STAËL, ANNE-LOUISE-GERMAINE de. — Of a Calvinist family of Genevan origin, daughter of the celebrated minister of Louis XVI, J. Necker, born in Paris on 22 April 1766 and died there on 4 July 1817, she married in 1786 Baron Erik Magnus de S.-Holstein, Swedish minister at the court of France, who formally separated from her in 1797. From the earliest years of the French Revolution she took a position in favor of the “constitutionalists,” or liberals, whose circles centered on her salon; for this reason she found herself in open opposition first to the Jacobins of the Terror and later to Napoleon. After her father’s resignation from the ministry, she lived with him at Coppet on Lake Geneva, where she prepared her first literary essays, inspired by the morbid sensibility of the age.
Her marriage enabled 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 returned to Coppet. At that time she published her first Réflexions politiques sur le procès de la Reine (1793) et sur la paix (1794–95); meanwhile, her constitutionalism was becoming more clearly defined, thanks also Constant (v.).
In 1800 her essay De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales appeared, a survey of European literature considered as an expression of society. In 1802 came an attempt at a “novel of passion,” Delphine. At the end of 1803 the Napoleonic police ordered her to leave Paris: ten years of peregrinations followed (in Germany and Italy), interrupted by lengthy stays at Coppet and culminating, in 1812–13, in an adventurous journey to Russia and then to England (S. summarized 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 stylized image of Italy, besides being inspired by sincere enthusiasm, reflects the aesthetic conceptions with which M.me de S. had come into contact through her acquaintance with Goethe and through the courses of Schelling and Schlegel. She renewed her acquaintance with them and with Jacobi in Munich and Vienna during the winter of 1807–1808; a longer stay at Coppet gave her the opportunity to compose her masterpiece De l'Allemagne (Paris 1810), which was immediately confiscated because of the vigorous implicit profession of faith in freedom that it contained. The vision of German humanity and spirit, which there almost identified itself with the new sensibility and the new poetics more directly linked to Europe’s medieval and Christian traditions—the Romantic vision—immediately aroused a broad response and won S. her greatest fame. Having returned from England to the Continent, M.me de S. kept somewhat apart from the active constitutional controversies of the Hundred Days and the Restoration; nevertheless, she undertook to organize the fruits of her political experience in 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 literature), which set off the liveliest Romantic controversy in Italy.