De l'Allemagne Reading Order

De l'Allemagne (On Germany, 1813) by Germaine de Staël is the most important work of literary criticism and cultural analysis of the French Romantic period — a vast comparative study of German culture, literature, philosophy, and religion that introduced German Romantic thought to France and changed the course of French literary history. De Staël began the work during her exile from France (Napoleon had banned her from Paris in 1803) and submitted it for publication in 1810; Napoleon ordered the entire first printing (10,000 copies) to be destroyed and de Staël herself deported. The work was finally published in London in 1813 and in France after Napoleon's fall in 1814. De l'Allemagne is not a travel book or a cultural survey but a systematic argument: de Staël identifies two opposing literary traditions — 'literature of the South' (French classicism, based on ancient Greek and Roman models, focused on social life and human nature in society) and 'literature of the North' (German and English Romanticism, based on Christian, medieval, and folk sources, focused on the individual soul in its relationship to nature and the infinite) — and argues that French literature needs to import from the North the spiritual depth, Christian feeling, and individual passion that its classical tradition lacks. This argument was the founding statement of French Romanticism and had an immediate and lasting effect: Victor Hugo, Stendhal, Lamartine, and Sainte-Beuve all acknowledged De l'Allemagne as the critical event that made French Romanticism thinkable.