The Birth of European Romanticism

It was through Stael's best-seller De l'Allemagne that the term 'Romanticism', coined in Germany, reached Europe and America. Around this term, Stael built a new and universal agenda: her manifesto offered Napoleon's Europe an alternative to everything he stood for. The new universe she revealed helped to bury the neo-Classical world and to shape the nineteenth century. In this important work, Dr Isbell reasserts Stael's place in history and analyses her vast agenda, which covers every Classical and Romantic divide in art, philosophy, religion, and society from 1789 to 1815. This investigation sheds light upon the two different revolutions that created modern Europe, seen here by a leader of both.