Germaine de Stael
In Our Time: Culture
BBC
4.5 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 16 November 2017
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
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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| 0:47.0 | Hello, Jermaine de Stahl was born in Paris in 1766, |
| 0:51.0 | where her father was finance minister to Louis the 16th and her mother held dazzling |
| 0:54.7 | Salon. |
| 0:56.5 | Stahl was famous and privileged from childhood. |
| 0:58.9 | Yet she struggled against her father, against Napoleon and against society to do what men did freely, to write to be an intellectual, |
| 1:05.9 | to take lovers to be influential. |
| 1:08.1 | She became formidable. |
| 1:09.8 | It was said Napoleon recognised only three powers in Europe, Britain, Russia and Germain de Stahl. |
| 1:15.0 | On her death in 1817 for her novels, her essays and her political sway she was described |
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