SOURCE: “Forging a Vocation: Germaine de Staël on Fiction, Power, and Passion,” in Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, Vol. 86, No. 3, 1983-1985, pp. 242-54.

In the following essay, Gutwirth analyzes de Staël's views on love, passion, and ambition as expressed in De l’influence des passions.

Quelle époque ai-je choisie pour faire un traité sur le bonheur des individus et des nations! (What an age I have chosen to write a treatise on the happiness of individuals and nations!)

—Staël De l’influence des passions … Introduction

“Marat,” wrote Germaine de Staël in her account of the French Revolution, “was using his newspaper day after day [in the summer of 1792] to threaten the royal family and its defenders with the most atrocious of tortures. Never had one witnessed a human tongue so denatured; the roaring of wild beasts could have been translated into the language...