Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Author's note
- Introduction
- 1 Birth of a nation – Staël's Romantic Germany in 1810
- 2 Romantic literature and politics
- 3 Philosophy and ethics in Napoleonic Europe
- 4 Religion, love, enthusiasm – a new Enlightenment
- Conclusion
- Appendix: De l'Allemagne titles and dates
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in French
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Author's note
- Introduction
- 1 Birth of a nation – Staël's Romantic Germany in 1810
- 2 Romantic literature and politics
- 3 Philosophy and ethics in Napoleonic Europe
- 4 Religion, love, enthusiasm – a new Enlightenment
- Conclusion
- Appendix: De l'Allemagne titles and dates
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in French
Summary
Il est impossible à condamner la pensée à revenir sur ses pas, avec l'espérance de moins et les regrets de plus.
(DL 295)I end this book painfully aware of what it leaves unsaid. Others here are precious sources of further information: Kohler, Henning, Pange; Balayé, Solovieff, Jasinski, Nagavajara; the Collogues de Coppet, the Cahiers staëliens. My sketches of Staël's ‘mentors’ need further review: Humboldt, Villers, Crabb Robinson, the Schlegels. So too does Staël's immediate context, the Groupe de Coppet, perhaps history's only international Romantic movement. Besides Staël and Schlegel, its core includes Necker, Constant, Sismondi, Bonstetten, Barante, Jordan. Contemporaries linked De l'Allemagne's publication to that of two other Coppet productions in the same year, Schlegel's Cours de littérature dramatique and Sismondi's De la littérature du Midi de l'Europe: all contained definitions of Romanticism, and they were called a Confédération romantique.
Chapter 3 stresses Staël parallels in Schiller, over Germans like Schlegel whom she knew better: her parallels are there by 1800, and Schiller is a key first source, for ideas later so common we cannot hope to attribute them. Staël's nouvelle école allemande also stresses Weimar Classicism over Berlin and later Heidelberg Romanticism, but countless details remain unsaid: her chapter on German art is pure Schlegel; it also quotes Goerres's introduction to Die Teutschen Volksbücher.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Birth of European RomanticismTruth and Propaganda in Staël's 'De l'Allemagne', 1810–1813, pp. 216 - 221Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994