Staël, Romanticism and Revolution

Two centuries of sexism have hidden Germaine de Staël’s place in international history. Straddling the divides of the French Revolution, Napoleonic Europe, emergent nationalism, and European Romanticism, and playing pivotal roles in those movements, she was also a friend of Byron, Thomas Jefferson, and Tsar Alexander. Extensive archival research and a complete contextual overview of Staël’s writings here restore Staël’s canonical status as political philosopher, historian, European Romantic theorist, and revolutionary. While the term stateswoman is not commonly used, it describes Staël aptly, acting as she necessarily did through men around her. The brilliant game of masks and proxies imposed on her by patriarchy is detailed here, alongside her unending fight for the oppressed, from the nations of Napoleon’s subjugated Europe to the victims of the Atlantic slave trade. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

John Claiborne Isbell is a scholar, educator, and poet. He has published in French and English on Staël and on European Romanticism, starting in 1994 with The Birth of European Romanticism: Truth and Propaganda in Staël’s “De l’Allemagne” (Cambridge University Press). His most recent monograph is An Outline of Romanticism in the West (2022).