When she reached marriageable age, many ambitions of her parents were frustrated by her independent will. Pitt, Mirabeau, Bonaparte, were considered, but destiny had in store for her a Swedish ambassador, Staël-Holstein, a man of good family, but with little money and plenty of debts, who had been looking out for a comfortable dowry. In 1786, at the time when Marie Antoinette was at the height of her popularity, this girl of twenty years was married to a man seventeen years her senior, who had no affection for her and whom she could not love.
At Paris she immediately opened a salon, which soon eclipsed, both in beauty and wit, that of her mother; there her eloquence, enthusiasm, and conversational gifts captivated all, but her imprudent language, the recklessness of her conduct, her scorn of all etiquette, her outspoken preferences, frightened away women and stunned men. Her sympathy for her friends, Talleyrand, Narbonne, De Montmorency, together with the approaching Revolution, drew her into politics. When her father was called by the nation to the control of its finances, his daughter shared his glories.
Her salon was the centre of the élite and of all literary and political discussions; but as the majority of its frequenters were partisans of the English constitution and expressed their views openly and freely, her enemies became numerous. When Narbonne was made minister of war, a great triumph for her and her party, the eloquence of his reports was attributed to her, and when he fell into disgrace she rescued him. However, the atmosphere of Paris was too unfriendly, so she left in 1792 for her home at Coppet, which became an asylum for all the proscribed. When she visited England, she began a thorough study of its mode of life, its customs, and its parliamentary institutions. Upon her return to Coppet she wrote Réflexions sur le Procès de la Reine, to excite the commiseration of the judges. After the death of her mother in 1794, she devoted her energies to the education of her two boys.
After the violence of her love for Benjamin Constant, who drew her back to politics, was somewhat cooled, she became an ardent Republican, writing her treatise Réflexions sur la Paix adressées a M. Pitt et aux Anglais, which facilitated her return in 1795 to Paris, where she found her husband reinstalled as ambassador. Her hôtel in the Rue de Bac was reopened, and she proceeded to form a salon from the débris of society floating about in Paris. It was an assembly of queer characters—elements of the old and new régime, but not at all reconciled, converts of the Jacobin party returning for the first time into society, surrounded by the women of the old régime, using all imaginable efforts and flattery to obtain the rentrée of a brother, a son, or a lover; it was composed of the most moderate Revolutionists, of former Constitutionalists, of exiles of the Monarchy, whom she endeavored to bring over to the Republican cause.
Through the influence of Mme. de Staël, the decree of banishment was repealed by the convention, thus opening Paris to Talleyrand. In 1795 appeared her Réflexions sur la Paix Intérieure; the aim of that work being to organize the French Republic on the plan of the United States; it strongly opposed the restoration of the Monarchy. The Comité du Salut Publique accused her of double play, of favoring intrigues, and, seeing the plots of the Royalists, she adopted a new plan in her salon; politics being too dangerous, she decided to devote herself more to literature. In her book Les Passions she endeavored to crush her calumniators; she wrote: "Condemned to celebrity, without being able to be known I find need of making myself known by my writings."
It was not safe for her to return to Paris until 1797, when her friend Talleyrand was made minister of foreign affairs. Her efforts to charm Napoleon led only to estrangement, although he appointed her friend Benjamin Constant to the tribunate; but when he publicly announced the advent of the tyrant Napoleon, she was accused of inciting her friends against the government, and was again banished to Coppet, where she wrote the celebrated work De la Littérature Considérée sous ses Rapports avec les Institutions Sociales, a singular mixture of satirical allusions to Napoleon's government and cabals against his power; in that work she announced, also, her belief in the regeneration of French literature by the influence of foreign literature, and endeavored to show the relations which exist between political institutions and literature. Thus, she was the first to bring the message of a general cosmopolitan relationship of literatures and literary ideas.
In 1802 she returned to Paris and began to show, on every possible occasion, a morbid hatred for Napoleon. When her father published his work Dernières Vues de Politique et de Finance, expressing a desire to write against the tyranny of one, after having fought so long that of the multitude, the emperor immediately accused Mme. de Staël of instilling these ideas into her father. Her salon and forty of her friends were put into the interdict.
After the death of her husband in 1802, she was free to marry Benjamin Constant; and after refusing him, she wrote her novel Delphine to give vent to her feelings. The two famous lines found in almost every work on Mme. de Staël may be quoted here, as they well express her ideas on marriage: "A man must know how to brave an opinion, and a woman must submit to it." This qualification Benjamin Constant lacked, and at that time she was unable to give the submission.
Her travels in Germany, Russia, and Italy were one great succession of triumphs; by her brilliancy, her wonderful gift of conversation, and her quickness of comprehension, she everywhere baffled and astounded those with whom she conversed. Schiller declared that when she left he felt as though he were just convalescing after a long spell of illness. One day she abruptly asked the staid old philosopher Fichte: "M. Fichte, can you give me, in a short time, an aperçu of your system of philosophy, and tell me what you mean by your ego? I find it very obscure." He began by translating his thoughts into French, very deliberately. After talking for some ten minutes, in the midst of a deep argument she interrupted him, crying out: "Enough, M. Fichte, quite enough! I understand you perfectly; I have seen your system in illustration—it is an adventure of Baron Münchhausen." The philosopher assumed a tragic attitude, and a spell of silence fell upon the audience.
The result of her visit to Italy was her novel Corinne, in which the problems of the destiny of women of genius—the relative joys of love and glory—are discussed. This work remained for a whole generation the standard of love and ideals, and at the same time revealed Italy to the French, After a second visit to Germany, she began to labor seriously on her work on that country, in 1810 going incognito to Paris to have it printed. Ten thousand copies, ready for sale, were destroyed before reaching the public. This work opened the German world to the French; it applied, to a great nation, the doctrine of progress, defending the independence and originality of nations, while endeavoring to show that the future lay in the reciprocal respect of the rights of people, declaring that nations are not at all the arbitrary work of men or the fatal work of circumstances, and that the submission of one people to another is contrary to nature. She wished to make "poor and noble Germany" conscious of its intellectual riches, and to prove that Europe could obtain peace only through the liberation of that country. The censors accused her of lack of patriotism in provoking the Germans to independence, and of questionable taste in praising their literature; consequently, the book was denounced, all the copies obtainable were destroyed, and a vigorous search for the manuscript was undertaken. After this episode, her friends were not permitted to visit her at Coppet.