SOURCE: “Communication and Power in Germaine de Staël: Transparency and Obstacle,” in Germaine de Staël: Crossing the Borders, edited by Madelyn Gutwirth, Avriel Goldberger, and Karyna Szmurlo, Rutgers University Press, 1991, pp. 55-68.

In the following essay, Bowman considers the problem of communication in de Staël's writing.

One of the results of absolute power which most contributed to Napoleon's downfall was that, bit by bit, no one dared any longer tell him the truth about anything. He ended up unaware that winter arrived in Moscow in November because none of his courtiers was Roman enough to tell him something even that simple.¹

Because of this remark, and many others like it, I shall try to present here an overall view of a major problem in Staël's writing, which she never analyzes in a systematic way, but where her thought is very rich: how communication is...