Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein (1766-1817), known as Madame de Staël, was a writer, philosopher, and politically engaged woman who survived the French Revolution and was exiled multiple times by Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821). She was the only daughter of notable writer Suzanne Curchod Necker (1737-1794) and Jacques Necker (1732-1804), a banker, politician, and Minister of Finance for France's King Louis XVI before the Revolution.

Born in France, Germaine Necker married the Swedish ambassador to France, Baron Eric de Staël-Holstein (1749-1802); it was a marriage of convenience which ended in a formal separation in 1797. She had three children.

Staël-Holstein went to Coppet, Switzerland, the family residence near Geneva, in 1793, where she established a meeting place for some of western Europe's leading intellectuals. She returned to France a year later and published several political and literary essays. Because Napolean considered her a threat, he banished Madame de Staël a distance of forty miles from Paris in 1803, and thereafter she made Coppet her headquarters. She traveled extensively throughout Europe and continued to write. She returned to France in 1816 and died a year later in Paris.