Germaine de Staël, the forgotten liberal

As a daughter of the Enlightenment, Germaine de Staël naturally embraced the liberal discourse. But she developed it by associating it with the idea of the nation, a reflection of the Romanticism of the time, which liberalism had come to tame with the concept of the nation-state.

Not that Germaine de Staël, Jacques Necker's daughter, doesn't have an assured place in the pantheon of European liberalism. Her links with Benjamin Constant, her intellectual influence from her refuge in Coppet, and her hostility to Bonaparte are well known, and had guaranteed her a favorable reputation among liberals. His posterity, however, lay more in the fame of his mind, his relentless defense of his father's revered name, his novel Corinne and eventually his De l'Allemagne.

Although we know that Constant's works owed a great deal to his mistress, it was difficult to really measure her influence, as she was so much a part of his life.