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Richard Whatmore, Germaine de Staël: A Political Portrait, French History, Volume 31, Issue 2, 1 June 2017, Pages 250–251, https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/crx030
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Pity Madame de Staël. First, the republican politics that she fervently embraced through the 1790s with her lover Benjamin Constant were from the first associated with terror, violence, electoral manipulation and a permanent state of political crisis. Second, the man she and Constant hoped might save the republic, Napoleon Bonaparte, became a tyrant, putting an end to the sovereignty of the people and in de Staël’s view to the revolution, and conducting a personal vendetta against de Staël that resulted in her fearing assassination and living in exile in Switzerland for almost ten years. Third, the father she venerated as the greatest living sage in politics, Jacques Necker, was attacked mercilessly as a fool of a man and a minister serving Louis XIV, failing to understand the nature of the French Revolution, and allowing the monarchy to fall by putting a personal need to justify himself, and his reputation for financial probity, above the need to maintain the state. All of this meant that de Staël’s politics faced the greatest of challenges, that of reinvention in altered circumstances, and in conditions where the goals of politics were being sharply narrowed—from being capable of creating a better world of happiness for all to bringing peace and avoiding extremism. One issue that bedevilled de Staël after 1798 was whether the pursuit of a more aspirational politics, introducing rights and liberties for all, had resulted in the brutality and instability that suddenly made reform a dirty word for the generation that survived into the new century.
