Germaine de Stael

In Our Time

BBC

History

4.6 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 16 November 2017

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and impact of Germaine de Staël (1766-1817) who Byron praised as Europe's greatest living writer, and was at the heart of intellectual and literary life in the France of revolution and of Napoleon. As well as attracting and inspiring others in her salon, she wrote novels, plays. literary criticism, political essays, and poems and developed the ideas behind Romanticism. She achieved this while regularly exiled from the Paris in which she was born, having fallen out with Napoleon who she opposed, becoming a towering figure in the history of European ideas. With Catriona Seth, Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford Alison Finch, Professor Emerita of French Literature at the University of Cambridge and Katherine Astbury, Associate Professor and Reader in French Studies at the University of Warwick. Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the BBC.
0:02.0	Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time.
0:04.5	There's a reading list to go with it on our website.
0:07.0	And you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time.
0:12.0	I hope you enjoyed the programs.
0:13.5	Hello, Jermaine de Stahl was born in Paris in 1766,
0:17.0	where her father was finance minister to Louis XVI and her mother held Dozzling Sallow.
0:22.0	Stahl was famous in privilege from childhood.
0:25.0	Yet she struggled against her father, against Napoleon,
0:28.0	and against society to do what men did freely,
0:31.0	to write to be an intellectual, to take lovers, to be influential.
0:34.0	She became formidable.
0:36.0	It was said Napoleon recognised only three powers in Europe, Britain, Russia, and Jermaine de Stahl.
0:41.0	On her death in 1817, for her novels, her essays and her political sway,
0:45.0	she was described as the greatest woman in Europe.
0:48.0	With me to discuss Jermaine de Stahl, our Catriona Seth,
0:51.0	Marshall Fosch, professor of French literature at the University of Oxford,
0:55.0	Alison Finch, professor of a minute at a French literature at the University of Cambridge,
0:59.0	and Kate Asprey, associate professor and reader of French studies at the University of Warwick.
1:04.0	Catriona Seth, what's known about Jermaine's st-da-style childhood?
1:08.0	Well, Jermaine de Stahl in many ways had an enchanted childhood.
1:11.0	You mentioned that she was born in Paris,
	...

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