Madame de Staël

Madame de Staël (1766–1817), pen name of Anne-Louise Germaine Necker, Baroness de Staël-Holstein, was a French writer, essayist, and political thinker. A central figure in the intellectual and political debates during the French Revolution, the Consulate, and the Napoleonic Empire, she exerted great influence as a mediator between the ideas of the Enlightenment and the new movements of Romanticism and political liberalism. She is considered a precursor of French Romanticism and one of the first important female voices in European political and cultural debate.