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Germaine de Stael 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 Stael 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 deperate 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 Stael 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 a 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 Coppet, 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 Napoleon's downfall.
Triumph in Exile is a fictionalized chronicle of Germaine de Stael'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 than she. Victoria 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 to bring down an unbridled tyrant and altered the course of history in France and - it is no exaggeration to say - the rest of the modern world.
