Returning to Paris after the Empire Disappointments of the final return in Germaine de Staël's correspondence

In de Staël’s final years, she turned from the subject of the pain of exile to an ontology of return: this is a reflection on remanence, affecting both the subject and the nation, who were, in 1814, haunted by ghosts of the past. Her correspondence from the years 1814-1817 therefore casts light on a stage of de Staël’s life when she was torn between a desire for recognition and a sense of unreality and gradual disappearance. The strangeness of her situation pushed her towards analysis, since she herself echoed the ambiguity of the country’s political situation.