STAËL, ANNE-LOUISE-GERMAINE DE. - Of a Calvinist family of Genevan origin, daughter of the famous minister of Louis XVI, J. Necker, born in Paris on 22 April 1766, died there on 4 July 1817, married in 1786 to Baron Erik Magnus de S.-Holstein, minister of Sweden at the court of France, who formally separated from her in 1797. From the earliest years of the French Revolution she took her stand with the "constitutionalists," or liberals, whose circles centred on her salon; for this she found herself in open conflict first with the Jacobins of the Terror and later with Napoleon. After her father's resignation from the ministry, she lived with him at Coppet on Lake Geneva and there prepared her first literary essays, inspired by the morbid sensibility of the age.
Her marriage allowed her to live in Paris during the first revolutionary period, until Sept. 1792. She was in London for four months at the beginning of 1793, and then again at Coppet. She then published her first Réflexions politiques sur le procès de la Reine (1793) et sur la paix (1794-95); her constitutionalism was meanwhile becoming clearer, thanks also to her meeting with Benjamin Constant (v.).
In 1800 her essay De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales appeared, a panorama of European literature considered as an expression of society. From 1802 dates an attempt at a "novel of passion," Delphine. At the end of 1803 the Napoleonic police ordered her to leave Paris: there followed ten years of wanderings (Germany and Italy), interrupted by long stays at Coppet and concluded, in 1812-13, by an adventurous journey to Russia and then to England (S. summed up her experiences as an exile in Dix années d'exil).
The fruit of a journey to Italy was the novel Corinne ou de l'Italie (1807): the mannered image of Italy, besides reflecting a sincere enthusiasm, is inspired by the aesthetic conceptions with which Mme de S. had come into contact through her acquaintance with Goethe and the courses of Schelling and Schlegel. With them and with Jacobi she had new contacts at Munich and Vienna in the winter of 1807-1808; a longer stay at Coppet gave her the leisure to compose her masterpiece De l'Allemagne (Paris 1810), immediately seized because of the vigorous profession of faith in liberty that it implicitly contained. The vision of German humanity and spirit, which in it was almost identified with the new sensibility and the new poetics most directly bound to the medieval and Christian traditions of Europe, those of Romanticism, at once had a vast resonance and procured for S. her greatest fame. Having returned from England to the continent, Mme de S. held somewhat aloof from the active constitutional polemics of the Hundred Days and the Restoration; she nevertheless set about reordering the fruit of her own political experience in the Considérations sur la Révolution Française (published posthumously in 1818 by her son-in-law, the duke de Broglie). Having returned to Italy in the winter of 1815-16, she published in the journal Biblioteca italiana a Lettera sulle traduzioni (and on their usefulness for the renewal of Italian letters) which kindled in Italy the liveliest Romantic polemic.
Bibliography8 works
Enzo Bottasso