Conference
Germaine de Staël : writing or politics
Saturday, April 4, 2026Lecture presented by Sophie Doudet
Daughter of Necker, Louis XVI's Minister of Finance whose dismissal sparked the French Revolution, child of the Enlightenment, brilliant and charming salonnière who welcomed all of intellectual Europe to her château in Coppet, eternal lover and friend of Talleyrand, Constant, Byron, Schiller, Chateaubriand, and many others, an opponent of Napoleon who exiled her from France and had her hunted down in Russia, a prolific author of novels, essays, and plays... Germaine de Staël was a great, free-thinking and ambitious woman of her time. Yet today she is little known and rarely read. How can we explain this neglect and, above all, remedy it? This is what Sophie Doudet will attempt to do in her lecture.
Introduction of the speaker
Sophie Doudet
Sophie Doudet is a lecturer in French literature at the Institut d'Études Politiques in Aix-en-Provence, where she has been teaching general culture, literature, and the history of arts and ideas since 2001. She has written biographies of Winston Churchill, André Malraux, Madame de Staël, and Abbé Pierre in Gallimard's “Folio biographie” collection. She is the author of young adult novels published by Scrineo on Rimbaud, Churchill, Michelangelo, and Da Vinci. Finally, she participated in the creation of the exhibition “Camus Citoyen du monde” in Aix-en-Provence in 2013.