This book, fruit of some years of archival research, follows Germaine de Staël (1766–1817), daughter of Louis XVI’s minister Jacques Necker, from a childhood watched by Denis Diderot in her mother’s salon on to Revolution – during which the Bastille fell three days after her father’s dismissal – to her years with Benjamin Constant as the Republic died and her ten years of exile at Napoleon Bonaparte’s hands. It tracks her flight to Moscow, weeks ahead of Napoleon’s army, and on via Stockholm and London at last to Paris in 1814, three years before her early death. It follows Staël through a close reading of her manuscripts and publications, recreating her life as author and stateswoman and thereby reworking some received wisdom both about Staël’s various publications and about her literary and political action.

Chapter 17 retraces the Groupe de Coppet’s work toward abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, from Staël’s parents in the 1780s to Staël’s children in the 1840s. What links these fighters is Staël. Staël’s gender, her religion, her life of revolution and exile all fed the flame that drove her struggle forward. Staël’s thought, trained in the Enlightenment, strives constantly toward universal and timeless truths, which brings a special excitement and power to her discussion of freedom and its antithesis, slavery, in the age of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme. In the history of abolitionism, many aspects of Staël’s thought are curious: her broad refusal of the slave-despot metaphor; her geographical and historical sweep; and her refusal of topoi designed to short-circuit discussion, like the Christian slaves in Algiers. Thirty-odd years of thought about freedom will produce some words on slavery, but Staël and her circle joined deeds to words.

Staël responded to the Terror with De l’influence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des nations. Chapter 5 has two parts. First, I review Staël’s use of her sources: her private life, France’s public Revolution, and the texts of the moral philosophers. Cathartic for herself as a woman, Staël’s book is also a public stand on the Terror and a manifesto for the French Republic’s future. It draws on a startling range of texts, from Cicero through Condorcet. These sources reveal above all what Staël does not do; she systematically transforms them, reading, then flouting, two millennia of passion theory to construct her own new moral vision. Second, I review what Staël offers the French Republic: a way out of ping-pong coups d’état by grounding the Directoire in coalition and moral principle, precisely the vision of her partner Constant’s simultaneous brochures, on which we know she quietly collaborated.

Chapter 9 argues that Staël saw a Faustian bargain in Corinne ou l’Italie, took it, and paid the price; its triumphs and failures thus stand or fall together. What Staël gained was mythic power; what she lost was the ability to control its fate. Corinne’s political impact in Europe and America, standing as it does at the birth of modern nationalism, is both real and unquantifiable – witness the coinage nationalité, part of the larger impact of Staël’s ideas on national genius, reflected in Blackwood’s praise of her in 1818 as the creator of the science of nations. The novel’s esthetic impact on a century of readers is both fascinating and somewhat easier to assess, an invitation to future study already made in 1825 by Stendhal in a remark from Racine et Shakespeare: “Je ne vois réellement que Corinne qui ait acquis une gloire impérissable sans se modeler sur les anciens.”

Focusing on the life trajectory of Brazilian engineer Teodoro Sampaio, this chapter discusses the possibilities for social transformation available to men of color during and after Brazilian abolition. Sampaio lived through a time when the dismantling of slavery coincided with a racialization of social status, justified by the postulates of scientific racism. His trajectory thus illuminates how an educated son of a freed mother could make his way through a society that was reinventing socio-racial hierarchies even as slavery lost its legitimacy. This chapter aims to elucidate the intricate network of relationships and endeavors engendered by a pardo, born on a large slave property, who managed to become an engineer and manumit his three brothers, who were enslaved on the same plantation where Sampaio himself was raised free. Based on Sampaio’s autobiographical texts, books, articles, and private correspondence – as well as on what his contemporaries wrote about him – this chapter will reflect on what we can learn from Teodoro Sampaio’s life about what it meant to be a free, lettered pardo man during the dismantling of Brazilian slavery.

This chapter traces the parallel life stories spun by a single woman – “Benedicta” to some and “Ovídia” to others – in pursuit of freedom in 1880s Brazil. Building upon a vast historiography, it uses a single microhistory to recuperate the social practices, ways of life, and world visions that resided below the surface of judicial testimony. In so doing, it opens an important window through which we can apprehend the ways in which women on the borders of slavery and freedom constructed their identity during Brazil’s age of abolition.

Slave songs – understood here as songs, dances, movements, and genres developed by the enslaved – profoundly marked the history of conflict and cultural dialogue in slave and post-slavery societies across the Americas. This chapter investigates belle époque slave song performance by focusing on two Black musicians, Eduardo das Neves (1874–1919) and Bert Williams (1874–1922). Their stories demonstrate that the musical field occupied a fundamental space within the politics of Afro-descendant representation, exclusion, and incorporation (real or imagined). Representations of Black people and the meanings attributed to their music could shore up the racial inequalities that reproduced themselves after the end of slavery, but they could also subversively amplify Black struggles for equality and cultural recognition.

Chapter 1 argues that Staël only chose art and Europe when banned by men from politics and France. The “romantic heroine” her life and works handed to posterity was a fallback position, used by a woman exiled from the revolutionary stage. Staël’s complete works make this clear, splitting into four epochs: Old Regime, Revolution, Consulat and Empire, and Restoration. They are retraced here.

Chapter 8 reviews Staël’s Manuscrits de M. Necker. At Staël’s death, her partner Constant called this memoir of her father his favorite Staël text; and since Necker was France’s chief minister when the Bastille fell, the memoir seems ripe for study. Startling, then, that a recent 2,700-item survey of Staël criticism lists one single review, from 1805, while in 2004, Cahier staëlien 55, which is dedicated to Necker, contains no real mention of his daughter’s text. This chapter addresses this blind spot, tackling three questions: where the text fits in our knowledge of Staël and Necker; what pressures are strong enough to render a major text like this invisible; and what our blindness has cost us.

The traditional narrative of the Assemblée législative, 1791–1792, offers us an inexplicable couple: an idéologue Madame de Staël combined with a failed Brumairian Narbonne, a society thinker and the plotter of a coup. “Quelle gloire pour Mme de Staël et quel plaisir pour elle,” wrote the queen when Narbonne became Minister for War, “d’avoir ainsi toute l’armée [...] à elle!” The queen saw here a salon intrigue, and historians have repeated this old topos of the weak but authoritarian man and his intriguing mistress. But analyzing the couple’s writings, as Chapter 3 does, offers the means to grow beyond this legend of caprice and iron fist. We will find the trace of a team effort divided between two professionals, and a progressive program for which Staël appears to have been the inspiration, if not the author.

Chapter 12 has two theses. The first is that Staël’s semi-autobiographical Dix années d’exil may be read as a hermetic text, hiding an apocalyptic vision with Napoleon as one of various demonic figures. This was common coin around 1814. The second is that Staël’s apocalyptic vision accords with another hidden theme of hers: that a sibyl is known by her prophecies. Her complete works bear unexpected testimony to this theme, as is here demonstrated. The chapter also traces Staël’s engagement with Russia, both in her Dix années and in various apocryphal or newly attributed texts.

This chapter discusses how slave traffickers adapted to the new circumstances created by Brazil’s 1831 ban on the transatlantic slave trade. While the ban by no means prevented further slave trafficking, it did force significant changes. In Pernambuco, the fourth most important destination for enslaved Africans in the Americas, traders could still reap abundant profits if they were willing to use small ships, pack them with the compact bodies of children and adolescents, and forge active partnerships with the complicit plantation owners who controlled the coast, roads, and towns surrounding Brazil’s natural harbors. In encouraging these new and brutal economic logics, the 1831 ban deeply impacted both the social demographics of Pernambucan slavery and the political and economic networks that structured the province.