Saturday, January 29, 2011

Madame de Staël on Napoleon

"of the whole inheritance of his dreadful power, there remains nothing to mankind but the baneful knowledge of a few secrets the more in the art of tyranny."

Madame (Anne Louise Germaine) de Staël, of Napoleon, in Considerations on the principal events of the French Revolution IV.19 ((New York, NY:  James Eastburn and Co., 1818), vol. 2, p. 114).  I was put onto this by Ruth Scurr, "For liberty:  Madame de Staël as a political thinker," Times literary supplement, December 10, 2010, p. 15 (14-15).

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