Louise de Broglie, Countess d'Haussonville

Louise de Broglie, Countess d'Haussonville
Portrait by Ingres (1845)
Born	(1818-05-25)25 May 1818 Coppet, Switzerland
Died	21 April 1882(1882-04-21) (aged 63) Paris, France
Nationality	French
Other names	Louise Albertine, Princess de Broglie
Occupation	Writer

Louise de Broglie, Countess d'Haussonville (25 May 1818 – 21 April 1882) was a French essayist and biographer, and a member of the House of Broglie, a distinguished French family. Her 1845 portrait by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, which took three years to complete, has been exhibited in the Frick Collection in New York City since the 1930s.

Titled from birth (as was the custom in her father's aristocratic family) as Louise Albertine, Princess de Broglie, she was the daughter of statesman and diplomat Victor de Broglie, 3rd Duke de Broglie and Albertine, Baroness Staël von Holstein. She was the oldest of three children to survive to adulthood; her brother Albert would inherit the de Broglie ducal title and achieve political and literary renown, while her youngest brother Auguste, the future Abbé de Broglie, would pursue an ecclesiastical career. Through her mother, Louise was the granddaughter of famed saloniste and novelist Germaine de Staël, better known as Madame de Staël. Although de Staël died a year before her birth, Louise was born in her grandmother's Château de Coppet in Switzerland, a residence made famous through de Staël's writings and cultural notoriety. She would inherit the Coppet estate in 1878, and be buried there; the property, which has been open to the public since 1924–1925, is still owned by the Countess d'Haussonville's descendants.

Germaine de Staël was the daughter of the Swiss banker and politician Jacques Necker, who had been Louis XVI's director-general of finance, and his wife Suzanne Curchod, the poor but well-educated daughter of a Swiss pastor (Curchod had previously been engaged to historian Edward Gibbon). Louise's maternal grandfather was said to be Erik Magnus Staël von Holstein, Swedish Ambassador to France, but as de Staël also maintained a longstanding romantic relationship and intellectual collaboration with liberal political activist and writer Benjamin Constant, who believed he fathered Albertine (Louise's mother), it is possible that Constant was her biological grandfather.