At the height of the fierce political infighting among Jacobins, royalists, Girondins and an assortment of French but also British, Italian and German political conspirators that took hold in France before Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in 1799, Sieyès was accused by his supporters of not showing enough firmness towards the Jacobins. ‘There is a sect that is even more redoubtable than the Jacobins’, he was reported to have replied, ‘it is the sect of those who are impatient’.1 It is a revealing comment not only because it captures something long-lasting in Sieyès’s view of how events in France had unfolded over the past decade but also because it highlighted the mixture of blindness and insight that was one of the abiding characteristics of his political vision. Sieyès had a plan, based in large measure on Rousseau’s political thought and, more specifically, on Rousseau’s advice to his Polish interlocutors about how to prevent Poland from falling off the political map.

Chapter 10 reviews Staël’s impact on French nineteenth-century theater, from her critical discussions in treatises like De l’Allemagne, to which Romantic drama theory owes profound debts, to her own performances in Geneva and across Europe, to her substantial dramatic output, from Voltairean verse tragedies to vaudevilles and avant-garde drames, source for at least two Romantic authors including E. T. A. Hoffmann. Staël’s complex relationship to German Romanticism, from Hoffmann to Tieck and the Schlegels, gains from this review.

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.

Chapter 16 concerns national, public credit, with two axes. First, it argues that Staël’s theory of credit is richer than that of the tyrants, from Convention to Empire, who exiled the woman they owed two million francs. She calls such tyranny myopic, like building an economy on theft; modern states require public credit. Second, later history again denied Staël credit, exiling her from their all-male Revolution canon by seeing women’s chatter where her dialectic stood. This dialectic is retraced throughout Staël’s works but primarily in her posthumous Considérations sur la Révolution française.