Madame de Staël ou le plaidoyer pour une vie seconde : le théâtre

Abstract

Madame de Staël or the Necessity of a Second Life: The Theatre. Our contribution proposes an incursion into literary history at the time of the First Wave of French Romanticism. The subject of the investigation is Madame de Staël’s experimental theatre and the dramatic seasons that she organized between 1804 and 1811 in Coppet and Geneva. Our conclusions are twofold: on the aesthetic side, Coppet’s dramatic representations had the role of changing the aesthetic and literary canons of the early 19^th century; on the historical side, the Coppet Group is one of the first romantic cenacles whose resounding literary activity was the theatre.