Anne Louise Germaine de Staël

From Philosopedia

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël (22 Apr 1766 - 14 July 1817)

Commonly known as Madame de Stael, she was a French-speaking Swiss author who influenced literary tastes in Europe at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Born Germaine Necker, later known as "Mme. de Stael," she had a mother who was pious but her father, who was French Minister of Finance, was more liberal. Germaine started writing political essays at 15. She married the Swedish Ambassador, the Baron de Stael, in 1786.

They separated after a few years. Mme. de Stael wrote Sophie, a drama, in 1786, studied Rousseau, and left Paris in 1792 for long periods of both self-imposed and Napolean-imposed exiles. During her travels she wrote a four-volume novel, Delphine, published in 1802.

Although the Revolution cooled some of her Voltairean views, she continued to reject Christianity. “She spoke much about the preservation of religion, in which, she gave me to understand, she did not herself believe,” wrote American envoy John Q. Adams, writing about Mme. de Stael, in a letter to his mother dated Nov. 22,1812 (Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, vol. xxiii, 1913, cited by Joseph McCabe in A Dictionary of Modern American Rationalists (1920).

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