Stäel, MADAME DE, one of the most illustrious of Frenchwomen, was born at Paris, 22d April 1766. Her full name was Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, and she was the only child of Necker and his irreproachable but colourless wife, who as Suzanne Curchod had loved the young historian Gibbon at Lausanne. Germaine was an extraordinarily precocious child, figured at receptions at eleven, and grew up in an atmosphere of admiration. She ever loved and respected her mother, but her father throughout life she loved on this side idolatry. Rousseau, Clarissa, and Werther were her first idols, she was steeped in the sensibility of the age, and already in her girlhood she wrote romantic comedies, tragedies, novels, essays, and one book which has lived, Lettres sur Rousseau (1789). She was fifteen when her father was dismissed from office for publishing his famous Compte Rendu, and withdrew into retirement, carrying with him the admiration of the whole of France. A great marriage was desired for the young heiress, and it seems certain that William Pitt on his visit to the Continent in 1783 was a suitor for her hand, and one favoured especially by her mother, although displeasing to herself. At length after long negotiations she married on January 14, 1786, the Baron de Staël-Holstein, whom Gustavus III. of Sweden pledged himself to retain as his ambassador at Paris. He was drowned in debt, and seventeen years her senior, but proved an inoffensive and easy husband. She bore him two sons (1790 and 1792) and a daughter (1797), but to protect her fortune separated formally from him in 1798, although she hastened dutifully to his bedside when he died four years later. The deepest feeling of her heart was a woman's craving for love, and those who can read between the lines of Delphine (1802)—the real romance of her life—will understand how little she had realised her youthful dream in marriage. But hardly less deep within her heart was the desire to shine and to please, and this she gratified to the full as a society-queen in the brilliant world of the Paris of her day. She lacked the special charm of beauty, she was careless of dress, impulsive and abrupt in manners, but her vast capacity for enthusiasm and the passionate intensity of her affections gave force and colour to her rich and versatile character, and combined to form a personality whose influence was irresistible. Society and conversation were a necessity of her nature, and called forth from the depths of her heart that flowing impromptu eloquence that subdued all hearers into admiration. The simplicity and directness of her thought was no less remarkable than its impetuosity and force, and words and ideas flowed from her lips in a kind of glorified improvisation that suggested at once the exalted inspiration of the prophet, the refined sensibility of the woman, and the clear understanding of the thinker. 'Were I queen,' said Madame de Tessé, 'I would order Madame de Staël to talk to me for ever.'
She shone brilliant and solitary in Paris, but many envious enemies—her father's before her own—embittered her triumph. Meanwhile the dawn of revolution promised to open up new horizons for France, but events moved quickly to their inevitable end, and Necker's elevation and unregretted fall but hastened on the dénouement of the tragedy. She mistrusted Mirabeau, and saw with sinking heart the ruin of the monarchy, but only quitted Paris for Coppet at the last moment, in September 1792. Indeed she risked her own life with characteristic unselfishness to save some of her friends, and only fled when it was impossible longer to remain. From Coppet she went to England, where at Mickleham in Surrey she was surrounded by Narbonne, Talleyrand, Montmorency, Lally, and Malouet, and cast her unfailing spell over that warm-hearted little prude Fanny Burney. Even here, victim of the Revolution as she was, Necker's daughter was shunned by the royalist exiles; still with all her mortifications she acknowledged that she owed to England 'four months of happiness saved from the shipwreck of life.' She joined her husband at Coppet in May 1793, and launched into the world her Réflexions sur le Procès de la Reine in the vain hope to save the head of Marie Antoinette. The Terror literally crushed her sympathetic heart, and all work became for a time impossible. Her mother died in May 1794; in September of the same year she found some consolation in a new friendship with Benjamin Constant, which formed an epoch in the lives of both. In May 1795 she returned to Paris, where her husband had re-established him- self as ambassador. She prepared for a political rôle by her Réflexions sur la Paix intérieure (1795), and published some of the novels of her youth, with an Essai sur les Fictions, but the Directory found her inconvenient as a citizen of Paris, and she was advised to return to Coppet in December. Her book De l'Influence des Passions appeared in the autumn of 1796; the chapters on ambition and suicide are forced and feeble; those on woman's love, unsatisfied, misunderstood, betray the living heart. She was allowed to return to Paris in April 1797. The young conqueror, Bonaparte, overawed her with a vague presentiment of fear. He disliked clever women, and received her friendly advances with such studied coldness that their mutual feelings soon turned to hatred. In April 1800 she published her famous book De la Littérature considérée dans ses Rapports avec les Institutions sociales—a thesis of 600 pages on that perfectibility of the human mind which finds its consecration in the liberty guaranteed by republican institutions.
She returned again to Paris in March 1802, when her salon was more brilliant than ever. Here the vulgarity and charlatanism of the Napoleonic régime were heartily laughed at, but at length the epigrams of Constant, her own friendship with disaffected men like Moreau and Bernadotte, and last of all the appearance of Necker's Dernières Vues de Politique et de Finances exhausted the patience of Napoleon. And now commenced that ten years' duel between Cæsar and a single woman of genius, which drew towards her the pity and admiration of the world. If she does pose somewhat too complacently throughout as the victim of a tragedy, and if there is still something of theatrical exaltation in her exile's despair, it cannot be denied that Napoleon belittled himself by his malignant and spiteful persecution. Already in 1802 her friends fell off from her under Napoleon's displeasure, and in the autumn of 1803 she received orders to keep forty leagues from Paris. Her husband had died in May 1802, and she was now free to marry Constant, but she determined not to convert a slave into a master, and in December 1803 set out with her children for Weimar. Schiller received her with warmth, but Goethe paid a more unwilling homage. She dazzled the whole court with the extraordinary volubility and force of her ideas, yet even the generous Schiller breathed a sigh of relief when she departed for Berlin. Here she made acquaintance with the erudite August Schlegel, afterwards to be added to the circle of intimates at Coppet to the displeasure of Sismoudi, Bonstetten, and the rest. She next turned her steps towards Vienna, but on the way learned of her father's death, and at once returned to Coppet, her heart weighed down under the deepest grief of her life. She found relief during the spring in writing the sincere and touching eulogy, Du Caractère de M. Necker et de sa Vie privée. Then she set out for Italy accompanied by Schlegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Bonstetten, and returned to Coppet in June 1805 to write Corinne, a romance unfolded in a journal of travel mingled with meditations on history, the heroine again herself, exalted indeed, but recognisable down to close personal traits. It at once brought her a European fame, and it revealed to Frenchmen all the mystery and charm of Italy.
She visited Germany again in the end of 1807, thought for a moment of travelling in America, and about this time began to turn for consolation to religion, or at least to what the Duc Victor de Broglie terms with a happy and pious vagueness, 'un latitudinariste piétisme.' Her famous book De l'Allemagne was finished in 1810, submitted to the established censorship, and then entrusted to the same publisher who had printed Corinne. To see it through the press she established herself at Chaumont, and ten thousand copies had already been struck off when the whole was seized by Savary and destroyed, and herself ordered instantly to Coppet. It was the crowning act of Napoleon's malignity, but fortunately her son had preserved the manuscript, and at length the work was safely published by John Murray at London in 1813. But her exile had now become a bitter reality, and she found herself encompassed with spies, the post-masters between Coppet and Geneva forbidden to supply her with horses, and her faithful friends, Montmorency, Schlegel, Madame Récamier, and others exiled or imprisoned for visiting her. Overwhelmed with despair, she escaped secretly to Berne, and thence made her way through Innsbruck, Vienna, and Galicia to Russia, then to St Petersburg and Stockholm, and finally in June 1813 to London. The progress of the enemy of Napoleon through the northern capitals was a continuous triumph, and in England she found herself the object of an unbounded admiration that reached its climax in the enthusiasm which followed the publication of De l'Allemagne, the most finished of all her works. She made acquaintance with Lord Grey, Lord Lansdowne, Sir James Mackintosh, Lord Holland, Canning, Wilberforce, and Byron. The last, while acknowledging his admiration for the writer, has not spared some characteristic sneers against the woman. The autumn of 1814 found her again at Paris. She was received with the utmost cordiality by Louis XVIII., but it sickened her patriotic heart to see that French freedom was the work of strangers whose foreign uniforms darkened the streets of Paris. Her old friends flocked to her salon; Madame Récamier, Madame de Krüdener, and Benjamin Constant, already twice married, disillusioned, and forty-eight years old, but still in love with her, although her own feeling had long subsided into quiet affection; even the time-serving Talleyrand, who had so long forgotten his early friendship, was generously forgiven. She returned for the summer to Coppet, but spent the winter of 1814-15 again at Paris, where the two millions which Necker had left in the Treasury was honourably paid back to her. The escape of Napoleon from Elba drove her hurriedly from Paris, and after Waterloo she did not return to witness the humiliation of the second occupation. She spent the winter in Italy for the sake of the health of Albert de Rocca, whom she had met about the end of 1810 at Geneva, and married secretly, though twenty-one years his senior, in the beginning of 1811. Her daughter Albertine married the Duc Victor de Broglie in February 1816. Her own health now began to give way, but she forgot her sufferings in the devoted affection of her husband, himself in enfeebled health and destined for an early grave. She died without pain on the morning of 14th July 1817, and was buried at her father's feet at Coppet. Her surviving son and daughter made public the marriage with Rocca, and received as a brother the son she had borne him. They published with pious care in 1818 her unfinished Considérations sur la Révolution Française, which Saint-Beuve thought her finest work, and in 1821 the Dix Années d'Exil.
A complete edition of her works was issued by her son, the Baron Auguste de Staël (17 vols. 1820-21), with a Notice by her cousin, Madame Necker de Saussure.
Madame de Staël has not maintained the place unanimously given her by her contemporaries and her immediate posterity, but she still remains as a woman and a writer a unique phenomenon in the history of letters. She had little creative power, was careless of style, and was steeped in a sensibility long since happily forgotten; but her remarkable personality can never lose its attraction, and her work remains entire in its influence on the one side on Royer-Collard, Guizot, and the Doctrinaires, and on the other on Lamartine and the whole Romantic movement in France. She has given an endless subject to the ablest critics of France from her own day down to Sainte-Beuve, who says in one of his latest writings (1862), 'she has been one of the idols of my youth, and that idolatry I have not abjured.'
See the elaborate Lives by Stevens (2 vols. Lond. 1880), Lady Blennerhassett (3 vols. Berl. 1887-89; Eng. trans. 3 vols. 1889), and the shorter studies by Bella Duffy (1887) and Albert Sorel (1890; Eng. trans. 1892). See also Gérard, Lettres inédites et souvenirs biographiques de Mad. Récamier et de Mad. de Staël (1868), and the Comte d'Haussonville's book, Le Salon de Madame Necker (2 vols. 1882; Eng. trans. 1882). Criticisms will be found in Sainte-Beuve's Portraits de Femmes, and in the collected studies of Caro, Scherer, Brunetière, &c. Her husband's Correspondance diplomatique was published at Paris in 1881.—The famous estate of Coppet, bequeathed by Necker to Madame de Staël, and lastly the property of her granddaughter, Madame d'Haussonville, sister of the Duc de Broglie, was sold by her in 1880.