Germaine Necker was born in Paris to Swiss Protestant parents, in 1766. Her father, Jacques Necker, was an aristocratic, a banker, who was appointed Louis XVI's finance minister in 1777. His dismissal by the king was a link in the series of events which led to the storming of the Bastille. The young Germaine Necker studied privately at home, and grew up attending the salon of her mother, Suzanne (Curchod) Necker. In her childhood Germaine met such famous figures as Edward Gibbon, who had once courted her mother, Denis Diderot, and Jean d'Alembert. In 1786 Germaine married the Swedish ambassador, Baron Erik de Stal-Holstein (d. 1802), a penniless nobleman, who was 17 year older than she. Germaine never loved her husband and only her first child, Edwige-Gustavine, was fathered by her husband. Edwige-Gustavine died in 1789. Assured that she would never have to live in Sweden, she established herself as a leading figure in Parisian society. The marriage ended in 1797 in formal separation.

Like other educated, wealthy women, Madame de Stal opened her own salon, a closed circle in which writers, artists, and critics discussed about manners and good taste, and decided the fate of literature fashions.

Germaine de Stal was not a beauty. "I would gladly give half of the wit with which I am credited for half of the beauty you possess." she wrote in a letter to Madame Rcamier. However, her talents attracted influential men. In a portrait painting by Franois Grard, she looks somewhat plump, but she has a glittering, alert look in her eyes and she smiles cheerfully. "Men of wit are so astounded by the existence of women rivals that they cannot judge them with either an adversary's generosity or protector's indulgence. This is a new kind of combat, in which men follow the laws of neither kindness nor honor."

As a writer Germaine de Stal made her breakthrough with Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractre de J.-J. Rousseau (1788), which expressed her deep admiration of the great thinker. She supported Rousseau's idea that passionate love is natural to human beings and to yield oneself to love will not result in abandoning virtue. After the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, she became involved with power struggles, and supported the moderate liberal policies of her father. Both revolutionary Jacobins and aristocratic migrs viewed her with suspicion. Perhaps this prompted her to state: "In monarchies, women have ridicule to fear; in republic, hatred." Madame de Stal believed in progress - like Voltaire in his own way - and claimed that liberty and religious tolerance were essential preconditions for bringing literature to new heights. He also warned about the too enthusiastic military spirit which started to spread. The view did not gain much response among Napoleon's supporters.

In 1791 she helped her lover Louis de Narbonne to escape to England. She gave birth to his son, Albert, and in 1793 she fled from Paris to England and then settled to Coppet, Switzerland, where her family had an estate. During this period she had a brief love affair with Adolph von Ribbing. With her literary connections and skills as a conversationalist, she created a new meeting place for the leading Western intellectuals. At the end of the Reign of Terror in 1794, she returned to Paris.

In 1795 Madame de Stal started an affair with Benjamin Constant de Rebecque (1767-1830) and had one daughter, Albertine, probably fathered by him. This relationship lasted 15 years. Under his influence she started to read the work of brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich von Schlegel. In 1795-76 she was exiled by Napoleon. She published several political and literary essays, including De l'influence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des nations (1796). In De la littrature considre das ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (1800). Later, her works Delphine (1802) and Corinne (1807) were among the early examples of the Romantic style of writing. Corinne became an immediate success. 

After Napoleon became the first consul and the de facto leader of France, Constant joined the opposition. He was a member of the Tribunate, the council that debated proposed laws, and made speeches that Napoleon Bonaparte thought were written by Madame de Stal. Perhaps it did not flatter Constant who was also a writer.Not only Constant but also Madame de Stal started to annoy Napoleon and his minister for security, Joseph Fouch: her salon was a place which supported new ideas, and in 1803 she was ordered to move 150 miles from Paris.

Germaine de Stal went to Weimar, where Schiller and Goethe tried in vain avoid her company - she talked too much and in aesthetic questions they considered her taste bourgeois. When her father died she returned to Coppet, which became an anti-Bonapartist headquarters. Doors to literary circles opened easily because she was guided by A.W. von Schlegel, whom she had met earlier and whom she treated like a dog. Schlegel influenced her views on literature, and was tutor of her children. The hospitality she received did not hinder her from recognizing that the individual freedom of the German poets was nothing more than a compensation for their exclusion from active political life. De l'Allemagne, a study of German culture, appeared in 1810. Although the censors did not see much harm in it, the minister of police banned the book as an anti-French work. The French edition, 10000 copies, was seized and destroyed. Some copies escaped the police and came out in fresh edition in England. De l'Allemagne described the German people as musical and more interested in ideas than action. Her image of Germans and the Romantic generation offered an alternative view of the country. Madame de Stal advocated the idea, which became a clich, that the classical was descended from the Pagan Roman past, dominant in southern Europe, and the romantic from the knightly and Christian world of the North.

In 1811 Germaine de Sal married secretly Jean Rocca, a young officer and nearly half of her age, and again publicly five years later; their only son was born retarded. Increasingly persecuted by Napoleon's police, she spent eight weeks in Russia in 1812, swearing that she would never live in any country under Napoleon's rule. Because of the French invasion of Russia, she had to travel to St. Petersburg via Kiev, Moscow and Novgorod. From Finland she continued to Stockholm, and finally to London, where she had a triumphant reception and met among others Lord Byron.

After Waterloo in 1814 Madame de Stal returned to Paris. Despite her poor health she enthusiastically joined the political struggle. She opposed the reactionary tendencies of the Bourbon regime and worked for the abolition of the slave trade. She died after a stroke on July 14, 1817, in Paris; her body was buried at the feet of her parents, who were lying in a basin filled with alcohol. In the bas-relief she had written: "My mother takes my father by the hand to lead him to Heaven, and he looks down with kindness upon a kneeling figure shrouded in a veil." Her work Dix Annes d'exil (1821) was published posthumously. Jean Rocca died six months later in 1818. Only her daughter Albertine, who married the duc de Broglie, left descendants.