Chapter 4 proposes answers to the problem facing the friends of liberty when Rousseau’s social contract succumbed beneath the Terror. First, Rousseau in Le Contrat social identifies liberty with citizens’ active participation in the polis or res publica. Jacobin discourse returns often to this definition. Second, as early as the Consulat, Constant opposes this ancient and public liberty, now discredited by the Terror, to the modern private liberty he celebrates: These “positive and negative” liberties have since become a touchstone of modern liberalism. As it happens, this distinction already appears in Staël’s neglected political treatises and broadsides written under the Convention and the Directoire, as shown here. Third, this “negative liberty” of classical liberalism, whose weaknesses we begin to underline today, presents a problem for Staël as a woman that was necessarily less crucial to her friend, a new problem to which her work again offers a solution.