Akademik

(1766–1817)

French writer. Mme de Staël was the daughter of the financier Jacques Necker, and became one of the great salonistes, whose political, philosophical, and literary career was closely entwined with Romanticism . She was exiled after her father's downfall in the French revolution, and again in 1804 by Napoleon, returning to Paris in 1814. Her principal philosophical work was De l’influence des passions sur le bonheur des individuels et des nations (1796, trs. as A Treatise on the Influence of the Passions on the Happiness of Individuals and of Nations, 1798), in which she develops the theme of the inseparable connection between thought and feeling. Her De l’Allemagne (‘On Germany’, 1813, published in London) was an important instrument for introducing German Romanticism to the French and the English.