Chapter 14 reviews the texts published in French in 1814 by A. W. Schlegel, Staël, and Sismondi – core members of the Groupe de Coppet – which led to them being dubbed a confédération romantique. The texts furnish a Romantic dialectic and a vision of the new man for the various anti-classical reactions playing out in Europe over the previous fifty years. Schlegel offers Shakespeare and arguments to reject France, Staël proposes Faust and Kant, and in Sismondi, finally, one finds a free Middle Ages opposing that of Chateaubriand. But the three also offer an idea of the nation that seems as influential as their literary ideas, and tools to transform the Europe of the nineteenth century. These writers elaborate a new Europe of the imagination to confront the dead Europe of the Emperor. Romanticism is vast, and these texts are distinguished above all by the immense scope of the subjects they treat.

Chapter 12 has two theses. The first is that Staël’s semi-autobiographical Dix années d’exil may be read as a hermetic text, hiding an apocalyptic vision with Napoleon as one of various demonic figures. This was common coin around 1814. The second is that Staël’s apocalyptic vision accords with another hidden theme of hers: that a sibyl is known by her prophecies. Her complete works bear unexpected testimony to this theme, as is here demonstrated. The chapter also traces Staël’s engagement with Russia, both in her Dix années and in various apocryphal or newly attributed texts.