In the morally lax and very hypocritical eighteenth century in Europe it was quite acceptable for married ladies to take pleasure where, and as they found it. They combine to represent a personality whose influence it seems was completely irresistible to the majority of people who met her, although there were some quite notable exceptions. From there she went to England in 1793, where she was surrounded by French émigré’s, although her views on politics and morals excluded her from the very best London society, despite her husband’s current diplomatic status. Born into an influential Swiss family (her father was finance minister to France’s King Louis XVI) woman of letters, political propagandist, and conversationalist, Madame de Staël, Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baroness of Staël-Holstein (1766-1817) wrote romantic comedies, tragedies, novels and essays. “Our family,” she wrote to him in 1816, “is still a little intellectual island where Franklin, Washington, and Jefferson are revered as in their own country.”41 Shortly before her death, she told George Bancroft in Paris: “You are the vanguard of the human race, you are the future of the world.”42. [28. A special session of the Parlement of Paris called by the monarch to impose the registration of his royal edicts. They were also a meeting place for the women and men, who were the creative, innovative thinkers of her age. The parlements19 were never able to limit the royal authority, which had retained the legal right to impose a lit de justice.20 Moreover, the Estates General were convened only eighteen times in almost five centuries (1302–1789) and did not meet at all between 1614 and 1789. Her mother Suzanne, though stiff and cold, entertained the leading intellectuals and politicians of the day in her famous salon. In the end, Madame de Staël argues, Napoléon left a nefarious legacy that strengthened the coercive force of centralization and fueled the atomization of society. . “That which is particularly characteristic of England,” she noted in a Burkean vein, “is a mixture of chivalrous spirit with an enthusiasm for liberty”29 fostering a fortunate balance between all social classes, which makes the English nation seem, “if we may say so, one entire body of gentlemen.”30 Unlike the French nobles, the English aristocrats were united to—and identified themselves with—the nation at large and did not form a privileged caste detached from the management of local affairs. She returned to Paris, where she followed with great interest the debates on the new Chamber of Deputies while also seeking to recover the two million livres that her father had loaned to the French state during the Revolution. Staël did not hesitate to list a long series of royal abuses, including arbitrary imprisonments, ordinances, banishments, special commissions, and lits de justice that infringed upon the rights of ordinary citizens and were passed against their will. Madame de Staël draws an unflattering (and somewhat biased) portrait of the future emperor by emphasizing not only his unbounded egotism and intoxication with power but also his lack of emotion combined with an unsettling air of vulgarity and political shrewdness. i, 101–10. He had the French edition of 1810 (10,000 copies) seized and destroyed. . Germaine’s mother, Suzanne Curchod, was a highly educated woman from Lausanne who closely supervised her daughter’s education, seeking to give her a truly encyclopedic knowledge of disciplines as diverse as mathematics, languages, geography, theology, and dance. A famous political figure during that time, Staël was received in the most select circles in England, Germany, Sweden, Austria, and Russia. The political agenda of Considerations is illustrated by chapters xi and xii of part V, in which Madame de Staël examines the system that the Bourbons and the friends of liberty ought to have followed in 1814. Germaine had many friendships with the influential people who were busy giving birth to the age of reason or enlightenment. He was “neither good, nor violent, nor gentle, nor cruel. She influenced literary tastes in… …   Wikipedia, Anne Louise Germaine de Staël — Anne Germaine de Staël Madame de Staël im Jah …   Deutsch Wikipedia, Anne Louise von Staël-Holstein — Anne Germaine de Staël Baronin Anne Louise Germaine de Staël Holstein [stal] (* 22. 22 April 1766 – 14 July 1817. ‘I was at Madame de Staël’s one morning when she received me in her private apartment. Choix de lettres (1778–1817). . If there was anything inevitable in the Revolution, Maistre claimed, it concerned God’s punishment for the excesses of the Enlightenment. Essays It was her Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractère de J.-J. It was this concern that prompted her to work toward bringing the two countries together. A similar concern can be found in Benjamin Constant’s famous lecture, “The Liberty of the Moderns Compared to the Liberty of the Ancients,” which drew inspiration from various ideas of Madame de Staël. I, 132–33. An influential Banker Jacques Récamier purchased her Parisian house for his young, and very beautiful wife Juliette in 1798 and remodelled it completely. Justifying his decision, Necker wrote: “Darkness and obscurity favor carelessness, [while] publicity can only become an honor and a reward.”2 The public success of Necker’s Compte rendu was tremendous: more than three thousand copies were sold the first day of its publication. “In matters of the heart, nothing is true except the improbable.”. This was to be a happy time. She claimed that the Charter of 1814 contained all the political principles that had previously been advocated by Necker, but she also expressed her concerns about the long-term viability of the new constitutional text. Madame de Staël did not seek to be a neutral observer of the English scene; her normative approach stemmed from her belief that France must imitate the political institutions of England in order to overcome its legacy of despotism and centralization.