Anne Louise Germaine de Stael-Holstein (22 April 1766-14 July 1817) was a French philosopher and the daughter of Jacques Necker.
Biography[]
Anne Louise Germaine Necker was born in Paris, France in 1766, the daughter of Swiss banker Jacques Necker. She married Swedish attache Baron Erik Magnus Stael von Holstein in 1786 when she was 19 and her husband 37, but neither spouse had much affection for the other. She held a salon in the Swedish embassy during the French Revolution, and she met Charles de Talleyrand, Louis de Narbonne-Lara (whom she took as a lover), Antoine Barnave, Charles Lameth, Alexandre-Theodore-Victor de Lameth, Stanislas Marie Adelaide de Clermont-Tonnerre, Pierre Victor de Malouet, Abbe Delille, Thomas Jefferson, Gouverneur Morris, Paul Barras, and the Marquis de Condorcet. She fled Paris during the September Massacres of 1792 and moved to Switzerland, and she later visited England and was impregnated by Narbonne while there. She returned to Switzerland in the summer of 1793 after Narbonne cooled towards her, and she published a defense of Marie Antoinette's character. De Stael also advocated for a constitutional monarchy in the English model. In 1795, she returned to Paris and took Benjamin Constant as her lover. She was mistrusted by both the left and right due to her moderate views, but she engineered Talleyrand's appointment as Foreign Minister. She later befriended Juliette Recamier, and she became rivals with Napoleon due to his invasion of Switzerland in 1798. In 1800, Napoleon exiled Constant, and Stael opposed Napoleon during his consulate and his reign as Emperor; Napoleon, in turn, belittled her as a writer because she was a woman. In 1803, she was exield from Paris and left for Germany, and she rejoined Constant in Auxerre, Rouen, and Aubergenville. She returend to France in 1810 and published a book about German culture and Romanticism, only for Napoleon to destroy its 10,000 copies due to its introduction of foreign ideas to France. In 1811, she became engaged to marry the veteran Albert Jean Michel de Rocca, whom she married in 1816. In 1812, she visited Russia as Napoleon invaded the country, and she met twice with Czar Alexander I of Russia. She returned to Paris in May 1814 after the Bourbon Restoration, but she fell out with Constant over his approval of Napoleon's return in 1815 and went into exile in Coppet before returning to Paris in 1816. She died in 1817, converting to Catholicism on her deathbed.