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Whilst the title here may appear surprising or provocative when applied to the Napoleonic universe – a priori, two hundred years on, the term abdication (self-annihilation) can only evoke bad memories or echoes of the Emperor being forced to step down by the allies after Waterloo – nevertheless, this is not the only resonance possible. The word abdication can also be seen as the programmatic key or decode for relations between Germaine Staël and Napoleon, it being also an essentially Staëlian term. Here, the abdication is not historical or military but rather philosophical and moral. As shown in her Réflexions sur le suicide (which she published in 1812), for Madame de Staël, abdication means self-annihilation and the sacrifice of one’s interest when put to the test by pain: “It is unquestionable, that whenever we submit to adversity with mild magnanimity, we are refined and improved by the test. The noblest faculties of the soul are developed in suffering, and so salutary is the moral process of amelioration, that after a certain interval, it seldom fails to restore us to tranquility. [...] Human existence, properly understood, is directed to self-annihilation, or the subjection of all petty individual interests, to the principles of eternal truth and justice.”