Germaine de Staël
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The Congress of Vienna in 1815 had an indisputable and decisive influence on the Germans' decline. Had this assembly never taken place, National Socialism would probably have never come into being. Never had the Germans been closer to conducting a republican revolution on the American model, and never had they reached a higher moral level, than they were during the 1812-15 Wars of Liberation. These wars were not merely a republican uprising against Napoleon's imperialist occupation of the greater part of Germany; above all else, they were spearheaded by a flourishing constitutional movement.
The movement was led, of course, by the Prussian reformers vom Stein, Humboldt, and Scharnhorst, but it drew its vitality from the countless common citizens who were filled with patriotism and inspired by Schiller's dramas and other republican writings. Even at the Vienna Congress itself, vom Stein still cherished hopes that the negotiations would result in a united, sovereign German nation. But that was precisely what the international oligarchy conspired to prevent. With the intrigues and machinations of the English, French, Venetians, the Russian nobility, and especially the wretched Metternich (the man whom, not surprisingly, Henry Kissinger admires the most) arrayed against them, the German republicans did not stand a chance. Cloaked in hypocritical fundamentalism, the Holy Alliance snuffed out each and every shining idea, introducing instead an era of brutal oppression and surveillance. The German population, unable to understand why their heroic and victorious struggle against Napoleon had not led to a nation-state, lapsed to an ever greater degree into an other-worldly Romanticism during the years following the Restoration, drifting later on into outright demoralization. It is only from this standpoint that the influence wielded by Nietzsche and the other demagogues of cultural pessimism becomes comprehensible.....
The Vienna Congress marked the end of republican turmoil in Germany. The oligarchy of England, Russia, France, Switzerland, Venice, and Austria had regrouped their forces, and were determined to leave no openings for the German negotiator, vom Stein. Following 1815, and with a vengeance in the wake of the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819, there began a long phase of gloomy reaction, with devastating effects on the population. Most citizens were unable to reconstruct in their minds precisely why and how they had been robbed of the fruits of their struggle. As the bigoted narrowness of the Holy Alliance increasingly made itself felt, the clear mind of the world citizen and patriot shrank into the limited purview of the Burschenschaften (student dueling societies) and maudlin German chauvinism. Clear conceptions yielded to romantic Schwarmerei, and the disappointed hopes lapsed into latent cultural pessimism.
This paradigm shift from classicism to Romanticism, however, was no more a "sociological phenomenon" than was West Germany's turn from a belief in progress during the "economic miracle" of the 1960s, to the 1970s' zero-growth ideology and hatred of technology. The subversion, sabotage, and final defeat of the hopeful republican freedom movement at the start of the nineteenth century was the result of the same shift; and all the weapons directed against the humanist conception of man can be summed up under one modern concept: the "Conservative Revolution."...
Romanticism was consciously promoted by the European oligarchy as a movement which advocated the total rejection of reason and humanism, upon which Weimar classicism was based. One of the oligarchy's most influential agents, who supported the young Romantics with body and soul, was Madame de Stael, daughter of the Swiss banker Jacques Necker, who as French finance minister had ruined France for the sake of the Swiss banks. Heinrich Heine has pointedly described how Madame de Stael and her circles were angered that the "republican" culture found in the Weimar classics, in musical soirees at home, or in the great theater houses had begun to spread through large portions of the population. In a blue rage, she attempted to regain her own control of culture by luring young artists into her own salon. These recruits threw themselves into action with the same abandon as today's "beautiful people" or the nobility's "Jet set." Not only did this romantic movement produce the organized terrorism of Giuseppe Mazzini's "Young Europe," but it also spawned the tendency stretching from the turn-of-the-century youth movement to today's counterculture "alternative" movement, along with its ideologues Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, Alfred Rosenberg, and so forth. The Nazis too drank out of this "alternative" trough.....
The most devastating oligarchical attack on the republican spirit, however, was led by the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel in Berlin, who is proven by "check-stubs" to have been a paid agent of Austria's Metternich against the Prussian state, and was therefore working directly for the sinister reaction of the Holy Alliance. It is a sad commentary on the level of our universities, that the holy aura surrounding Hegel has remained intact down to the present day.
When one considers that Hegel finished his Phenomenology of Mind in the year 1806, in the midst of the intellectual climate of the Weimar classics, we can only conclude that his ostensibly dialectical method was nothing but a Jesuitical distortion of the Socratic method so gloriously evident in the dramas of Friedrich Schiller.Hegel's idea of the world-historical individual was indeed drawn from the classics; his "philosopher kings" or "philosophical minds," however, tended to degenerate into mere power-mongers (Napoleon, for Hegel, was the World Spirit on horseback!), and were much closer to the master-race concept of Nietzsche and Hitler. Worst of all, toward the end of his teaching career Hegel not only engaged in the corrupt practice of blocking or spoiling the studies of many young and hopeful students, but also -- in his Philosophy of Right -- he provided the perfect justification for the totalitarian state, which served as source material for Europe's reactionary oligarchical circles, as it did later for the Third Reich.
We could name many more figures and fields which were involved in the Conservative Revolution's attempt to reshape the population's conscious values. In all these cases it can be proven, often in great detail, that these were not "sociological phenomena" or mysterious transformations in the Zeitgeist, but were developments initiated or financed by the oligarchy.
In spite of passing rivalries, the oligarchy's efforts after 1815 were closely coordinated, and they often succeeded in setting into motion movements which crossed national borders, such as Young Europe and the Anthroposophist movement. The direct successors of these movements today are tied to the activities of such supranational institutions as the Trilateral Commission, the Club of Rome, and the Aspen Institute.
The republicans, who could look back upon the American Revolution as their proudest victory, were seriously weakened following 1815 and were later eliminated as a political force. At best, republicans worked on as dispersed, humanistically inclined individuals, who had lost consciousness of the great historical weight of their task. Such individuals reacted to humanist culture solely on the basis of their own personal moral disposition.
While Hegel was providing the totalitarian state with a frightening ideological justification, pointing the way to the Nazis' "everything is permitted" rule, Romanticism was at the same time softening up the general population. The Holy Alliance slowly but surely stifled Germany's soul, and encouraged the emergence of such romantic philosophers as Schopenhauer, who began to deny the power of reason. For Schopenhauer, egoism was the natural disposition of mankind, and life as such was not an adequate affirmation of life. Thus the republicans' cultural optimism yielded to an irrational, immoral pessimism.
The absolute height of Romanticism, or rather the nadir of general culture, where raving folly and emotional infantilism turned into aggressive mania, the welding point between the Romantic muddleheads and the Nazis -- this was the world of Nietzsche, whose works can only be described as the mind running amok.
This self-hating, joyless psychotic could not tolerate the idea of reason; he hated Socrates, Schiller, Beethoven, and Humboldt. In his confused writings he attempted, if incoherently, to rewrite history, emphasizing not the classical and Renaissance periods as the Weimar classics had done, but the Dark Ages, the dionysian and bacchanalian orgies, the dances of St. Vitus and the flagellants. He regarded the scientific mode of questioning as man's arch-enemy, just as the Greens do today. Everything the Nazis later made into reality was already lurking within Nietzsche's tormented brain, darting about with increasing frenzy: the volkisch idea, a deep hatred of industrial progress, the "biological world outlook" of "blood and soil," the idea of a master race, the mystically inspired hatred of Christianity, and its final and ultimate form, the Ecce Homo, where Nietzsche cries out: "Have I made myself clear? -- Dionysus against the Crucified .... "
Nietzsche, celebrated along with Dostoevsky as the prophet of the Conservative Revolution, was the spiritual pathfinder for the nihilism of the National Socialists and the existentialist philosophers.
-- The Hitler Book, edited by Helga Zepp-LaRouche
"Madame de Staël" by François Gérard (1810)
Born Anne-Louise Germaine Necker
22 April 1766
Paris, France
Died 14 July 1817 (aged 51)
Paris, France
Cause of death Cerebral hemorrhage
Nationality French
Notable work Delphine, Corinne, De l'Allemagne
Spouse(s) Erik Magnus Staël von Holstein (m. 1786; d. 1802)
Albert Jean Michel de Rocca (m. 1811)
School Romanticism
Main interests
French nationalism, representative government and constitutionalism
Notable ideas
Literary salons
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein (French: [stal]; née Necker; 22 April 1766 – 14 July 1817), commonly known as Madame de Staël, was a French woman of letters of Genevan origin whose lifetime overlapped with the events of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era. For many years she lived as an exile under the Reign of Terror and under Napoleonic persecution. Known as a witty and brilliant conversationalist, often dressed in flashy and revealing outfits, she participated actively in the political and intellectual life of her times. She was present at the first opening of the Estates General and at the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,[1] and witnessed the departure of the royal family from Versailles. Her intellectual collaboration with Benjamin Constant between 1795 and 1811 made them one of the most celebrated intellectual couples of their time. They discovered sooner than others the tyrannical character and designs of Napoleon.[2] In 1814 one of her contemporaries observed that "there are three great powers struggling against Napoleon for the soul of Europe: England, Russia, and Madame de Staël".[3] Her works, both novels and travel literature, with emphasis on passion, individuality and oppositional politics made their mark on European Romanticism. Personal freedom was evidently as important to her as abstract political liberties.[4]
Childhood
Germaine Necker by Carmontelle
Germaine (or Minette) was the only child of the prominent Genevan banker and statesman Jacques Necker, who was the Director-General of Finance under King Louis XVI of France. Her mother was Suzanne Curchod, also of Swiss birth, who hosted in Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin one of the most popular salons of Paris.[5] Mme Necker wanted to educate her daughter according to the principles of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and to endow her with the intellectual education and Calvinist discipline instilled in her by her pastor father.[6] On Friday she habitually brought Germaine as a young child to sit at her feet in her salon, where the guests took pleasure in stimulating the brilliant child. (Celebrities such as the Comte de Buffon, Jean-François Marmontel, Melchior Grimm, Edward Gibbon, the Abbé Raynal, and Jean-François de la Harpe, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Denis Diderot, and Jean d'Alembert were frequent visitors.) At the age of thirteen she read Montesquieu, Shakespeare, Rousseau and Dante.[7] This exposure occasioned a nervous breakdown in adolescence, but the seeds of a literary vocation had been sown.
According to Craiutu her father "Necker is remembered today for taking the unprecedented step in 1781 of making public the country’s budget, a novelty in an absolute monarchy where the state of finances had always been kept a secret."[8] Leading to his dismissal in May, the family eventually took up residence in 1784 at Château Coppet, an estate her father purchased on Lake Geneva. The family returned to the Paris region in 1785, and Mlle Necker continued to write miscellaneous works, including the three-act romantic drama Sophie (1786) and the five-act tragedy, Jeanne Grey (1787).
Marriage
The Swedish Ambassy, Hôtel de Ségur, later Hôtel de Salm-Dyck
At the age of eleven, she offered her mother to marry Edward Gibbon, so he would always be around. Being twenty Germaine's parents became impatient for her to marry a Protestant. In 1783 William Pitt the Younger and the Comte de Guibert, a cold-hearted fop of some talent, certainly paid her attention.[5] Finally a marriage was arranged with Baron Erik Magnus Staël von Holstein, an attaché of the Swedish legation to France. It took place on 14 January 1786 in the Swedish embassy at 97, Rue du Bac; Germaine was 20, her husband 37. On the whole, the marriage seems to have been acceptable to both parties, although neither seems to have had any or little affection for the other. The baron, a gambler, obtained great benefits as he was confirmed as lifetime ambassador to Paris, although his wife was almost certainly the more effective envoy.[9]
Revolutionary activities
The meeting of the Estates General on 5 May 1789 at Versailles
"Dix Août 1792. Siege et prise du Chateau des Tuileries": French soldiers and citizens storming the Tuileries to get the royal family and end the monarchy.
In 1788, she published Letters on the works and character of J.J. Rousseau.[10] This fervid panegyric, written for a limited number of friends - in which she accused his housekeeper Therese Levasseur having been unfaithful - she demonstrated evident talent, but little in the way of critical discernment. De Staël was at this time enthusiastic for a mixture of Rousseau's ideas about love and Montesquieu in politics. On 4 and 5 May 1789 she joined the meetings of the Estates-General in Versailles , where she met with the young Mathieu de Montmorency. Her father had instigated the assembling, doubling the number of deputies from the Third Estate. His address at the Estates-General was terribly miscalculated: his speech lasted for hours, and while those present expected a reforming policy to save the nation from bankruptcy, he gave them like a school teacher many financial data. This approach had serious repercussions on Necker's reputation leading to his resignation on 11 July, and prompted Camille Desmoulins the storming of the Bastille. Her parents left France on the same day in unpopularity and disgrace. Accompanied by Erik Magnus, their son-in-law, they escaped to Switzerland. Necker had lost half his fortune introducing assignats, invested in the public treasury.[11][12]
In January 1791 she went back to Paris. The increasing disturbances caused by the Revolution made her privileges as the consort of an ambassador very important safeguards. Germaine held a salon in the Swedish embassy, where she gave "coalition dinners", that were frequented by moderates as Talleyrand, De Narbonne, monarchists (Feuillants) as Barnave, Charles Lameth and his brothers Alexandre and Théodore, the Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre, and Pierre Victor, baron Malouet, the poet Abbé Delille, Thomas Jefferson, the one-legged Minister Plenipotentiary to France Gouverneur Morris, the leftish Barras and the radical Condorcets. "The issue of leadership, or rather lack of it, was central to Staël's preoccupations at this stage of her political reflection. The death of Comte de Mirabeau she experienced as a sign of great political disorientation and uncertainty. He was the only man with necessary charisma, energy, and prestige to keep revolutionary movement on the path of constitutional reform."[13]
After the French legislative election, 1791 was held, and the French Constitution of 1791 was announced in the National Assembly, she resigned from a political career and decided not to be re-eligible. "Fine arts and letters will occupy my leisure."[14] Though, in the succession of Comte de Montmorin the minister of Foreign Affairs, and the appointment of Narbonne as minister of War she played an important role and became the center of the stage.[15] Marie Antoinette wrote to Hans Axel Fersen: "Count Louis de Narbonne is finally Minister of War, since yesterday; what a glory for Mme de Staël and what a joy for her to have the whole army, all to herself."[16] In 1792 the French Legislative Assembly saw an unprecedented turnover of ministers (six ministers of the interior, seven ministers of foreign affairs, and nine ministers of war.[17]) On 10 August 1792 Clermont-Tonnere was thrown out of a window, and trampled to death. De Staël offered Malouet a plan to escape to Dieppe for the royal family.[18] She helped De Narbonne, dismissed for plotting, to hide under the altar in the chapel of the Swedish embassy, and lectured the sans-culottes in the hall.[19][20][21][7] On 20 August De Narbonne arrived in England on a German passport.
On 2 September, the day before the September massacres of 1792 she fled her self, escorted by the procurator Louis Pierre Manuel and Jean-Lambert Tallien. Her carriage was stopped and the crowd forced her to go to the Paris town hall, where Robespierre seated.[22] Her own account of her escape is, as usual, so florid that it provokes the question whether she was really in any danger.
Salons at Coppet and Paris
Juniper Hall Plaque
Château de Coppet near Nyon
In 1797 Constant and De Staël lived in the remains of the Abbey of Herivaux.
After her flight from Paris, she moved to Rolle where Albert was born. She was surrounded by De Montmorency and the Marquis de Jaucourt.[23] In January 1793, she made a four months visit to England to live with her lover, the Comte de Narbonne at Juniper Hall. (Since 1 February France and Great Brittain were at war.) Within a few weeks she got pregnant, apparently one of the reasons she caused a scandal in England. According to Fanny Burney her father urged his daughter to avoid De Staël and the group of French Émigres in Surrey.[1] She met with Horace Walpole, James Mackintosh, Lord Sheffield, a friend of Edward Gibbon, and Lord Loughborough, the new Lord Chancellor.[1] De Staël was not favourably impressed by the conditions of women in English society.[1]
In the summer of 1793, she returned to Coppet Castle perhaps while De Narbonne stopped loving her. She wrote a biased depiction of the character of queen, called "Reflections on the Trial". For De Staël France had to follow England's example from absolute to limited royalty.[24] Living in Jouxtens-Mézery, Germaine was visited by Adolph Ribbing in July 1793.[7][23] Count Ribbing was living in exile, after being sentenced for taking part in a conspiracy to murder the Swedish king Gustav III. Under his influence it seems she converted to Republicanism.[23] At the same time Germaine helped several monarchists to escape from France. Late 1793 her parents moved to Beaulieu Castle. In September 1794 she was visited by the divorced Benjamin Constant. In May 1795 she moved with her new "colleague" to Paris. (The fall of Maximilien Robespierre opened the way back to Paris.) De Staël had rejected the idea of the right of resistance - which had been introduced by the French Constitution of 1793, but removed from the Constitution of 1795.[25] In 1796 she published Sur l'influence des passions, in which she praised suicide, and a book that attracted the attention of the German authors Schiller and Goethe.[26] For De Staël "passionate love is natural to human beings and to yield oneself to love will not result in abandoning virtue".[27]
Germaine had also an obsession with French politics,[28] and reopened her salon. It was during these years that Mme de Staël was of chief political importance. For a time she was conspicuous in the motley and eccentric society of the mid-1790s. On the 13 Vendémiaire the Comité de salut public ordered her to leave Paris after accusations of politicking, and locked up Constant for one night.[29] Germaine spent that autumn in Forges-les-Eaux, a spa. She was trusted by neither side and a threat to political stability.[30] The couple moved to Ormesson-sur-Marne where they lived with Montmorency. In Summer 1796 Constant founded "Cercle constitutionnel" in Luzarches; De Staël supported him.[31] In May 1797 she was back in Paris and eight months pregnant. She succeeded in getting Talleyrand from the list of Émigrés and in July in his appointment by Paul Barras as minister of Foreign Affairs.[32] Since the coup of 18 Fructidor (in September) anyone wishing to restore the monarchy or the French Constitution of 1793 would be shot without a trial.[33] Germaine moved to Saint-Ouen near Montmartre, on her father's estate and became friends with the beautiful and rich Juliette Récamier to whom she sold the parental house in the Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin.
De Staël completed the initial part of her first most substantial contribution to political and constitutional theory, "Of present circumstances that can end the Revolution, and of the principles that must found the republic of France".[8] On 6 December 1797 at Talleyrand's office and 3 January 1798 during a ball she met with Napoleon. She made clear she did not agree with his planned French invasion of Switzerland, but he showed no interest and would not read her letters.[34]
Conflict with Napoleon
Bonaparte in 1803 by François Gérard
Both personal and political reasons threw her into opposition to Napoleon Bonaparte, in August 1802 elected as first consul for life. For De Staël Napoleon started to resemble Machiavelli; for Napoleon J.J. Rousseau was the cause of the French Revolution.[35] It culminated when Jacques Necker had published his "Last Views on Politics and Finance" and his daughter "De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales". It was her first philosophical approach to Europe, that dealt with such important factors as nationality, history and social institutions.[36] Napoleon started a campaign against this publication. He did not like her cultural determinism and generalizations, in which she stated that "an artist must be of his own time".[27][37] For him a woman should stick to knitting.[38] He said about her, according to the Memoirs of Madame de Rémusat, that she "teaches people to think who never thought before, or who had forgotten how to think."[39] It became pretty clear that the first man in France and the De Staël were not likely to get on together.[40] In January 1800 Benjamin Constant was appointed by Napoleon as a member of the Tribunat but he acted not long after as the first consul's enemy. Two years later the first consul forced him to withdraw because of his speeches that Napoléon Bonaparte thought were written by Mme de Staël.[27] In April 1802 she moved to Coppet.
De Staël published a provoking (anti-catholic) novel Delphine, in which the femme incomprise (misunderstood woman) living in Paris between 1789 and 1792, is confronted with conservative ideas about divorce after the Concordat of 1801. In this tragic novel, influenced by Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther and Rousseau's Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, she reflects on the legal and practical aspects on divorce, the arrests and the September Massacres, and the fate of the émigrés. The main characters have traits of the flippant Benjamin Constant, and Talleyrand is depicted as an old woman, herself as the heroine with the liberalist view of the Italian aristocrat and politician Melzi d'Eril?[41] In December 1802 she sent Bernard-François, marquis de Chauvelin a copy.
When Constant moved to Maffliers in September 1803 De Staël went to see him and let Napoleon know she would be wise and careful. Immediately the house became very popular among her friends, but Napoleon, informed by Madame de Genlis suspected a conspiracy. "Her extensive network of connections - which included foreign diplomats and known political opponents, as well as members of the government and of Bonaparte's own family - was in itself a source of suspicion and alarm for the government."[42] Her protection of Jean Gabriel Peltier - who wished the death of Napoleon - influenced his decision on 13 October 1803 to exile her without a trial.[43] For ten years De Staël was not allowed to settle within a distance of 40 leagues (almost 200 km) from Paris. She accused Napoleon of "persecuting a woman and her children".[44] On 23 October she left for Germany "out of pride",[45] in the hope to gain attention and to be able to return as soon as possible.[46]
German travels
Weimar around 1800 by Georg Melchior Kraus
François Gérard (1770–1837), Carnavalet Museum. Mme. de Staël as her character Corinne (posthumously)
Château de Chaumont
With her children and Constant she stopped off in Metz, met with Kant's translator Charles de Villers.
The most devastating oligarchical attack on the republican spirit, however, was led by the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel in Berlin, who is proven by "check-stubs" to have been a paid agent of Austria's Metternich against the Prussian state, and was therefore working directly for the sinister reaction of the Holy Alliance. It is a sad commentary on the level of our universities, that the holy aura surrounding Hegel has remained intact down to the present day.
-- The Hitler Book, edited by Helga Zepp-LaRouche
In mid-December, they arrived in Weimar, where she stayed for two and a half months at the court of Karl August, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach and his mother. She was constantly on the move, talking and asking questions.[47][27] The exchange of ideas and literary and philosophical conversations with Goethe, Schiller, and Wieland, would later inspire de Staël to write one of the most influential books of the nineteenth century,[48] recounting her travels through the German states. Goethe in fact became ill and hesitated about seeing her. An irritated Schiller felt relieved when she left, but also Constant decided to abandon her in Leipzig and return to Switzerland. De Staël travelled to Berlin, where she made the acquaintance of August Schlegel who was giving lectures on literature. In the vain hope of his becoming her lover, she appointed him on an enormous salary as private tutor to her children. On 18 April they all left Berlin when the news of her father's death reached her. Constant decided to return to Weimar and assisted her.
On 19 May she arrived in Coppet and found herself its wealthy and independent mistress, but her sorrow for her father was deep and certainly sincere. She spent the summer at the chateau arranging her father's writings, and published an essay on his private life. In July Constant wrote: "She exerts over everything around her a kind of inexplicable but very real power. If she could only govern herself, she might have governed the world."[49] In December 1804 she travelled to Italy, accompanied by her children, Schlegel and the historian Sismondi. She met with the poet Vincenzo Monti and the painter, Angelica Kauffman. "Her visit to Italy helped her to further develop her theory of the difference between northern and southern societies..."[1]
She returned to Coppet in June 1805, moved to Meulan (Château d'Acosta) and spent nearly a year writing her next book on Italy's culture and history. In Corinne, ou L'Italie (1807) the female hero appears to have been inspired by the Italian poet Diodata Saluzzo Roero.[50] She showed all of Italy's works of art still in place, rather than plundered by Napoleon and taken to France.[51] The book's publication acted as a reminder of her existence, and Napoleon sent her back to Coppet. Her house was, according to Stendhal, "the general headquarters of European thought" and became a debating club hostile to Napoleon, "turning conquered Europe into a parody of a feudal empire, with his own relatives in the roles of vassal states".[52] Madame Récamier, also banned by Napoleon, Prince Augustus of Prussia, Charles Victor de Bonstetten, Prosper de Barante, Claude Hochet, Zacharias Werner, Adelbert von Chamisso and Chateaubriand all belonged to the "groupe de Coppet".[53] Each day the table was laid for about thirty guests. Talking seemed to be everybody's chief activity. She invited the (obscure) Danish poet Friederike Brun to come and stay with her.
For a time she had lived with Constant in Auxerre (1806), Rouen (1807), Aubergenville (1807), then she had met with Friedrich Schlegel, whose wife Dorothea had translated Corinne into German. (Schlegel and Madame de Staël have endeavoured to reduce poetry to two systems, classical and romantic.) The use of the word Romanticism was invented by Schlegel, but spread more widely across France through its persistent use by Madame de Staël.[54] Late in 1807 she set out for Vienna and visited Maurice O'Donnell, whom she had met before in Venice.[55] She was accompanied by her children and August Schlegel who again held his famous lectures. She was again at Coppet in the summer of 1808 (in which year Benjamin Constant was afraid to admit to her that he had got married in the meanwhile). "If men had the qualities of women", Staël wrote, "love would simply cease to be a problem."[56] De Staël set to work on her book about Germany - a country that did not exist until Bismarck - in which she presented the idea of Germany as an ethical and aesthetic model and praised German literature and philosophy.[57]
Pretending she had emigrated to the US, de Staël was given permission to re-enter France. Looking around in Chaumont-sur-Loire de Staël moved into the Château de Chaumont (1810) which she rented from James Le Ray, and then onto Fossé and Vendôme. She was determined to publish De l'Allemagne in France, a book in which she called French political structures into question, so indirectly criticising Napoleon while promoting French culture and theatre. Constrained by censorship, she wrote the emperor a somewhat provocative and perhaps undignified letter. Anne Jean Marie René Savary had emphatically forbidden the publication of her book as being “un-French" and she again set sail on a boat as she had earlier pretended.[58][59] In October 1810 de Staël was exiled again and had to leave France within three days. Then August Schlegel was ordered to leave Swiss Confederation as an enemy of the French literature. She found consolation in a wounded officer named Albert de Rocca, twenty-three years her junior, to whom she got engaged privately in 1811 and subsequently married publicly in 1816.[27]