In the century of nationalism, the House of Habsburg ruled over a vast territory in East Central Europe. Second only to Russia in size on the European continent, the Habsburg lands stretched from the Alps to the foothills of the eastern Carpathians and from the shores of the Adriatic to the Sudetes mountain range on the border with Saxony. The core of this territory in the Alps, corresponding roughly to what is today Austria and Slovenia, had been ruled by the Habsburgs from the High Middle Ages. In 1526, the Habsburgs made a decisive step to become East Central Europe’s leading power by acquiring the Bohemian and the Hungarian crowns. After one and a half centuries of warfare against the Ottoman Empire, the long eighteenth century witnessed the Habsburgs’ decisive eastern expansion. First, at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they reconquered central Hungary and Transylvania from the Ottomans.

This chapter offers a critical analysis of how scholars have interpreted the relationship between eighteenth-century cultural practice and revolutionary politics, circa 1760 to 1825. The chapter first surveys and classifies eighteenth century cultural practice, identifying three main types: the social arts, practices of everyday life, and fine arts. The bulk of the essay then reflects on three major paradigms for interpreting how these forms of culture interacted with revolutionary politics. The dominant approach, exemplified by literature on the “bourgeois public sphere,” argues that eighteenth-century culture prefigured or lay the groundwork for revolutionary politics. Other scholars, particularly those working on the fine arts in the revolutionary era, have emphasized how cultural practices were transformed by revolutionary politics. A third, newer approach emphasizes the autonomy of cultural practice. Scholars working within this paradigm argue that cultural change was itself a form of revolution and that culture acted as an independent container for new political practices during the revolutionary era. This paradigm points the way to a broader, more inclusive account of revolution in this period. The essay covers the historiographies of eighteenth-century culture and revolutionary politics in North America, Europe (especially France and the Netherlands), and Latin America (especially Peru).

The Introduction begins by outlining the generative tension of the early modern public sphere: debate and defamation, free speech and false news, went hand in hand. Libels were often vicious and violent. Yet they were also essential to England’s emerging media ecosystem. Drawing from public sphere theory, the first main section conceptualizes the viral circulation of libels across speech, manuscript, print, and performance; and it makes the case that theater – urban and provincial, amateur and professional alike – was central to their multimedia careers. The next section follows the intertwined semantic, cultural, and legal histories of libel from the 1550s to the early 1600s. In the process, it identifies a clear and enduring paradigm of libel: as anonymous, extralegal accusation. The third section returns to theater history, tracing the same logic to the core of efforts to regulate the stage. After surveying the relevant scholarship on dramatic censorship, it pins the theater’s proximity to libeling on the vexed question of audience interpretation. The Introduction finally locates the late Elizabethan scenes of libel in the context of the anxious years of the long 1590s (1588–1603).

The epilogue situates the foregoing chapters in a longer theater history, tracing two early Stuart scenes of libel – in the anonymous Nobody and Somebody (c.1605) and Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor (1626) – to their late Elizabethan roots. In Nobody and Somebody, the titular characters reenact in a comic vein Heywood’s story of Jane Shore and Richard III from Edward IV. At once a folk hero and a figure for libel, Nobody plays on his constitutive anonymity to affiliate himself with the same seditious, defamatory talk of which he is falsely accused. The Roman Actor likewise revises the paradigm of libel formulated by its dramatic predecessor, in this case Jonson’s Poetaster. In the play’s metatheatrical opening scenes, the actor Paris rehearses Jonsonian arguments to vindicate himself from accusations of libel leveled by the corrupt tribune and spy, Aretinus. Yet the rest of Massinger’s play belies Paris’s defense of playing, laying bare the unresolved ironies at the heart of Jonson’s satirical project. Finally, the epilogue returns in closing to the constitutive tensions – between protest and threat, free speech and false news – that animated the early modern public sphere.

The foundations of the separation of powers principle and those of antitrust present an actual and renewed interest, as we are currently witnessing a resurgence of non-economic concerns in the antitrust literature. This observation especially relates to the United States, but many issues raised in this country are also relevant in other jurisdictions. Several key provisions of antitrust national laws or European treaties are rather vague, leaving broad room for interpretation, and have remained unchanged in substance for decades, which may open a connection between the political content of antitrust viewed historically and prospectively; to a certain extent, the ball is now in the court of agencies and courts. The concentration of power in the digital era constitutes the starting point of the analysis, which continues with the observation that some digital platforms have significant political power and ends with the idea that such platforms have become important or even fundamental parts of the digital infrastructure of democracy.

This chapter focuses on Charles Reznikoff’s 1934 version of his long poem Testimony, which consists almost entirely of collaged-together excerpts from nineteenth-century trial transcripts. The chapter proposes that Testimony utilizes these materials to suggest a link between past and present violence and social fragmentation, rejecting narratives of progress associated with the modern American nation and tacitly embracing the “debunking” imperative animating the work of interwar historians such as Caroline Ware. Reznikoff’s text is organized around the spectacle of the body in pain as a galvanizing scene within the modern public sphere, where public affect and social belonging were generated through collective acts of witnessing (and often perpetrating) violence and disaster. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the final subsection of Testimony, titled “Depression,” draws its subject matter from the aftermath of the “Depression” of 1873, as the text proposes this earlier period as a parallel to the crisis of the 1930s. In recalling this earlier period, the chapter claims further, Testimony proposes a negative vision of economic and technological modernity by revealing its human collateral, as well as the cyclical nature of modern social and economic crisis.

Chapter 13 reviews Staël’s contributions to her second husband John Rocca’s memoirs of the Peninsular War. When we consider the new Europe of nations that Staël bequeaths us, Romantic Spain seems striking in its absence. Her article “Camoëns” of winter 1811 has more on exiled genius than on Iberia; in Delphine, 1802, Léonce and the family of his Spanish mother are proud and devout to excess; and finally, the description in De la littérature (1800) of Spain’s inability, in contrast to Italy, to fuse the Arab South and the Christian North – a sterility born of priests and despotism – is fundamental for the 1813 debates of Staël, Schlegel, and Sismondi (DL 164–166). But here stands proof that she revised the war memoirs of her husband Rocca to show a popular struggle that checkmated Napoleon’s troops.

Staël with Delphine in 1802 split Paris into two camps, with conflicting views of art, politics, religion, ethics, and the place of women in society; the quarrel also reached Britain, Germany, and the Alps. Chapter 7 aims to situate several fine studies of the novel’s politics and reception within the broad continuum of a struggle in the field of power over textual meaning and the future of France, fought between Staël’s liberal camp and the camp of Bonaparte – who exiled her from France to end their argument. During this debate, Staël drafted three things – a new preface for Delphine, reflections on the novel’s moral purpose, and a less controversial ending – then chose not to publish them; so, we are looking in a sense at a revision that never happened. Delphine’s original suicide, deleted in the revised manuscript ending, offers a microcosm of this whole debate and will be our focus.

Chapter 11 demonstrates that De l’Allemagne’s surviving 1810 texts are not identical, as had been thought. We have texts from all three proof runs. In Vienna sits a copy of the 1810 edition; the censors’ proof and the copy‑text for 1813 subsist. This makes a mockery of Napoleon’s efforts to obliterate the book, allowing a peek at the “lost” 1810 edition and tracing a remarkable interplay between four conflicting pulls on the author. Her desires to clarify imprecise or obscure passages, and to use key words from elsewhere in De l’Allemagne, confront her desires to be faithful to her sources and to the facts. Exerting its own pull on this interplay is the fierce pressure on Staël to tone down her polemic. These forced revisions fall in with her book’s slide from politics into literary history, which for two centuries now has dimmed the ringing attack on tyranny that caused its pulping.

Chapter 4 proposes answers to the problem facing the friends of liberty when Rousseau’s social contract succumbed beneath the Terror. First, Rousseau in Le Contrat social identifies liberty with citizens’ active participation in the polis or res publica. Jacobin discourse returns often to this definition. Second, as early as the Consulat, Constant opposes this ancient and public liberty, now discredited by the Terror, to the modern private liberty he celebrates: These “positive and negative” liberties have since become a touchstone of modern liberalism. As it happens, this distinction already appears in Staël’s neglected political treatises and broadsides written under the Convention and the Directoire, as shown here. Third, this “negative liberty” of classical liberalism, whose weaknesses we begin to underline today, presents a problem for Staël as a woman that was necessarily less crucial to her friend, a new problem to which her work again offers a solution.

Chapter 6 reviews De la littérature. When Staël published this work, she had spent the previous decade growing older alongside the French Revolution, but the coup of 18 Brumaire had just ushered in the Consulat: Napoleon’s star was on the rise. This was not the most obvious time for an ex-minister for war to become a literary historian. Why then did Staël choose this juncture to write and publish her 400-page tractatus? Though we could descend into the weeds of Staël’s many literary details, we would there risk succumbing to a range of propagandist forces. Genevan, liberal, female, and Protestant, Staël has faced two centuries of critics eager to sideline or indeed privatize her achievements, presenting them as tangential to the public shaping of what it means to be French. This chapter argues that Staël’s 1800 work is engagé and focused on saving the Revolution if not the Republic.

Staël responded to the Terror with De l’influence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des nations. Chapter 5 has two parts. First, I review Staël’s use of her sources: her private life, France’s public Revolution, and the texts of the moral philosophers. Cathartic for herself as a woman, Staël’s book is also a public stand on the Terror and a manifesto for the French Republic’s future. It draws on a startling range of texts, from Cicero through Condorcet. These sources reveal above all what Staël does not do; she systematically transforms them, reading, then flouting, two millennia of passion theory to construct her own new moral vision. Second, I review what Staël offers the French Republic: a way out of ping-pong coups d’état by grounding the Directoire in coalition and moral principle, precisely the vision of her partner Constant’s simultaneous brochures, on which we know she quietly collaborated.

Chapter 9 argues that Staël saw a Faustian bargain in Corinne ou l’Italie, took it, and paid the price; its triumphs and failures thus stand or fall together. What Staël gained was mythic power; what she lost was the ability to control its fate. Corinne’s political impact in Europe and America, standing as it does at the birth of modern nationalism, is both real and unquantifiable – witness the coinage nationalité, part of the larger impact of Staël’s ideas on national genius, reflected in Blackwood’s praise of her in 1818 as the creator of the science of nations. The novel’s esthetic impact on a century of readers is both fascinating and somewhat easier to assess, an invitation to future study already made in 1825 by Stendhal in a remark from Racine et Shakespeare: “Je ne vois réellement que Corinne qui ait acquis une gloire impérissable sans se modeler sur les anciens.”

Chapter 1 argues that Staël only chose art and Europe when banned by men from politics and France. The “romantic heroine” her life and works handed to posterity was a fallback position, used by a woman exiled from the revolutionary stage. Staël’s complete works make this clear, splitting into four epochs: Old Regime, Revolution, Consulat and Empire, and Restoration. They are retraced here.

Chapter 8 reviews Staël’s Manuscrits de M. Necker. At Staël’s death, her partner Constant called this memoir of her father his favorite Staël text; and since Necker was France’s chief minister when the Bastille fell, the memoir seems ripe for study. Startling, then, that a recent 2,700-item survey of Staël criticism lists one single review, from 1805, while in 2004, Cahier staëlien 55, which is dedicated to Necker, contains no real mention of his daughter’s text. This chapter addresses this blind spot, tackling three questions: where the text fits in our knowledge of Staël and Necker; what pressures are strong enough to render a major text like this invisible; and what our blindness has cost us.

The traditional narrative of the Assemblée législative, 1791–1792, offers us an inexplicable couple: an idéologue Madame de Staël combined with a failed Brumairian Narbonne, a society thinker and the plotter of a coup. “Quelle gloire pour Mme de Staël et quel plaisir pour elle,” wrote the queen when Narbonne became Minister for War, “d’avoir ainsi toute l’armée [...] à elle!” The queen saw here a salon intrigue, and historians have repeated this old topos of the weak but authoritarian man and his intriguing mistress. But analyzing the couple’s writings, as Chapter 3 does, offers the means to grow beyond this legend of caprice and iron fist. We will find the trace of a team effort divided between two professionals, and a progressive program for which Staël appears to have been the inspiration, if not the author.

Chapter 16 concerns national, public credit, with two axes. First, it argues that Staël’s theory of credit is richer than that of the tyrants, from Convention to Empire, who exiled the woman they owed two million francs. She calls such tyranny myopic, like building an economy on theft; modern states require public credit. Second, later history again denied Staël credit, exiling her from their all-male Revolution canon by seeing women’s chatter where her dialectic stood. This dialectic is retraced throughout Staël’s works but primarily in her posthumous Considérations sur la Révolution française.

Chapter 2 traces the balancing or buffeting of our author between private and public spheres, beneath the burning sky of the Revolution. It follows the appearance of her first published work, the Lettres sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in granular detail, amid the highly charged context of 1788–1789, as the French Revolution began; it then traces the publication in context of her story Zulma and her Recueil de morceaux détachés, in 1794–1795, arguing for a radical redating of several pieces in this collection.