Germaine de Staël: Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution

Like many of the earliest historians of the French revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, Germaine de Staël (1766–1817) lived through them. She was the daughter of Swiss banker Jacques Necker, a prominent figure in the French government in the last days of the Old Regime and at the dawn of the French Revolution. De Staël continued to support the liberal ideas of the earlier phases of the revolution. She also had a high regard for the parliamentary political culture of Britain. Although she had admired the young Napoléon as a general under the French Republic, she turned against him shortly after his seizure of power in 1799. During the Napoleonic period, De Staël was one of the few French writers to explicitly oppose Napoléon. For her involvement with the political opposition, she was exiled from France in 1793, and her books were banned. She spent the next year at her Swiss country estate at Coppet (near Geneva, Switzerland), which became a center of anti-Napoleonic sentiment. Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution was originally conceived of as an examination of Necker's career but grew into a history of the period from 1789 to 1815. It was published posthumously, in 1818.