Germaine de Staël (1766-1817)

Abstract

As France came out of the Reign of Terror and into the Thermidorian period, not only did Germaine de Staël articulate a moderate republican liberalism, but she also elaborated an informal poetics of a new literary genre-the "philosophical novel"-that could morally reform the nation. This genre proposed individual responsibility and duty to freedom, grounded in German idealism, as the new public morality of a liberal republic. The genre also depended on a specific type of genius found predominantly in exceptional women writers, whom she elevated to the status of moral educators of the nation.