Germaine de Staël Quotes
If one hour's work is enough to govern France, four minutes is all that is needed for Italy. There is no nation more easily frightened; even its poetic imagination predisposes it to fear, and they look upon power as on an image that fills them with terror.
Staël, Germaine de. Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution. Vol. 1, Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1818.
The terror to which he referred was to the French Revolution’s executing former aristocrats and then including anyone suspected of monarchist sympathies.
The Flemmish city of Ghent needed a Governor. Du Bois approached Philip Van Artevelde whose father had been a successful governor to see if he would be interested in assuming the office. Many cities, while not democracies, did elect their ruler as for a time was done on Ancient Rome. This quotation is interesting in that Du Bois, a kingmaker politician, shows us what qualifications were perceived necessary for a Governor of a major city.
Robespierre was the driving force behind the Reign of Terror where hundreds of thousands of French citizens were beheaded because they were accused of not being loyal enough to the regime.
Honore Gabriel Victor Requiti
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein, commonly known as Madame de Staël), was a French woman of letters and political theorist, the daughter of banker and French finance minister Jacques Necker and Suzanne Curchod, a leading salonnière. She was a voice of moderation in the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era up to the French Restoration. She was present at the Estates General of 1789 and at the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Her intellectual collaboration with Benjamin Constant between 1794 and 1810 made them one of the most celebrated intellectual couples of their time.
