Madame de Staël and the Transformation of European Politics, 1812–17

Abstract

What place do women have in international history? This article approaches the chronic uncertainty surrounding this question through an examination of the role of one woman, Germaine de Staël (1766–1817), in the processes of peace-making that Paul W. Schroeder has described in his landmark study The Transformation of European Politics as ‘the decisive turning point’ in the transformation of ‘the governing rules, norms, and practices of international politics’. The author argues that Staël's intellectual and personal involvement in these events give us cause to reconsider the presence of women in international history, as actors intruding on what is normatively a masculine landscape, and as the agents of the political ideas that informed the ‘transformational’ peace-making agenda in the period leading up to and after the celebrated Congress of Vienna. She argues that adding Staël to this history recasts the relevance of female élites to the shifting parameters of diplomacy and the rise of a new Europe-centred liberal internationalism in the early nineteenth century, while inviting larger questions about the intersecting trajectories of gender relations and international politics and power.