Through the influence of Mme. de Stael, the decree of banishment was repealed by the convention, thus opening Paris to Talleyrand.  In 1795 appeared her Reflexions sur la Paix Interieure; the aim of that work being to organize the French Republic on the plan of the United States; it strongly opposed the restoration of the Monarchy.  The Comite du Salut Publique accused her of double play, of favoring intrigues, and, seeing the plots of the Royalists, she adopted a new plan in her salon; politics being too dangerous, she decided to devote herself more to literature.  In her book Les Passions she endeavored to crush her calumniators; she wrote:  “Condemned to celebrity, without being able to be known I find need of making myself known by my writings.”

It was not safe for her to return to Paris until 1797, when her friend Talleyrand was made minister of foreign affairs.  Her efforts to charm Napoleon led only to estrangement, although he appointed her friend Benjamin Constant to the tribunate; but when he publicly announced the advent of the tyrant Napoleon, she was accused of inciting her friends against the government, and was again banished to Coppet, where she wrote the celebrated work De la Litterature Consideree sous ses Rapports avec les Institutions Sociales, a singular mixture of satirical allusions to Napoleon’s government and cabals against his power; in that work she announced, also, her belief in the regeneration of French literature by the influence of foreign literature, and endeavored to show the relations which exist between political institutions and literature.  Thus, she was the first to bring the message of a general cosmopolitan relationship of literatures and literary ideas.

In 1802 she returned to Paris and began to show, on every possible occasion, a morbid hatred for Napoleon.  When her father published his work Dernieres Vues de Politique et de Finance, expressing a desire to write against the tyranny of one, after having fought so long that of the multitude, the emperor immediately accused Mme. de Stael of instilling these ideas into her father.  Her salon and forty of her friends were put into the interdict.

After the death of her husband in 1802, she was free to marry Benjamin Constant; and after refusing him, she wrote her novel Delphine to give vent to her feelings.  The two famous lines found in almost every work on Mme. de Stael may be quoted here, as they well express her ideas on marriage:  “A man must know how to brave an opinion, and a woman must submit to it.”  This qualification Benjamin Constant lacked, and at that time she was unable to give the submission.