Anne-Louise Germaine de Staël 22 April 1766 – 14 July 1817

Born in Paris in 1766, Anne-Louise Germaine Necker was the only child of Jacques Necker, Finance Minister under Louis XVI, and Suzanne Curchod Necker, a notable salonnière.

The Neckers, both born in Switzerland, were protestant.

A well-read woman and a strong believer in the ideas of her countryman Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mme Necker ensured her daughter had a strong education. Young Germaine was a permanent fixture in her mother's salon where she carried on conversations with great thinkers like Diderot, Buffon, Grimm, LaHarpe, Marmontel, and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre.

La Liseuse by Jean-Honoré Fragonard

In January 1786, at the age of twenty, after several lengthy, failed courtships, Germaine married a man seventeen years her elder, Erik Magnus Staël von Holstein. Erik was the Swedish ambassador to France.

The Baron Staël von Holstein

Germaine and Erik's marriage would not be a happy one. They rarely spent time together, and Germaine had several very public love affairs. They would separate in 1800.

Nevertheless, marriage brought Germaine several sources of happiness.

First, it brought her four children (although her husband is thought to be the father only of the first) who she adored: Gustavine (1787-1789), Auguste (1790-1827), Albert (1792-1813), and Albertine (1797-1838).

Mme de Staël et sa fille by Marguerite Gérard

Secondly, her status as a married woman allowed Germaine the freedom to openly pursue study and writing.

Over the next thirty years, Germaine would write in several different genres and her works would know great success both in France and internationally.

Germaine's writings would earn her the ire of Napoléon, who exiled her from France in 1803.

Forced to leave Paris, she sought refuge with her father, who had fled France during the Revolution, at the family's château in Coppet, Switzerland.

There, she would begin an informal group of some of the greatest minds in Europe - the "Groupe de Coppet". Members of this circle included Benjamin Constant, Charles de Villers, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Chateaubriand, Friedrich Schlegel, Victor de Broglie, Auguste de Prusse, Juliette Récamier, and George Gordon Byron amongst many others.

The Château de Coppet

Having been widowed in 1802, she remarried in 1811. Her second husband, Albert de Rocca, was a French army lieutenant who was twenty-two years her junior. Germaine and Albert had one child together, a son named Louis-Alphonse Rocca (1812-1838).

In 1814, after Napoléon's exile to Elba, Germaine was able to return to Paris. In increasingly failing health, she gave up writing.

On July 14, 1817, she died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Paris. She is buried next to her parents at Coppet.

Created with images by tpsdave - "fragonard art artistic"

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