In every age of revolution and reaction, when power grows centralized and the advocates of liberty are scattered, there arise sanctuaries where free minds find refuge. For the classical liberals of Revolutionary, Napoleonic, and Restoration Europe, that haven was the Château de Coppet, a modest estate on the shores of Lake Geneva that became one of the most remarkable intellectual centers in modern history. There, in the first decades of the 19th century, a circle of thinkers gathered around Madame Germaine de Staël to preserve and renew the philosophy of freedom in the face of the twin dangers of tyranny and chaos.
At Coppet met a constellation of figures whose combined influence helped shape the modern liberal tradition—men and women who sought to balance the Enlightenment’s love of reason with a sober recognition of the passions, institutions, and traditions that sustain liberty. Their work bridged the gap between the classical liberalism of the 18th century and the revival of liberal thought in the 19th. And their example—of discourse, hospitality, and intellectual courage—remains as vital today as ever.
Following the rise of the Jacobins, Directory, and Napoleon Bonaparte, France entered an era of censorship, regimentation, and the cult of centralized power. For those who had defended the liberal ideals of the original French Revolution of 1789—constitutional government, freedom of expression, the rule of law—the culmination of the Revolution in the Empire was a betrayal of everything they had fought for. Many fled into exile. One of them was Germaine de Staël, the daughter of the Swiss banker and minister to Louis XVI, Jacques Necker.
De Staël’s château at Coppet, just across the border from France, became both a physical refuge and an intellectual one. There, she gathered a circle of thinkers who shared a belief in liberty and moral responsibility, and who resisted the intellectual uniformity the post-1793 Revolution and Napoleonic period demanded.
The company she kept there was extraordinary. Benjamin Constant, perhaps the most important political theorist of classical liberalism in early 19th century Europe, made Coppet his second home. His essays, especially “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns,” captured the central challenge facing post-revolutionary Europe: how to preserve individual freedom in an age of mass politics and centralized administration. Constant’s insight was that liberty in the modern world must be built, not on direct popular sovereignty, as in the ancient polis, but on the protection of individual rights through institutions that restrain power. He warned that “the authority of all is no less dangerous than the authority of one,” and that democracy—untethered from liberal principles—could easily become despotism by majority vote, a theme later taken up by Tocqueville.
The economists who gathered at Coppet were no less influential. The economist Jean-Baptiste Say—later renowned for Say’s Law and his defense of entrepreneurial dynamism—was a frequent visitor. Building on the work of the Physiocrats and Smith, he emphasized that wealth is created not by hoarding money or manipulating trade balances but by productive activity—by the creative coordination of resources through voluntary exchange. His famous “law of markets,” that production itself creates the means for demand, was a riposte against the mercantilist and interventionist policies then in vogue. Say’s emphasis on entrepreneurship and the free circulation of goods and capital would profoundly influence later liberal and Austrian economists, from Bastiat to Mises.
Historian and economist Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi also came to stay. A firm believer in individual property and voluntary exchange, his chief concern was to remind liberals that liberty must rest on a moral and social foundation—that human beings are not merely producers and consumers, but citizens bound by ties of affection and duty.
What bound these diverse figures together was a shared conviction that freedom was more than a political arrangement; it was a moral and cultural condition. The Coppet Group defended freedom of thought, religion, and enterprise not as abstract rights alone, but as expressions of human dignity.
In the shadow of Napoleon’s empire—the prototype of the modern bureaucratic state—the thinkers at Coppet articulated a vision of limited government, individual autonomy, and the rule of law. They sought to reconcile reason and faith, progress and order, rights and responsibilities.
The atmosphere de Staël created was one of earnest dialogue and open exchange. Guests debated literature, economics, religion, and politics late into the night. There were disagreements, even feuds, but the animating spirit was one of intellectual charity and curiosity—the belief that, through discussion, free minds could refine truth.
Every generation of liberty lovers faces the same challenge: how to sustain a tradition of thought in a world often hostile to it. Power—whether monarchical or democratic—tends naturally toward consolidation; liberty must be cultivated.
In that sense, Coppet was not just a historical episode but a model. It showed that even when liberty seems politically defeated, it can endure culturally—in conversation, in books, in communities of shared inquiry. The Coppet Group kept alive ideas that would later shape European liberalism in the nineteenth century and beyond.
Modern institutions like the Mises Institute play a similar role today. They provide a place for thinkers, scholars, and students to meet, debate, and refine ideas outside the constraints of political orthodoxy. As in de Staël’s time, when intellectual conformity was enforced by imperial decree, so today freedom of thought often depends on private initiative and personal courage.
Liberty’s future will not be secured by elections alone, but by the preservation of independent spaces—physical or virtual—where the conversation of the free can continue.
