Madame de Stael 1766 – 1817

Anne-Louise-Germaine de Stael, known as Madame de Stael, was a French-Swiss writer, philosopher, and woman of letters who shaped the literary and political thought of her age. Daughter of Necker, finance minister to Louis XVI, and salonniere of one of the most influential Parisian salons, she was repeatedly exiled by Napoleon for the independence of her thought. Her Of Germany introduced French readers to the philosophy and literature of Goethe, Schiller, and the German Romantics, while her Considerations on the French Revolution offered one of the first liberal histories of that event.

Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, later Baroness de Stael-Holstein and known as Madame de Stael, was born in 1766 in Paris, the only child of the Genevan banker and statesman Jacques Necker, Louis XVI's controller-general of finances, and of the salon hostess Suzanne Curchod. She grew up in the most brilliant intellectual milieu of late-Enlightenment Paris and at twenty was married to the Swedish ambassador, Erik Magnus Stael von Holstein.

From the early years of the Revolution she presided over a salon at the Swedish embassy and at Coppet on the Lake of Geneva that became the meeting place for moderate constitutionalists and, after Napoleon's coup, for the European liberal opposition. Her major works are the treatise On Literature Considered in Its Relations with Social Institutions (1800), the novels Delphine (1802) and Corinne, or Italy (1807), the long study On Germany (1810, suppressed by Napoleon and published in London 1813), and the posthumous Considerations on the French Revolution.

Stael introduced French readers to the German Romantics, argued for the irreducible plurality of national literatures, and offered an analysis of representative government, religious liberty, and the rights of women that places her among the founding figures of nineteenth-century European liberalism. Exiled by Napoleon for most of his rule, she returned to Paris after 1815 and died there in 1817.