To this day, the intellectual exchanges between Germaine de Staël and Benjamin Constant are little known, particularly in the field of religion. Yet their writings, published or in manuscript, contain many traces of a joint reflection which, after their meeting in Sep- tember 1794, and in the aftermath of the Terreur, focused on the passions and their effects on human beings. Religion became a central topic of their analysis: is religion the source of passionate outbursts or an inner resource to be directed against the evils of the passions? These questions led de Staël and Constant to increasingly distinguish between inner and outer religion, the passions gradually being ousted from their reflections, parti- cularly under the influence of German thought, in favour of religious feeling.