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 Staël-Holstein, Swedish minister to the French court, who formally separated from her in 1797. From the earliest years of the French Revolution she took a stand for the “constitutionalists,” or liberals, whose circles gathered around her salon; for this she found herself in open conflict with the Jacobins of the Terror first and then with Napoleon. After her father resigned 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 time.
Her marriage allowed her to live in Paris during the first revolutionary period, until September 1792. She was in London for four months at the beginning of 1793, and then again at Coppet. At that time she published her first *Réflexions politiques sur le procès de la Reine* (1793) and *sur la paix* (1794–95); her constitutionalism was meanwhile becoming clearer, also thanks to her encounter with Benjamin Constant (q.v.).
In 1800 her essay *De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales* appeared, a panorama of European literature regarded as an expression of society. In 1802 she made an attempt at a “novel of passion,” *Delphine*. At the end of 1803 the Napoleonic police ordered her to leave Paris: followed ten years of wandering (Germany and Italy), interrupted by long stays at Coppet and concluded, in 1812–13, by a journey to Russia and then to England (Madame de Staël 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, beyond a sincere enthusiasm, was inspired by the aesthetic conceptions with which Madame de Staël had come into contact through her acquaintance with Goethe and the lectures of Schelling and Schlegel. With them and with Jacobi she had further contacts in 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 confiscated because of the vigorous profession of faith in freedom it contained. The vision of humanity and of the German spirit that was almost identified with it in the new sensibility and the new poetics more directly linked to the medieval and Christian traditions of Europe—those of Romanticism—soon met with wide resonance and brought Madame de Staël her greatest fame. Returning from England to the Continent, Madame de Staël kept somewhat apart from the active constitutional polemics of the Hundred Days and the Restoration; she nevertheless devoted herself to organizing 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). Returning to Italy in the winter of 1815–16, she published in the journal *Biblioteca italiana* a *Letter on Translations* (and on their usefulness for the renewal of Italian literature) that kindled in Italy the liveliest Romantic controversy.