Suzanne Curchod

See also: Necker

Suzanne Curchod , by its marriage Mrs Necker was born with Crassier (Canton of Vaud, Suisse) in May 1739 and died in Beaulieu (Swiss) the May 6th 1794.

Girl of a Pasteur of the country of Vaud, it receives an education Protestante solid and complete. Remained poor, she marries in 1764 the financier - Switzerland, him-also - Jacques Necker, which already made fortune, and which will become Minister for Finance of Louis XVI. They are convinced Protestants, but if they are Calvinistes enthusiastic, they are neither Puritains, nor Dogmatiques. From their union is born a girl, Germaine, future the Madam de Staël.

The ambition of Jacques Necker exceeds the financial world. It is the capacity which he wants and which he will reach in 1776, in spite of the double difficulty of not being neither French nor catholic. It reaches the direction of Finances of France, having much with his wife who supports her career with a great skill, there deploying much energy and a great activity; it indeed knew to create and reign on a living room quickly become one of most famous of Paris, a literary Salon because it included/understood and measured the influence of the writers on the opinion.

It is in fact the last large living room of the Ancien Mode, where one discusses literature, but also political, and which accommodates many artists and writers: Jean-François Marmontel, the Toothing-stone, Buffon, Grimm, Mably, the abbot Raynal, Bernardin of Saint-Pierre and largest collaborators of the Encyclopedia, Diderot, of Alembert, but also Mrs Geoffrin, Madam of Swiss Deffand, and the friends of , because Necker remain very attached to the friends of their country of origin.

It could however never be devoted to its taste for the writing, this activity displeasing with her husband for a woman and particularly for his. She thus leaves only few writings, among which a Mémoire on the Establishment of the old people's homes in 1786 and of the Réflexions on the divorce in 1794. She however takes care to give to her daughter, future the Madam de Staël, the best education which is, quite higher than that of which can profit the young girls from her medium at the same time, and this one will be able to exploit its taste for the literature and its talent of writer.

It is also famous to have founded in Paris, in 1778, a Hôpital which bears its name today: Hospital Necker/Ill children. After the fall of the ministry of her husband, it is withdrawn in Switzerland in its Château of Coppet.

References

Paul-Gabriel d' Haussonville, the Living room of Mrs Necker , Paris, Calmann-Levy, 1882,2 vol.

Random links: