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Germaine de Staël was not a beautiful woman.Yet she captivated the imagination and won the love of some of the most powerful men at the heart of the French Revolution and the era that followed. One colossus, however, refused to fall under her spell—and she took him on as a worthy adversary. He was Napoleon Bonaparte. Although Germaine de Staël was among the first to recognize Napoleon as a "champion of democracy" and help him achieve his rise to power, she was also one of the first to acknowledge his uncontrolled lust for military and political Dominance—and to challenge his despotic leadership. The Emperor soon exiled her from her beloved France and banned her books and treatises. But those desperate acts backfired on Bonaparte because they motivated the Baroness to become a key architect in the loss of his throne and—sweet irony—in his exile from France. Madame de Staël was not only an impassioned advocate of universal rights who founded "a cult of liberty," but also a proficient and prolific writer who penned "best-sellers" at a time when women "scribblers" were discounted. Among her books were romans à clef that both championed her friends and political philosophies and taunted her opponents who rejected equal justice, particularly the Emperor of France. Her lesser opponents occasionally struck back by revealing her overlapping amorous affairs, but Bonaparte went much further. He forbad her to write and limited her movements to a small area around her country estate in Coopet, Switzerland. It was after a daring escape from Coppet, across the continent to Russia and Sweden that she took part in formulating the military alliance between the Swedish Crown Prince and Czar Alexander that brought about Napoleons's downfall. Where did Madame De Staël—this powerful force in world history—come from? Her training began as soon as she could talk. Germaine's father, Jacques Necker, Finance Minister to King Louis XVI, tutored her in politics, and her mother launched her on a rigid regimen of classics and the arts, to prepare her for life among the elite of French society. By the time she was twelve, Germaine was already a fixture in her mother's salon, enchanting illustrious literary, political and philosophical celebrities with her charm, brilliance, quick wit...and luminous, disarming, violet eyes. At eighteen she married the Baron Eric de Staël, Swedish Ambassador to France, with the sanction of the King and Marie Antoinette. Soon, however, she grew disillusioned by her husband's vacuity and the frivolous life at court. To exercise her relentless curiosity and boundless energy, she fashioned her own salon when she was just twenty. The greats of Europe found it irresistible, but tot nearly so as their eloquent hostess, the Baroness de Staël. It was there that she encountered Charles–Maurice do Talleyrand–Perigord, Bishop of Autun, who soon became the first of her numerous lovers and her mentor in amorous and political intrigue. Triumph in Exile is a fictionalized chronicle of Germaine de Staël's life, based on historical fact, which focuses on her confrontation with Napoleon as well as her many tempestuous love affairs...some with gallant men much younger that she. Victoria D. Schmidt vividly tells the story of a towering woman who, motivated by uncompromising principles and fortified with the unlimited resources of her wealthy father, helped helped to bring down an unbridled tyrant and altered the course of history in France and—in is no exaggeration to say—the rest of the world.
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