This chapter looks at Germaine de Staël's complex construction of fathers in relation to slavery and abolition. Central to that construction is Staël's own father, Jacques Necker, who appears in person or in various guises in his daughter's fictional, biographical, historical, and other writings. The painting Mme de Staël à côté du buste de son père Jacques Necker attributed to Firmin Massot (Figure 2), which Staël commissioned shortly after Necker's death, captures the strong bond between father and daughter. Both gaze to their left in the sentimental, benevolent spirit of those devoted to the cause of freedom and the end of oppression. Despite the darkening clouds above them, both project a sense of calm fortitude. Their fates are portrayed as inextricably linked. The daughter stands proudly with her father and slightly below him, as age and sex dictate. His sole heir, Staël appears as a woman endowed with both the physical and intellectual attributes befitting the bearer of her father's familial and political legacy.

I argue here that Staël's love and admiration for Necker produced a conflict between her submission to patriarchal authority on the one hand and her commitment to the rights of slaves and women on the other. Consider the words she spoke at the end of her life, “J'ai toujour été la même, vive et triste. J'ai aimé Dieu, mon père et la liberté” (“i've always been the same, lively and sad. I loved God, my father and freedom.”) Perhaps it was the inherent incompatibility between patriarchy and freedom that fueled both Staël's passion and her unhappiness.