a trip to Italy to write the novel Corinne (1807), whose heroine became an international symbol of romanticism. Her principal work, the three-volume 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), Selected Correspondence (2000), tr. by K. Jameson-Cemper; her memoirs (new ed. 1968); biographies by J. C. Herold (1958, repr. 1981, 2000), R. Winegarten (1985), A. Gooden (2008), and F. du P. Gray (2008) ; M. Levaillant, The Passionate Exiles (1958, repr. 1971) and R. Weingarten, Germaine de Staël and Benjamin Constant: A Dual Biography (2008).