Germaine de Staël: Forging a Politics of Mediation ed. by Karyna Szmurlo (review)

By the time that she died in 1817, Germaine de Staël had established a European-wide literary and intellectual presence. The circle of her interlocutors included Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de Sismondi and Alessandro Manzoni in Italy, Claude Fauriel, Prosper de Barante, Charles-Victor de Bonstetten, and Benjamin Constant in France and Switzerland, Wilhelm von Humboldt and the Schlegel brothers in Prussia and Austria, along with James Mackintosh and Henry Crabb Robinson in Britain, and an array of now lesser-known figures in Russia, Spain, Sweden, and Denmark. In the light of this intellectual panoply, the title of this new collection of essays edited by Karyna Szmurlo is well chosen, even if readers of Constant’s Cécile might wonder whether the term ‘mediation’ is quite the word required to capture the intensity, range, and variety of the intellectual and personal relationships in which Mme de Staël was involved. The collection, made up of seventeen contributions by an impressive number of established Staël scholars, together with a wide-ranging historiographical ‘Preface’ by Madeleine Gutwirth, is divided into two broad groups of articles. Nine deal with Mme de Staël’s involvement in French politics, either in the context of particular events or problems, as in the case of her dealings with Lafayette or of her assessments of Marie-Antoinette and Napoleon (described respectively by Paul Spalding, Catriona Seth, and Susan Tenenbaum), or in the broader context of the nature and development of her own moral and political thought (as examined in the contributions by Marie-Ève Beausoleil, Aurelian Craiutu, Chinatsu Takeda, and Jean-Marie Roulin). The other eight focus on Staël’s personal and intellectual impact beyond the francophone world, with four articles (by Clorinda Donato, Robert Casillo, Paola Giuli, and Nanora Sweet) dealing with aspects of the Italian reception of her thought, and a further two (by Ulrike Wagner and Eric Gidal) focusing on the German, British, and American dimensions of both Staël’s thought and its reception. As Wagner’s essay helps to show particularly fully, the connection between the two parts of the collection is perhaps best described in terms of Mme de Staël’s activity as a mediator, not only between different clusters of European thought, but also between the various ways of thinking about the relationship between history and politics that began to take shape in Europe in the wake of Rousseau, Kant, Schiller, and Schelling. In this sense, Szmurlo’s volume complements the earlier collection of articles on Staël and her early German reception edited by Gerhard Kaiser and Olaf Muller in 2008, Germaine de Staël und ihr erstes deutsches Publikum: Literaturpolitik und Kulturtransfer um 1800 (Heidelberg: Winter). As with that collection, it helps to give the measure not only of Staël’s own intellectual achievements but also of the scale of the imaginative and analytical work that has come to be needed to bring their various interlocking dimensions back into full historical view.