French Revolution and empire from 1789 to the mid-19th century
The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the complex literary culture
of the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feeling—whether based on reason, sentiment,
or an exacerbated sensibility—and most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789 to
1815. Certainly, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The
insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly
underlined the regime’s centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This classicism, or, strictly
speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and literary forms
that had dominated “serious” literature—and drama in particular—in France for almost two
centuries. But Rousseau’s emphasis on subjectivity and sentiment still had its heirs, as did the
new forms of writing he had helped to evolve. Likewise, while the Gothic violence that had
emerged in early Revolutionary drama and novels was curbed, its dynamic remained. The seeds
of French Romanticism had been sown in national ground, long before writers began to turn to
other nations to kindle their inspiration.
The poetry of Chénier
André Chénier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in
volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets, who
saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical spirit,
especially that of Greece, Chénier exploited Classical myths for modern purposes. He began
work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, “Hermès,” a history of the universe and human
progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit but also anticipate the
episodic epic poems of the later Romantics. Chénier, though a moderate in revolutionary terms,
was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in the scathing fierceness of his lyrical
satires, the Ïambes, many of which were written from prison shortly before his execution. His
best-known poems, however, are elegies that sing of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and
lost happiness.
Revolutionary oratory and polemic
The intensity of political debate in Paris during the Revolution, whether in clubs, in the
National Assembly, or before tribunals, threw into prominence the arts of oratory. Speaking in
the name of reason, virtue, and liberty and using the Roman Republic or the city-states of Greece
as a frame of reference, Revolutionary leaders such as Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, and Louis de Saint-Just infused the
intellectual preoccupations of the Enlightenment with a sense of drama and passion. This
renewal of rhetoric is echoed in the enormously expanded political press, including Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Jacques-René Hébert’s Le Père Duchesne (“Old
Duchesne”), and Gracchus Babeuf’s Le Tribun du peuple (“The Defender of the People”). To
some extent the proclamations and communiqués of Napoleon prolonged this Revolutionary
eloquence.
Chateaubriand
The French Revolution made an émigré of François-Auguste-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, and his first major work, the Essai sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”; Eng. trans. An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and
Modern), is a complex and sometimes confused attempt to understand revolution in general, the
French Revolution in particular, and the individual’s relationship to these phenomena.
Chateaubriand took as his model the stance of the 18th-century philosophe, but his Génie du
christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) caught a new mood of return to religious faith
based on emotional appeals and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Christianity. The impact
of this work was enormous, not least in its reinstatement of nature, and natural landscape, as the
lodging place of spiritual repose and renewal. Within it were two short narratives, Atala (Eng.
trans. Atala, also translated in Atala, René), a tale of fatal passion and savage (Indian) nobility,
and René (Eng. trans. René). A young hero not dissimilar to Goethe’s Werther, René, who flees
pain and suffering in Europe to look vainly for refuge in the wilds of America, came to represent
the mal du siècle (world-weariness, literally “sickness of the century”), the essence of Romantic
sensibility; he is insecure, solitary, disorientated, and in flight, searching for a happiness that will
always evade him.
Behind all Chateaubriand’s works lies the sense of a break, caused by the French
Revolution, in a stable, ordered existence. His Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848–50; “Memoirs
from Beyond the Tomb”; Eng. trans. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand), the masterpiece he
worked on most of his adult life and intended for posthumous publication, uses the
autobiographical format to meditate on the history of France, the passing of time, and the vanity
of human desires. His lyrical and rhythmic prose left a deep impression on many Romantic
writers.
Mme de Staël and the debate on literature
Mme de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein) was truly
encyclopaedic in her interests. Her contribution to intellectual debate far exceeded any narrow
definition of literature. At first liberal and then, after her offer of support was rebuffed, fiercely
anti-Napoleon in politics, eclectic in philosophy, mixing rationalism and spiritualism, and
determinedly internationalist in her feeling for literature, she moved most easily in a world of
ideas, surrounding herself with the salon of intellectuals she founded at Coppet, Switzerland. Her
two novels, Delphine (1802; Delphine) and Corinne (1807; Corinne, or Italy), focus on the limits
society tries to impose on the independent woman and the woman of genius. The account of
Corinne’s personal drama is combined with an examination of national identities in
postrevolutionary Europe, offering original insights into how new alliances can be forged across
old, hostile boundaries and what part artistic form and women’s influence could play in making
new communities. Her two most influential works, De la littérature (1800; The Influence of
Literature upon Society) and De l’Allemagne (1810; Germany), expanded conceptions of
literature with the claim that different social forms needed different literary modes: in particular,
postrevolutionary society required a new literature. She explored the contrast, as she saw it,
between the literature of the south (rational, Classical) and the literature of the north (emotional,
Romantic), and she explored the potential interest for French culture of foreign writers such as
William Shakespeare, Ossian, and above all the German Romantics.
Many of these ideas emerged from discussions with August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose
work on the drama was widely translated, and from meetings with and readings of the Germans
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The Genevan economist and writer Jean-
Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi reinforced many of Mme de Staël’s points in his De la
littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813; Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe).
This cosmopolitan cultural relativism was infuriating to many of Staël’s French contemporaries
in the prevailing Neoclassical literary climate.
Romanticism
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain,
with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of
revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very
particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of
history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle
(literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for
his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or
whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was
sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any
simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of
1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness,
loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often
in the form of frustrated dynamism.
Foreign influences
When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France,
they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and
Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative
writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon,
was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European
cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence
of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a
model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of
Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy
and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their
literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these
countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and
revenge tales.
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one
of the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding
poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a
variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving
frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing
ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830,
there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics
and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of
l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a
reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the
intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.
Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Méditations poétiques
(1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and remaining
unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating through the musicality of
his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings unfulfilled. This soft-centred
elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and Byronic revolt. The Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses (1830; “Poetic and Religious Harmonies”; Eng. trans. in A Biographical
Sketch), with their religious emotion, reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened
by unease and disquiet. Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d’un ange (1838; “The
Fall of an Angel”) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine’s
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading role in the
provisional government.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In
his first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman
Catholic legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to
Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous
quality of Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there
are already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and
problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of
poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of
pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating
on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is
interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic
consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic,
prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.
Vigny
In contrast to Hugo’s scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more limited
and controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however, he proposed
the poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified, moralizing
philosopher, using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense expression of his
thought. Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble stoicism, his work focuses
on figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His
Les Destinées (1864; “The Fates”), composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies
the high spiritual aspiration that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and
concentration of expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.
Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his
Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; “Tales of Spain and Italy”). His exuberant sense of humour
led him to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them ironically. Later, a
trajectory from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of emptiness and futility, sustained only
intermittently by the linking of suffering with love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense
of self. The Nuits (“Nights”) poems (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit
d’août,” “La Nuit d’octobre,” 1835–37) express the purifying power of suffering in verse of
sustained sincerity, purged of all the early showiness.
Nerval
For a long while Gérard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature (notably
Goethe’s Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as his real
contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimères (The Chimeras), composed between about
1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual odyssey Aurélia (1853–54; Eng. trans.
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an
anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of
literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of
achievement of that side of the Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the
spiritual reintegration of the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the
prose poem and his use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays
from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the
period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging
audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism.
Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such
battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in
the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a
contemporary public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play
Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—
which he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could
transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited
from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a
sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic
local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young
Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a
dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a
similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the
mingling of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic
drama. The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic
melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.
Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most
famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many
analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by
Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of
poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic
estrangement.
Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of
his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued
to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—
almost charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather
in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying
disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one
indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with
clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological
study of a once pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted
youth and lost illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a
prose that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of
Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and
crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison
with Shakespeare.
The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the complex literary culture
of the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feeling—whether based on reason, sentiment,
or an exacerbated sensibility—and most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789 to
1815. Certainly, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The
insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly
underlined the regime’s centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This classicism, or, strictly
speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and literary forms
that had dominated “serious” literature—and drama in particular—in France for almost two
centuries. But Rousseau’s emphasis on subjectivity and sentiment still had its heirs, as did the
new forms of writing he had helped to evolve. Likewise, while the Gothic violence that had
emerged in early Revolutionary drama and novels was curbed, its dynamic remained. The seeds
of French Romanticism had been sown in national ground, long before writers began to turn to
other nations to kindle their inspiration.
The poetry of Chénier
André Chénier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in
volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets, who
saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical spirit,
especially that of Greece, Chénier exploited Classical myths for modern purposes. He began
work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, “Hermès,” a history of the universe and human
progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit but also anticipate the
episodic epic poems of the later Romantics. Chénier, though a moderate in revolutionary terms,
was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in the scathing fierceness of his lyrical
satires, the Ïambes, many of which were written from prison shortly before his execution. His
best-known poems, however, are elegies that sing of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and
lost happiness.
Revolutionary oratory and polemic
The intensity of political debate in Paris during the Revolution, whether in clubs, in the
National Assembly, or before tribunals, threw into prominence the arts of oratory. Speaking in
the name of reason, virtue, and liberty and using the Roman Republic or the city-states of Greece
as a frame of reference, Revolutionary leaders such as Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, and Louis de Saint-Just infused the
intellectual preoccupations of the Enlightenment with a sense of drama and passion. This
renewal of rhetoric is echoed in the enormously expanded political press, including Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Jacques-René Hébert’s Le Père Duchesne (“Old
Duchesne”), and Gracchus Babeuf’s Le Tribun du peuple (“The Defender of the People”). To
some extent the proclamations and communiqués of Napoleon prolonged this Revolutionary
eloquence.
Chateaubriand
The French Revolution made an émigré of François-Auguste-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, and his first major work, the Essai sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”; Eng. trans. An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and
Modern), is a complex and sometimes confused attempt to understand revolution in general, the
French Revolution in particular, and the individual’s relationship to these phenomena.
Chateaubriand took as his model the stance of the 18th-century philosophe, but his Génie du
christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) caught a new mood of return to religious faith
based on emotional appeals and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Christianity. The impact
of this work was enormous, not least in its reinstatement of nature, and natural landscape, as the
lodging place of spiritual repose and renewal. Within it were two short narratives, Atala (Eng.
trans. Atala, also translated in Atala, René), a tale of fatal passion and savage (Indian) nobility,
and René (Eng. trans. René). A young hero not dissimilar to Goethe’s Werther, René, who flees
pain and suffering in Europe to look vainly for refuge in the wilds of America, came to represent
the mal du siècle (world-weariness, literally “sickness of the century”), the essence of Romantic
sensibility; he is insecure, solitary, disorientated, and in flight, searching for a happiness that will
always evade him.
Behind all Chateaubriand’s works lies the sense of a break, caused by the French
Revolution, in a stable, ordered existence. His Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848–50; “Memoirs
from Beyond the Tomb”; Eng. trans. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand), the masterpiece he
worked on most of his adult life and intended for posthumous publication, uses the
autobiographical format to meditate on the history of France, the passing of time, and the vanity
of human desires. His lyrical and rhythmic prose left a deep impression on many Romantic
writers.
Mme de Staël and the debate on literature
Mme de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein) was truly
encyclopaedic in her interests. Her contribution to intellectual debate far exceeded any narrow
definition of literature. At first liberal and then, after her offer of support was rebuffed, fiercely
anti-Napoleon in politics, eclectic in philosophy, mixing rationalism and spiritualism, and
determinedly internationalist in her feeling for literature, she moved most easily in a world of
ideas, surrounding herself with the salon of intellectuals she founded at Coppet, Switzerland. Her
two novels, Delphine (1802; Delphine) and Corinne (1807; Corinne, or Italy), focus on the limits
society tries to impose on the independent woman and the woman of genius. The account of
Corinne’s personal drama is combined with an examination of national identities in
postrevolutionary Europe, offering original insights into how new alliances can be forged across
old, hostile boundaries and what part artistic form and women’s influence could play in making
new communities. Her two most influential works, De la littérature (1800; The Influence of
Literature upon Society) and De l’Allemagne (1810; Germany), expanded conceptions of
literature with the claim that different social forms needed different literary modes: in particular,
postrevolutionary society required a new literature. She explored the contrast, as she saw it,
between the literature of the south (rational, Classical) and the literature of the north (emotional,
Romantic), and she explored the potential interest for French culture of foreign writers such as
William Shakespeare, Ossian, and above all the German Romantics.
Many of these ideas emerged from discussions with August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose
work on the drama was widely translated, and from meetings with and readings of the Germans
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The Genevan economist and writer Jean-
Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi reinforced many of Mme de Staël’s points in his De la
littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813; Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe).
This cosmopolitan cultural relativism was infuriating to many of Staël’s French contemporaries
in the prevailing Neoclassical literary climate.
Romanticism
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain,
with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of
revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very
particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of
history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle
(literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for
his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or
whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was
sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any
simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of
1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness,
loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often
in the form of frustrated dynamism.
Foreign influences
When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France,
they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and
Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative
writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon,
was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European
cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence
of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a
model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of
Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy
and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their
literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these
countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and
revenge tales.
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one
of the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding
poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a
variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving
frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing
ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830,
there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics
and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of
l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a
reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the
intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.
Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Méditations poétiques
(1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and remaining
unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating through the musicality of
his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings unfulfilled. This soft-centred
elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and Byronic revolt. The Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses (1830; “Poetic and Religious Harmonies”; Eng. trans. in A Biographical
Sketch), with their religious emotion, reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened
by unease and disquiet. Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d’un ange (1838; “The
Fall of an Angel”) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine’s
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading role in the
provisional government.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In
his first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman
Catholic legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to
Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous
quality of Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there
are already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and
problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of
poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of
pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating
on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is
interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic
consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic,
prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.
Vigny
In contrast to Hugo’s scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more limited
and controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however, he proposed
the poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified, moralizing
philosopher, using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense expression of his
thought. Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble stoicism, his work focuses
on figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His
Les Destinées (1864; “The Fates”), composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies
the high spiritual aspiration that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and
concentration of expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.
Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his
Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; “Tales of Spain and Italy”). His exuberant sense of humour
led him to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them ironically. Later, a
trajectory from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of emptiness and futility, sustained only
intermittently by the linking of suffering with love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense
of self. The Nuits (“Nights”) poems (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit
d’août,” “La Nuit d’octobre,” 1835–37) express the purifying power of suffering in verse of
sustained sincerity, purged of all the early showiness.
Nerval
For a long while Gérard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature (notably
Goethe’s Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as his real
contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimères (The Chimeras), composed between about
1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual odyssey Aurélia (1853–54; Eng. trans.
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an
anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of
literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of
achievement of that side of the Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the
spiritual reintegration of the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the
prose poem and his use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays
from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the
period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging
audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism.
Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such
battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in
the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a
contemporary public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play
Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—
which he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could
transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited
from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a
sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic
local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young
Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a
dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a
similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the
mingling of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic
drama. The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic
melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.
Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most
famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many
analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by
Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of
poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic
estrangement.
Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of
his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued
to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—
almost charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather
in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying
disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one
indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with
clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological
study of a once pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted
youth and lost illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a
prose that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of
Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and
crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison
with Shakespeare.
The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the complex literary culture
of the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feeling—whether based on reason, sentiment,
or an exacerbated sensibility—and most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789 to
1815. Certainly, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The
insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly
underlined the regime’s centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This classicism, or, strictly
speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and literary forms
that had dominated “serious” literature—and drama in particular—in France for almost two
centuries. But Rousseau’s emphasis on subjectivity and sentiment still had its heirs, as did the
new forms of writing he had helped to evolve. Likewise, while the Gothic violence that had
emerged in early Revolutionary drama and novels was curbed, its dynamic remained. The seeds
of French Romanticism had been sown in national ground, long before writers began to turn to
other nations to kindle their inspiration.
The poetry of Chénier
André Chénier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in
volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets, who
saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical spirit,
especially that of Greece, Chénier exploited Classical myths for modern purposes. He began
work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, “Hermès,” a history of the universe and human
progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit but also anticipate the
episodic epic poems of the later Romantics. Chénier, though a moderate in revolutionary terms,
was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in the scathing fierceness of his lyrical
satires, the Ïambes, many of which were written from prison shortly before his execution. His
best-known poems, however, are elegies that sing of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and
lost happiness.
Revolutionary oratory and polemic
The intensity of political debate in Paris during the Revolution, whether in clubs, in the
National Assembly, or before tribunals, threw into prominence the arts of oratory. Speaking in
the name of reason, virtue, and liberty and using the Roman Republic or the city-states of Greece
as a frame of reference, Revolutionary leaders such as Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, and Louis de Saint-Just infused the
intellectual preoccupations of the Enlightenment with a sense of drama and passion. This
renewal of rhetoric is echoed in the enormously expanded political press, including Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Jacques-René Hébert’s Le Père Duchesne (“Old
Duchesne”), and Gracchus Babeuf’s Le Tribun du peuple (“The Defender of the People”). To
some extent the proclamations and communiqués of Napoleon prolonged this Revolutionary
eloquence.
Chateaubriand
The French Revolution made an émigré of François-Auguste-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, and his first major work, the Essai sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”; Eng. trans. An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and
Modern), is a complex and sometimes confused attempt to understand revolution in general, the
French Revolution in particular, and the individual’s relationship to these phenomena.
Chateaubriand took as his model the stance of the 18th-century philosophe, but his Génie du
christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) caught a new mood of return to religious faith
based on emotional appeals and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Christianity. The impact
of this work was enormous, not least in its reinstatement of nature, and natural landscape, as the
lodging place of spiritual repose and renewal. Within it were two short narratives, Atala (Eng.
trans. Atala, also translated in Atala, René), a tale of fatal passion and savage (Indian) nobility,
and René (Eng. trans. René). A young hero not dissimilar to Goethe’s Werther, René, who flees
pain and suffering in Europe to look vainly for refuge in the wilds of America, came to represent
the mal du siècle (world-weariness, literally “sickness of the century”), the essence of Romantic
sensibility; he is insecure, solitary, disorientated, and in flight, searching for a happiness that will
always evade him.
Behind all Chateaubriand’s works lies the sense of a break, caused by the French
Revolution, in a stable, ordered existence. His Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848–50; “Memoirs
from Beyond the Tomb”; Eng. trans. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand), the masterpiece he
worked on most of his adult life and intended for posthumous publication, uses the
autobiographical format to meditate on the history of France, the passing of time, and the vanity
of human desires. His lyrical and rhythmic prose left a deep impression on many Romantic
writers.
Mme de Staël and the debate on literature
Mme de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein) was truly
encyclopaedic in her interests. Her contribution to intellectual debate far exceeded any narrow
definition of literature. At first liberal and then, after her offer of support was rebuffed, fiercely
anti-Napoleon in politics, eclectic in philosophy, mixing rationalism and spiritualism, and
determinedly internationalist in her feeling for literature, she moved most easily in a world of
ideas, surrounding herself with the salon of intellectuals she founded at Coppet, Switzerland. Her
two novels, Delphine (1802; Delphine) and Corinne (1807; Corinne, or Italy), focus on the limits
society tries to impose on the independent woman and the woman of genius. The account of
Corinne’s personal drama is combined with an examination of national identities in
postrevolutionary Europe, offering original insights into how new alliances can be forged across
old, hostile boundaries and what part artistic form and women’s influence could play in making
new communities. Her two most influential works, De la littérature (1800; The Influence of
Literature upon Society) and De l’Allemagne (1810; Germany), expanded conceptions of
literature with the claim that different social forms needed different literary modes: in particular,
postrevolutionary society required a new literature. She explored the contrast, as she saw it,
between the literature of the south (rational, Classical) and the literature of the north (emotional,
Romantic), and she explored the potential interest for French culture of foreign writers such as
William Shakespeare, Ossian, and above all the German Romantics.
Many of these ideas emerged from discussions with August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose
work on the drama was widely translated, and from meetings with and readings of the Germans
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The Genevan economist and writer Jean-
Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi reinforced many of Mme de Staël’s points in his De la
littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813; Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe).
This cosmopolitan cultural relativism was infuriating to many of Staël’s French contemporaries
in the prevailing Neoclassical literary climate.
Romanticism
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain,
with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of
revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very
particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of
history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle
(literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for
his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or
whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was
sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any
simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of
1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness,
loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often
in the form of frustrated dynamism.
Foreign influences
When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France,
they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and
Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative
writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon,
was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European
cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence
of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a
model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of
Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy
and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their
literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these
countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and
revenge tales.
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one
of the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding
poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a
variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving
frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing
ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830,
there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics
and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of
l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a
reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the
intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.
Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Méditations poétiques
(1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and remaining
unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating through the musicality of
his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings unfulfilled. This soft-centred
elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and Byronic revolt. The Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses (1830; “Poetic and Religious Harmonies”; Eng. trans. in A Biographical
Sketch), with their religious emotion, reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened
by unease and disquiet. Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d’un ange (1838; “The
Fall of an Angel”) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine’s
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading role in the
provisional government.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In
his first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman
Catholic legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to
Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous
quality of Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there
are already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and
problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of
poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of
pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating
on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is
interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic
consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic,
prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.
Vigny
In contrast to Hugo’s scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more limited
and controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however, he proposed
the poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified, moralizing
philosopher, using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense expression of his
thought. Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble stoicism, his work focuses
on figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His
Les Destinées (1864; “The Fates”), composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies
the high spiritual aspiration that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and
concentration of expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.
Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his
Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; “Tales of Spain and Italy”). His exuberant sense of humour
led him to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them ironically. Later, a
trajectory from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of emptiness and futility, sustained only
intermittently by the linking of suffering with love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense
of self. The Nuits (“Nights”) poems (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit
d’août,” “La Nuit d’octobre,” 1835–37) express the purifying power of suffering in verse of
sustained sincerity, purged of all the early showiness.
Nerval
For a long while Gérard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature (notably
Goethe’s Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as his real
contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimères (The Chimeras), composed between about
1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual odyssey Aurélia (1853–54; Eng. trans.
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an
anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of
literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of
achievement of that side of the Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the
spiritual reintegration of the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the
prose poem and his use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays
from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the
period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging
audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism.
Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such
battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in
the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a
contemporary public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play
Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—
which he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could
transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited
from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a
sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic
local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young
Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a
dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a
similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the
mingling of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic
drama. The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic
melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.
Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most
famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many
analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by
Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of
poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic
estrangement.
Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of
his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued
to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—
almost charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather
in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying
disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one
indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with
clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological
study of a once pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted
youth and lost illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a
prose that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of
Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and
crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison
with Shakespeare.
The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the complex literary culture
of the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feeling—whether based on reason, sentiment,
or an exacerbated sensibility—and most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789 to
1815. Certainly, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The
insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly
underlined the regime’s centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This classicism, or, strictly
speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and literary forms
that had dominated “serious” literature—and drama in particular—in France for almost two
centuries. But Rousseau’s emphasis on subjectivity and sentiment still had its heirs, as did the
new forms of writing he had helped to evolve. Likewise, while the Gothic violence that had
emerged in early Revolutionary drama and novels was curbed, its dynamic remained. The seeds
of French Romanticism had been sown in national ground, long before writers began to turn to
other nations to kindle their inspiration.
The poetry of Chénier
André Chénier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in
volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets, who
saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical spirit,
especially that of Greece, Chénier exploited Classical myths for modern purposes. He began
work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, “Hermès,” a history of the universe and human
progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit but also anticipate the
episodic epic poems of the later Romantics. Chénier, though a moderate in revolutionary terms,
was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in the scathing fierceness of his lyrical
satires, the Ïambes, many of which were written from prison shortly before his execution. His
best-known poems, however, are elegies that sing of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and
lost happiness.
Revolutionary oratory and polemic
The intensity of political debate in Paris during the Revolution, whether in clubs, in the
National Assembly, or before tribunals, threw into prominence the arts of oratory. Speaking in
the name of reason, virtue, and liberty and using the Roman Republic or the city-states of Greece
as a frame of reference, Revolutionary leaders such as Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, and Louis de Saint-Just infused the
intellectual preoccupations of the Enlightenment with a sense of drama and passion. This
renewal of rhetoric is echoed in the enormously expanded political press, including Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Jacques-René Hébert’s Le Père Duchesne (“Old
Duchesne”), and Gracchus Babeuf’s Le Tribun du peuple (“The Defender of the People”). To
some extent the proclamations and communiqués of Napoleon prolonged this Revolutionary
eloquence.
Chateaubriand
The French Revolution made an émigré of François-Auguste-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, and his first major work, the Essai sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”; Eng. trans. An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and
Modern), is a complex and sometimes confused attempt to understand revolution in general, the
French Revolution in particular, and the individual’s relationship to these phenomena.
Chateaubriand took as his model the stance of the 18th-century philosophe, but his Génie du
christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) caught a new mood of return to religious faith
based on emotional appeals and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Christianity. The impact
of this work was enormous, not least in its reinstatement of nature, and natural landscape, as the
lodging place of spiritual repose and renewal. Within it were two short narratives, Atala (Eng.
trans. Atala, also translated in Atala, René), a tale of fatal passion and savage (Indian) nobility,
and René (Eng. trans. René). A young hero not dissimilar to Goethe’s Werther, René, who flees
pain and suffering in Europe to look vainly for refuge in the wilds of America, came to represent
the mal du siècle (world-weariness, literally “sickness of the century”), the essence of Romantic
sensibility; he is insecure, solitary, disorientated, and in flight, searching for a happiness that will
always evade him.
Behind all Chateaubriand’s works lies the sense of a break, caused by the French
Revolution, in a stable, ordered existence. His Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848–50; “Memoirs
from Beyond the Tomb”; Eng. trans. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand), the masterpiece he
worked on most of his adult life and intended for posthumous publication, uses the
autobiographical format to meditate on the history of France, the passing of time, and the vanity
of human desires. His lyrical and rhythmic prose left a deep impression on many Romantic
writers.
Mme de Staël and the debate on literature
Mme de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein) was truly
encyclopaedic in her interests. Her contribution to intellectual debate far exceeded any narrow
definition of literature. At first liberal and then, after her offer of support was rebuffed, fiercely
anti-Napoleon in politics, eclectic in philosophy, mixing rationalism and spiritualism, and
determinedly internationalist in her feeling for literature, she moved most easily in a world of
ideas, surrounding herself with the salon of intellectuals she founded at Coppet, Switzerland. Her
two novels, Delphine (1802; Delphine) and Corinne (1807; Corinne, or Italy), focus on the limits
society tries to impose on the independent woman and the woman of genius. The account of
Corinne’s personal drama is combined with an examination of national identities in
postrevolutionary Europe, offering original insights into how new alliances can be forged across
old, hostile boundaries and what part artistic form and women’s influence could play in making
new communities. Her two most influential works, De la littérature (1800; The Influence of
Literature upon Society) and De l’Allemagne (1810; Germany), expanded conceptions of
literature with the claim that different social forms needed different literary modes: in particular,
postrevolutionary society required a new literature. She explored the contrast, as she saw it,
between the literature of the south (rational, Classical) and the literature of the north (emotional,
Romantic), and she explored the potential interest for French culture of foreign writers such as
William Shakespeare, Ossian, and above all the German Romantics.
Many of these ideas emerged from discussions with August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose
work on the drama was widely translated, and from meetings with and readings of the Germans
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The Genevan economist and writer Jean-
Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi reinforced many of Mme de Staël’s points in his De la
littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813; Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe).
This cosmopolitan cultural relativism was infuriating to many of Staël’s French contemporaries
in the prevailing Neoclassical literary climate.
Romanticism
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain,
with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of
revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very
particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of
history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle
(literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for
his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or
whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was
sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any
simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of
1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness,
loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often
in the form of frustrated dynamism.
Foreign influences
When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France,
they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and
Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative
writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon,
was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European
cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence
of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a
model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of
Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy
and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their
literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these
countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and
revenge tales.
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one
of the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding
poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a
variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving
frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing
ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830,
there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics
and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of
l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a
reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the
intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.
Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Méditations poétiques
(1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and remaining
unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating through the musicality of
his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings unfulfilled. This soft-centred
elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and Byronic revolt. The Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses (1830; “Poetic and Religious Harmonies”; Eng. trans. in A Biographical
Sketch), with their religious emotion, reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened
by unease and disquiet. Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d’un ange (1838; “The
Fall of an Angel”) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine’s
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading role in the
provisional government.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In
his first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman
Catholic legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to
Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous
quality of Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there
are already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and
problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of
poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of
pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating
on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is
interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic
consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic,
prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.
Vigny
In contrast to Hugo’s scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more limited
and controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however, he proposed
the poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified, moralizing
philosopher, using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense expression of his
thought. Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble stoicism, his work focuses
on figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His
Les Destinées (1864; “The Fates”), composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies
the high spiritual aspiration that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and
concentration of expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.
Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his
Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; “Tales of Spain and Italy”). His exuberant sense of humour
led him to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them ironically. Later, a
trajectory from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of emptiness and futility, sustained only
intermittently by the linking of suffering with love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense
of self. The Nuits (“Nights”) poems (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit
d’août,” “La Nuit d’octobre,” 1835–37) express the purifying power of suffering in verse of
sustained sincerity, purged of all the early showiness.
Nerval
For a long while Gérard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature (notably
Goethe’s Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as his real
contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimères (The Chimeras), composed between about
1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual odyssey Aurélia (1853–54; Eng. trans.
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an
anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of
literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of
achievement of that side of the Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the
spiritual reintegration of the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the
prose poem and his use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays
from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the
period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging
audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism.
Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such
battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in
the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a
contemporary public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play
Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—
which he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could
transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited
from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a
sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic
local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young
Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a
dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a
similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the
mingling of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic
drama. The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic
melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.
Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most
famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many
analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by
Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of
poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic
estrangement.
Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of
his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued
to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—
almost charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather
in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying
disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one
indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with
clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological
study of a once pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted
youth and lost illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a
prose that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of
Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and
crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison
with Shakespeare.
The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the complex literary culture
of the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feeling—whether based on reason, sentiment,
or an exacerbated sensibility—and most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789 to
1815. Certainly, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The
insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly
underlined the regime’s centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This classicism, or, strictly
speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and literary forms
that had dominated “serious” literature—and drama in particular—in France for almost two
centuries. But Rousseau’s emphasis on subjectivity and sentiment still had its heirs, as did the
new forms of writing he had helped to evolve. Likewise, while the Gothic violence that had
emerged in early Revolutionary drama and novels was curbed, its dynamic remained. The seeds
of French Romanticism had been sown in national ground, long before writers began to turn to
other nations to kindle their inspiration.
The poetry of Chénier
André Chénier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in
volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets, who
saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical spirit,
especially that of Greece, Chénier exploited Classical myths for modern purposes. He began
work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, “Hermès,” a history of the universe and human
progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit but also anticipate the
episodic epic poems of the later Romantics. Chénier, though a moderate in revolutionary terms,
was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in the scathing fierceness of his lyrical
satires, the Ïambes, many of which were written from prison shortly before his execution. His
best-known poems, however, are elegies that sing of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and
lost happiness.
Revolutionary oratory and polemic
The intensity of political debate in Paris during the Revolution, whether in clubs, in the
National Assembly, or before tribunals, threw into prominence the arts of oratory. Speaking in
the name of reason, virtue, and liberty and using the Roman Republic or the city-states of Greece
as a frame of reference, Revolutionary leaders such as Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, and Louis de Saint-Just infused the
intellectual preoccupations of the Enlightenment with a sense of drama and passion. This
renewal of rhetoric is echoed in the enormously expanded political press, including Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Jacques-René Hébert’s Le Père Duchesne (“Old
Duchesne”), and Gracchus Babeuf’s Le Tribun du peuple (“The Defender of the People”). To
some extent the proclamations and communiqués of Napoleon prolonged this Revolutionary
eloquence.
Chateaubriand
The French Revolution made an émigré of François-Auguste-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, and his first major work, the Essai sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”; Eng. trans. An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and
Modern), is a complex and sometimes confused attempt to understand revolution in general, the
French Revolution in particular, and the individual’s relationship to these phenomena.
Chateaubriand took as his model the stance of the 18th-century philosophe, but his Génie du
christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) caught a new mood of return to religious faith
based on emotional appeals and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Christianity. The impact
of this work was enormous, not least in its reinstatement of nature, and natural landscape, as the
lodging place of spiritual repose and renewal. Within it were two short narratives, Atala (Eng.
trans. Atala, also translated in Atala, René), a tale of fatal passion and savage (Indian) nobility,
and René (Eng. trans. René). A young hero not dissimilar to Goethe’s Werther, René, who flees
pain and suffering in Europe to look vainly for refuge in the wilds of America, came to represent
the mal du siècle (world-weariness, literally “sickness of the century”), the essence of Romantic
sensibility; he is insecure, solitary, disorientated, and in flight, searching for a happiness that will
always evade him.
Behind all Chateaubriand’s works lies the sense of a break, caused by the French
Revolution, in a stable, ordered existence. His Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848–50; “Memoirs
from Beyond the Tomb”; Eng. trans. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand), the masterpiece he
worked on most of his adult life and intended for posthumous publication, uses the
autobiographical format to meditate on the history of France, the passing of time, and the vanity
of human desires. His lyrical and rhythmic prose left a deep impression on many Romantic
writers.
Mme de Staël and the debate on literature
Mme de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein) was truly
encyclopaedic in her interests. Her contribution to intellectual debate far exceeded any narrow
definition of literature. At first liberal and then, after her offer of support was rebuffed, fiercely
anti-Napoleon in politics, eclectic in philosophy, mixing rationalism and spiritualism, and
determinedly internationalist in her feeling for literature, she moved most easily in a world of
ideas, surrounding herself with the salon of intellectuals she founded at Coppet, Switzerland. Her
two novels, Delphine (1802; Delphine) and Corinne (1807; Corinne, or Italy), focus on the limits
society tries to impose on the independent woman and the woman of genius. The account of
Corinne’s personal drama is combined with an examination of national identities in
postrevolutionary Europe, offering original insights into how new alliances can be forged across
old, hostile boundaries and what part artistic form and women’s influence could play in making
new communities. Her two most influential works, De la littérature (1800; The Influence of
Literature upon Society) and De l’Allemagne (1810; Germany), expanded conceptions of
literature with the claim that different social forms needed different literary modes: in particular,
postrevolutionary society required a new literature. She explored the contrast, as she saw it,
between the literature of the south (rational, Classical) and the literature of the north (emotional,
Romantic), and she explored the potential interest for French culture of foreign writers such as
William Shakespeare, Ossian, and above all the German Romantics.
Many of these ideas emerged from discussions with August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose
work on the drama was widely translated, and from meetings with and readings of the Germans
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The Genevan economist and writer Jean-
Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi reinforced many of Mme de Staël’s points in his De la
littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813; Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe).
This cosmopolitan cultural relativism was infuriating to many of Staël’s French contemporaries
in the prevailing Neoclassical literary climate.
Romanticism
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain,
with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of
revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very
particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of
history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle
(literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for
his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or
whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was
sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any
simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of
1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness,
loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often
in the form of frustrated dynamism.
Foreign influences
When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France,
they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and
Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative
writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon,
was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European
cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence
of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a
model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of
Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy
and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their
literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these
countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and
revenge tales.
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one
of the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding
poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a
variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving
frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing
ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830,
there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics
and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of
l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a
reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the
intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.
Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Méditations poétiques
(1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and remaining
unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating through the musicality of
his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings unfulfilled. This soft-centred
elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and Byronic revolt. The Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses (1830; “Poetic and Religious Harmonies”; Eng. trans. in A Biographical
Sketch), with their religious emotion, reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened
by unease and disquiet. Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d’un ange (1838; “The
Fall of an Angel”) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine’s
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading role in the
provisional government.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In
his first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman
Catholic legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to
Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous
quality of Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there
are already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and
problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of
poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of
pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating
on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is
interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic
consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic,
prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.
Vigny
In contrast to Hugo’s scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more limited
and controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however, he proposed
the poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified, moralizing
philosopher, using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense expression of his
thought. Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble stoicism, his work focuses
on figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His
Les Destinées (1864; “The Fates”), composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies
the high spiritual aspiration that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and
concentration of expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.
Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his
Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; “Tales of Spain and Italy”). His exuberant sense of humour
led him to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them ironically. Later, a
trajectory from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of emptiness and futility, sustained only
intermittently by the linking of suffering with love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense
of self. The Nuits (“Nights”) poems (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit
d’août,” “La Nuit d’octobre,” 1835–37) express the purifying power of suffering in verse of
sustained sincerity, purged of all the early showiness.
Nerval
For a long while Gérard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature (notably
Goethe’s Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as his real
contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimères (The Chimeras), composed between about
1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual odyssey Aurélia (1853–54; Eng. trans.
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an
anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of
literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of
achievement of that side of the Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the
spiritual reintegration of the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the
prose poem and his use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays
from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the
period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging
audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism.
Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such
battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in
the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a
contemporary public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play
Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—
which he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could
transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited
from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a
sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic
local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young
Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a
dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a
similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the
mingling of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic
drama. The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic
melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.
Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most
famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many
analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by
Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of
poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic
estrangement.
Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of
his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued
to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—
almost charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather
in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying
disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one
indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with
clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological
study of a once pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted
youth and lost illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a
prose that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of
Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and
crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison
with Shakespeare.
The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the complex literary culture
of the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feeling—whether based on reason, sentiment,
or an exacerbated sensibility—and most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789 to
1815. Certainly, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The
insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly
underlined the regime’s centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This classicism, or, strictly
speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and literary forms
that had dominated “serious” literature—and drama in particular—in France for almost two
centuries. But Rousseau’s emphasis on subjectivity and sentiment still had its heirs, as did the
new forms of writing he had helped to evolve. Likewise, while the Gothic violence that had
emerged in early Revolutionary drama and novels was curbed, its dynamic remained. The seeds
of French Romanticism had been sown in national ground, long before writers began to turn to
other nations to kindle their inspiration.
The poetry of Chénier
André Chénier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in
volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets, who
saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical spirit,
especially that of Greece, Chénier exploited Classical myths for modern purposes. He began
work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, “Hermès,” a history of the universe and human
progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit but also anticipate the
episodic epic poems of the later Romantics. Chénier, though a moderate in revolutionary terms,
was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in the scathing fierceness of his lyrical
satires, the Ïambes, many of which were written from prison shortly before his execution. His
best-known poems, however, are elegies that sing of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and
lost happiness.
Revolutionary oratory and polemic
The intensity of political debate in Paris during the Revolution, whether in clubs, in the
National Assembly, or before tribunals, threw into prominence the arts of oratory. Speaking in
the name of reason, virtue, and liberty and using the Roman Republic or the city-states of Greece
as a frame of reference, Revolutionary leaders such as Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, and Louis de Saint-Just infused the
intellectual preoccupations of the Enlightenment with a sense of drama and passion. This
renewal of rhetoric is echoed in the enormously expanded political press, including Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Jacques-René Hébert’s Le Père Duchesne (“Old
Duchesne”), and Gracchus Babeuf’s Le Tribun du peuple (“The Defender of the People”). To
some extent the proclamations and communiqués of Napoleon prolonged this Revolutionary
eloquence.
Chateaubriand
The French Revolution made an émigré of François-Auguste-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, and his first major work, the Essai sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”; Eng. trans. An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and
Modern), is a complex and sometimes confused attempt to understand revolution in general, the
French Revolution in particular, and the individual’s relationship to these phenomena.
Chateaubriand took as his model the stance of the 18th-century philosophe, but his Génie du
christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) caught a new mood of return to religious faith
based on emotional appeals and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Christianity. The impact
of this work was enormous, not least in its reinstatement of nature, and natural landscape, as the
lodging place of spiritual repose and renewal. Within it were two short narratives, Atala (Eng.
trans. Atala, also translated in Atala, René), a tale of fatal passion and savage (Indian) nobility,
and René (Eng. trans. René). A young hero not dissimilar to Goethe’s Werther, René, who flees
pain and suffering in Europe to look vainly for refuge in the wilds of America, came to represent
the mal du siècle (world-weariness, literally “sickness of the century”), the essence of Romantic
sensibility; he is insecure, solitary, disorientated, and in flight, searching for a happiness that will
always evade him.
Behind all Chateaubriand’s works lies the sense of a break, caused by the French
Revolution, in a stable, ordered existence. His Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848–50; “Memoirs
from Beyond the Tomb”; Eng. trans. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand), the masterpiece he
worked on most of his adult life and intended for posthumous publication, uses the
autobiographical format to meditate on the history of France, the passing of time, and the vanity
of human desires. His lyrical and rhythmic prose left a deep impression on many Romantic
writers.
Mme de Staël and the debate on literature
Mme de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein) was truly
encyclopaedic in her interests. Her contribution to intellectual debate far exceeded any narrow
definition of literature. At first liberal and then, after her offer of support was rebuffed, fiercely
anti-Napoleon in politics, eclectic in philosophy, mixing rationalism and spiritualism, and
determinedly internationalist in her feeling for literature, she moved most easily in a world of
ideas, surrounding herself with the salon of intellectuals she founded at Coppet, Switzerland. Her
two novels, Delphine (1802; Delphine) and Corinne (1807; Corinne, or Italy), focus on the limits
society tries to impose on the independent woman and the woman of genius. The account of
Corinne’s personal drama is combined with an examination of national identities in
postrevolutionary Europe, offering original insights into how new alliances can be forged across
old, hostile boundaries and what part artistic form and women’s influence could play in making
new communities. Her two most influential works, De la littérature (1800; The Influence of
Literature upon Society) and De l’Allemagne (1810; Germany), expanded conceptions of
literature with the claim that different social forms needed different literary modes: in particular,
postrevolutionary society required a new literature. She explored the contrast, as she saw it,
between the literature of the south (rational, Classical) and the literature of the north (emotional,
Romantic), and she explored the potential interest for French culture of foreign writers such as
William Shakespeare, Ossian, and above all the German Romantics.
Many of these ideas emerged from discussions with August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose
work on the drama was widely translated, and from meetings with and readings of the Germans
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The Genevan economist and writer Jean-
Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi reinforced many of Mme de Staël’s points in his De la
littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813; Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe).
This cosmopolitan cultural relativism was infuriating to many of Staël’s French contemporaries
in the prevailing Neoclassical literary climate.
Romanticism
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain,
with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of
revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very
particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of
history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle
(literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for
his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or
whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was
sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any
simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of
1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness,
loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often
in the form of frustrated dynamism.
Foreign influences
When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France,
they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and
Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative
writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon,
was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European
cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence
of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a
model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of
Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy
and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their
literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these
countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and
revenge tales.
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one
of the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding
poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a
variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving
frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing
ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830,
there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics
and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of
l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a
reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the
intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.
Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Méditations poétiques
(1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and remaining
unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating through the musicality of
his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings unfulfilled. This soft-centred
elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and Byronic revolt. The Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses (1830; “Poetic and Religious Harmonies”; Eng. trans. in A Biographical
Sketch), with their religious emotion, reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened
by unease and disquiet. Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d’un ange (1838; “The
Fall of an Angel”) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine’s
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading role in the
provisional government.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In
his first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman
Catholic legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to
Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous
quality of Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there
are already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and
problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of
poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of
pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating
on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is
interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic
consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic,
prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.
Vigny
In contrast to Hugo’s scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more limited
and controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however, he proposed
the poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified, moralizing
philosopher, using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense expression of his
thought. Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble stoicism, his work focuses
on figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His
Les Destinées (1864; “The Fates”), composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies
the high spiritual aspiration that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and
concentration of expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.
Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his
Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; “Tales of Spain and Italy”). His exuberant sense of humour
led him to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them ironically. Later, a
trajectory from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of emptiness and futility, sustained only
intermittently by the linking of suffering with love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense
of self. The Nuits (“Nights”) poems (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit
d’août,” “La Nuit d’octobre,” 1835–37) express the purifying power of suffering in verse of
sustained sincerity, purged of all the early showiness.
Nerval
For a long while Gérard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature (notably
Goethe’s Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as his real
contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimères (The Chimeras), composed between about
1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual odyssey Aurélia (1853–54; Eng. trans.
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an
anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of
literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of
achievement of that side of the Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the
spiritual reintegration of the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the
prose poem and his use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays
from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the
period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging
audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism.
Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such
battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in
the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a
contemporary public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play
Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—
which he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could
transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited
from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a
sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic
local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young
Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a
dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a
similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the
mingling of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic
drama. The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic
melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.
Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most
famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many
analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by
Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of
poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic
estrangement.
Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of
his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued
to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—
almost charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather
in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying
disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one
indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with
clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological
study of a once pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted
youth and lost illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a
prose that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of
Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and
crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison
with Shakespeare.
The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the complex literary culture
of the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feeling—whether based on reason, sentiment,
or an exacerbated sensibility—and most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789 to
1815. Certainly, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The
insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly
underlined the regime’s centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This classicism, or, strictly
speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and literary forms
that had dominated “serious” literature—and drama in particular—in France for almost two
centuries. But Rousseau’s emphasis on subjectivity and sentiment still had its heirs, as did the
new forms of writing he had helped to evolve. Likewise, while the Gothic violence that had
emerged in early Revolutionary drama and novels was curbed, its dynamic remained. The seeds
of French Romanticism had been sown in national ground, long before writers began to turn to
other nations to kindle their inspiration.
The poetry of Chénier
André Chénier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in
volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets, who
saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical spirit,
especially that of Greece, Chénier exploited Classical myths for modern purposes. He began
work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, “Hermès,” a history of the universe and human
progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit but also anticipate the
episodic epic poems of the later Romantics. Chénier, though a moderate in revolutionary terms,
was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in the scathing fierceness of his lyrical
satires, the Ïambes, many of which were written from prison shortly before his execution. His
best-known poems, however, are elegies that sing of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and
lost happiness.
Revolutionary oratory and polemic
The intensity of political debate in Paris during the Revolution, whether in clubs, in the
National Assembly, or before tribunals, threw into prominence the arts of oratory. Speaking in
the name of reason, virtue, and liberty and using the Roman Republic or the city-states of Greece
as a frame of reference, Revolutionary leaders such as Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, and Louis de Saint-Just infused the
intellectual preoccupations of the Enlightenment with a sense of drama and passion. This
renewal of rhetoric is echoed in the enormously expanded political press, including Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Jacques-René Hébert’s Le Père Duchesne (“Old
Duchesne”), and Gracchus Babeuf’s Le Tribun du peuple (“The Defender of the People”). To
some extent the proclamations and communiqués of Napoleon prolonged this Revolutionary
eloquence.
Chateaubriand
The French Revolution made an émigré of François-Auguste-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, and his first major work, the Essai sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”; Eng. trans. An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and
Modern), is a complex and sometimes confused attempt to understand revolution in general, the
French Revolution in particular, and the individual’s relationship to these phenomena.
Chateaubriand took as his model the stance of the 18th-century philosophe, but his Génie du
christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) caught a new mood of return to religious faith
based on emotional appeals and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Christianity. The impact
of this work was enormous, not least in its reinstatement of nature, and natural landscape, as the
lodging place of spiritual repose and renewal. Within it were two short narratives, Atala (Eng.
trans. Atala, also translated in Atala, René), a tale of fatal passion and savage (Indian) nobility,
and René (Eng. trans. René). A young hero not dissimilar to Goethe’s Werther, René, who flees
pain and suffering in Europe to look vainly for refuge in the wilds of America, came to represent
the mal du siècle (world-weariness, literally “sickness of the century”), the essence of Romantic
sensibility; he is insecure, solitary, disorientated, and in flight, searching for a happiness that will
always evade him.
Behind all Chateaubriand’s works lies the sense of a break, caused by the French
Revolution, in a stable, ordered existence. His Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848–50; “Memoirs
from Beyond the Tomb”; Eng. trans. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand), the masterpiece he
worked on most of his adult life and intended for posthumous publication, uses the
autobiographical format to meditate on the history of France, the passing of time, and the vanity
of human desires. His lyrical and rhythmic prose left a deep impression on many Romantic
writers.
Mme de Staël and the debate on literature
Mme de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein) was truly
encyclopaedic in her interests. Her contribution to intellectual debate far exceeded any narrow
definition of literature. At first liberal and then, after her offer of support was rebuffed, fiercely
anti-Napoleon in politics, eclectic in philosophy, mixing rationalism and spiritualism, and
determinedly internationalist in her feeling for literature, she moved most easily in a world of
ideas, surrounding herself with the salon of intellectuals she founded at Coppet, Switzerland. Her
two novels, Delphine (1802; Delphine) and Corinne (1807; Corinne, or Italy), focus on the limits
society tries to impose on the independent woman and the woman of genius. The account of
Corinne’s personal drama is combined with an examination of national identities in
postrevolutionary Europe, offering original insights into how new alliances can be forged across
old, hostile boundaries and what part artistic form and women’s influence could play in making
new communities. Her two most influential works, De la littérature (1800; The Influence of
Literature upon Society) and De l’Allemagne (1810; Germany), expanded conceptions of
literature with the claim that different social forms needed different literary modes: in particular,
postrevolutionary society required a new literature. She explored the contrast, as she saw it,
between the literature of the south (rational, Classical) and the literature of the north (emotional,
Romantic), and she explored the potential interest for French culture of foreign writers such as
William Shakespeare, Ossian, and above all the German Romantics.
Many of these ideas emerged from discussions with August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose
work on the drama was widely translated, and from meetings with and readings of the Germans
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The Genevan economist and writer Jean-
Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi reinforced many of Mme de Staël’s points in his De la
littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813; Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe).
This cosmopolitan cultural relativism was infuriating to many of Staël’s French contemporaries
in the prevailing Neoclassical literary climate.
Romanticism
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain,
with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of
revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very
particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of
history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle
(literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for
his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or
whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was
sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any
simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of
1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness,
loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often
in the form of frustrated dynamism.
Foreign influences
When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France,
they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and
Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative
writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon,
was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European
cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence
of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a
model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of
Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy
and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their
literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these
countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and
revenge tales.
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one
of the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding
poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a
variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving
frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing
ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830,
there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics
and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of
l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a
reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the
intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.
Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Méditations poétiques
(1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and remaining
unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating through the musicality of
his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings unfulfilled. This soft-centred
elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and Byronic revolt. The Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses (1830; “Poetic and Religious Harmonies”; Eng. trans. in A Biographical
Sketch), with their religious emotion, reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened
by unease and disquiet. Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d’un ange (1838; “The
Fall of an Angel”) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine’s
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading role in the
provisional government.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In
his first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman
Catholic legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to
Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous
quality of Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there
are already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and
problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of
poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of
pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating
on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is
interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic
consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic,
prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.
Vigny
In contrast to Hugo’s scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more limited
and controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however, he proposed
the poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified, moralizing
philosopher, using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense expression of his
thought. Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble stoicism, his work focuses
on figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His
Les Destinées (1864; “The Fates”), composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies
the high spiritual aspiration that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and
concentration of expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.
Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his
Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; “Tales of Spain and Italy”). His exuberant sense of humour
led him to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them ironically. Later, a
trajectory from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of emptiness and futility, sustained only
intermittently by the linking of suffering with love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense
of self. The Nuits (“Nights”) poems (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit
d’août,” “La Nuit d’octobre,” 1835–37) express the purifying power of suffering in verse of
sustained sincerity, purged of all the early showiness.
Nerval
For a long while Gérard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature (notably
Goethe’s Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as his real
contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimères (The Chimeras), composed between about
1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual odyssey Aurélia (1853–54; Eng. trans.
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an
anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of
literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of
achievement of that side of the Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the
spiritual reintegration of the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the
prose poem and his use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays
from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the
period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging
audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism.
Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such
battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in
the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a
contemporary public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play
Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—
which he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could
transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited
from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a
sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic
local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young
Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a
dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a
similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the
mingling of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic
drama. The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic
melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.
Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most
famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many
analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by
Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of
poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic
estrangement.
Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of
his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued
to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—
almost charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather
in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying
disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one
indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with
clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological
study of a once pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted
youth and lost illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a
prose that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of
Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and
crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison
with Shakespeare.
The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the complex literary culture
of the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feeling—whether based on reason, sentiment,
or an exacerbated sensibility—and most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789 to
1815. Certainly, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The
insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly
underlined the regime’s centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This classicism, or, strictly
speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and literary forms
that had dominated “serious” literature—and drama in particular—in France for almost two
centuries. But Rousseau’s emphasis on subjectivity and sentiment still had its heirs, as did the
new forms of writing he had helped to evolve. Likewise, while the Gothic violence that had
emerged in early Revolutionary drama and novels was curbed, its dynamic remained. The seeds
of French Romanticism had been sown in national ground, long before writers began to turn to
other nations to kindle their inspiration.
The poetry of Chénier
André Chénier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in
volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets, who
saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical spirit,
especially that of Greece, Chénier exploited Classical myths for modern purposes. He began
work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, “Hermès,” a history of the universe and human
progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit but also anticipate the
episodic epic poems of the later Romantics. Chénier, though a moderate in revolutionary terms,
was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in the scathing fierceness of his lyrical
satires, the Ïambes, many of which were written from prison shortly before his execution. His
best-known poems, however, are elegies that sing of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and
lost happiness.
Revolutionary oratory and polemic
The intensity of political debate in Paris during the Revolution, whether in clubs, in the
National Assembly, or before tribunals, threw into prominence the arts of oratory. Speaking in
the name of reason, virtue, and liberty and using the Roman Republic or the city-states of Greece
as a frame of reference, Revolutionary leaders such as Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, and Louis de Saint-Just infused the
intellectual preoccupations of the Enlightenment with a sense of drama and passion. This
renewal of rhetoric is echoed in the enormously expanded political press, including Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Jacques-René Hébert’s Le Père Duchesne (“Old
Duchesne”), and Gracchus Babeuf’s Le Tribun du peuple (“The Defender of the People”). To
some extent the proclamations and communiqués of Napoleon prolonged this Revolutionary
eloquence.
Chateaubriand
The French Revolution made an émigré of François-Auguste-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, and his first major work, the Essai sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”; Eng. trans. An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and
Modern), is a complex and sometimes confused attempt to understand revolution in general, the
French Revolution in particular, and the individual’s relationship to these phenomena.
Chateaubriand took as his model the stance of the 18th-century philosophe, but his Génie du
christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) caught a new mood of return to religious faith
based on emotional appeals and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Christianity. The impact
of this work was enormous, not least in its reinstatement of nature, and natural landscape, as the
lodging place of spiritual repose and renewal. Within it were two short narratives, Atala (Eng.
trans. Atala, also translated in Atala, René), a tale of fatal passion and savage (Indian) nobility,
and René (Eng. trans. René). A young hero not dissimilar to Goethe’s Werther, René, who flees
pain and suffering in Europe to look vainly for refuge in the wilds of America, came to represent
the mal du siècle (world-weariness, literally “sickness of the century”), the essence of Romantic
sensibility; he is insecure, solitary, disorientated, and in flight, searching for a happiness that will
always evade him.
Behind all Chateaubriand’s works lies the sense of a break, caused by the French
Revolution, in a stable, ordered existence. His Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848–50; “Memoirs
from Beyond the Tomb”; Eng. trans. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand), the masterpiece he
worked on most of his adult life and intended for posthumous publication, uses the
autobiographical format to meditate on the history of France, the passing of time, and the vanity
of human desires. His lyrical and rhythmic prose left a deep impression on many Romantic
writers.
Mme de Staël and the debate on literature
Mme de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein) was truly
encyclopaedic in her interests. Her contribution to intellectual debate far exceeded any narrow
definition of literature. At first liberal and then, after her offer of support was rebuffed, fiercely
anti-Napoleon in politics, eclectic in philosophy, mixing rationalism and spiritualism, and
determinedly internationalist in her feeling for literature, she moved most easily in a world of
ideas, surrounding herself with the salon of intellectuals she founded at Coppet, Switzerland. Her
two novels, Delphine (1802; Delphine) and Corinne (1807; Corinne, or Italy), focus on the limits
society tries to impose on the independent woman and the woman of genius. The account of
Corinne’s personal drama is combined with an examination of national identities in
postrevolutionary Europe, offering original insights into how new alliances can be forged across
old, hostile boundaries and what part artistic form and women’s influence could play in making
new communities. Her two most influential works, De la littérature (1800; The Influence of
Literature upon Society) and De l’Allemagne (1810; Germany), expanded conceptions of
literature with the claim that different social forms needed different literary modes: in particular,
postrevolutionary society required a new literature. She explored the contrast, as she saw it,
between the literature of the south (rational, Classical) and the literature of the north (emotional,
Romantic), and she explored the potential interest for French culture of foreign writers such as
William Shakespeare, Ossian, and above all the German Romantics.
Many of these ideas emerged from discussions with August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose
work on the drama was widely translated, and from meetings with and readings of the Germans
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The Genevan economist and writer Jean-
Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi reinforced many of Mme de Staël’s points in his De la
littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813; Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe).
This cosmopolitan cultural relativism was infuriating to many of Staël’s French contemporaries
in the prevailing Neoclassical literary climate.
Romanticism
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain,
with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of
revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very
particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of
history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle
(literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for
his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or
whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was
sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any
simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of
1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness,
loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often
in the form of frustrated dynamism.
Foreign influences
When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France,
they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and
Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative
writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon,
was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European
cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence
of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a
model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of
Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy
and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their
literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these
countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and
revenge tales.
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one
of the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding
poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a
variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving
frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing
ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830,
there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics
and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of
l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a
reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the
intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.
Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Méditations poétiques
(1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and remaining
unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating through the musicality of
his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings unfulfilled. This soft-centred
elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and Byronic revolt. The Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses (1830; “Poetic and Religious Harmonies”; Eng. trans. in A Biographical
Sketch), with their religious emotion, reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened
by unease and disquiet. Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d’un ange (1838; “The
Fall of an Angel”) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine’s
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading role in the
provisional government.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In
his first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman
Catholic legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to
Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous
quality of Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there
are already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and
problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of
poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of
pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating
on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is
interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic
consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic,
prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.
Vigny
In contrast to Hugo’s scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more limited
and controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however, he proposed
the poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified, moralizing
philosopher, using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense expression of his
thought. Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble stoicism, his work focuses
on figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His
Les Destinées (1864; “The Fates”), composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies
the high spiritual aspiration that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and
concentration of expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.
Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his
Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; “Tales of Spain and Italy”). His exuberant sense of humour
led him to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them ironically. Later, a
trajectory from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of emptiness and futility, sustained only
intermittently by the linking of suffering with love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense
of self. The Nuits (“Nights”) poems (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit
d’août,” “La Nuit d’octobre,” 1835–37) express the purifying power of suffering in verse of
sustained sincerity, purged of all the early showiness.
Nerval
For a long while Gérard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature (notably
Goethe’s Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as his real
contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimères (The Chimeras), composed between about
1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual odyssey Aurélia (1853–54; Eng. trans.
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an
anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of
literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of
achievement of that side of the Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the
spiritual reintegration of the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the
prose poem and his use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays
from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the
period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging
audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism.
Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such
battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in
the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a
contemporary public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play
Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—
which he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could
transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited
from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a
sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic
local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young
Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a
dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a
similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the
mingling of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic
drama. The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic
melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.
Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most
famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many
analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by
Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of
poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic
estrangement.
Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of
his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued
to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—
almost charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather
in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying
disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one
indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with
clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological
study of a once pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted
youth and lost illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a
prose that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of
Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and
crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison
with Shakespeare.
The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the complex literary culture
of the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feeling—whether based on reason, sentiment,
or an exacerbated sensibility—and most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789 to
1815. Certainly, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The
insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly
underlined the regime’s centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This classicism, or, strictly
speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and literary forms
that had dominated “serious” literature—and drama in particular—in France for almost two
centuries. But Rousseau’s emphasis on subjectivity and sentiment still had its heirs, as did the
new forms of writing he had helped to evolve. Likewise, while the Gothic violence that had
emerged in early Revolutionary drama and novels was curbed, its dynamic remained. The seeds
of French Romanticism had been sown in national ground, long before writers began to turn to
other nations to kindle their inspiration.
The poetry of Chénier
André Chénier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in
volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets, who
saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical spirit,
especially that of Greece, Chénier exploited Classical myths for modern purposes. He began
work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, “Hermès,” a history of the universe and human
progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit but also anticipate the
episodic epic poems of the later Romantics. Chénier, though a moderate in revolutionary terms,
was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in the scathing fierceness of his lyrical
satires, the Ïambes, many of which were written from prison shortly before his execution. His
best-known poems, however, are elegies that sing of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and
lost happiness.
Revolutionary oratory and polemic
The intensity of political debate in Paris during the Revolution, whether in clubs, in the
National Assembly, or before tribunals, threw into prominence the arts of oratory. Speaking in
the name of reason, virtue, and liberty and using the Roman Republic or the city-states of Greece
as a frame of reference, Revolutionary leaders such as Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, and Louis de Saint-Just infused the
intellectual preoccupations of the Enlightenment with a sense of drama and passion. This
renewal of rhetoric is echoed in the enormously expanded political press, including Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Jacques-René Hébert’s Le Père Duchesne (“Old
Duchesne”), and Gracchus Babeuf’s Le Tribun du peuple (“The Defender of the People”). To
some extent the proclamations and communiqués of Napoleon prolonged this Revolutionary
eloquence.
Chateaubriand
The French Revolution made an émigré of François-Auguste-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, and his first major work, the Essai sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”; Eng. trans. An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and
Modern), is a complex and sometimes confused attempt to understand revolution in general, the
French Revolution in particular, and the individual’s relationship to these phenomena.
Chateaubriand took as his model the stance of the 18th-century philosophe, but his Génie du
christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) caught a new mood of return to religious faith
based on emotional appeals and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Christianity. The impact
of this work was enormous, not least in its reinstatement of nature, and natural landscape, as the
lodging place of spiritual repose and renewal. Within it were two short narratives, Atala (Eng.
trans. Atala, also translated in Atala, René), a tale of fatal passion and savage (Indian) nobility,
and René (Eng. trans. René). A young hero not dissimilar to Goethe’s Werther, René, who flees
pain and suffering in Europe to look vainly for refuge in the wilds of America, came to represent
the mal du siècle (world-weariness, literally “sickness of the century”), the essence of Romantic
sensibility; he is insecure, solitary, disorientated, and in flight, searching for a happiness that will
always evade him.
Behind all Chateaubriand’s works lies the sense of a break, caused by the French
Revolution, in a stable, ordered existence. His Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848–50; “Memoirs
from Beyond the Tomb”; Eng. trans. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand), the masterpiece he
worked on most of his adult life and intended for posthumous publication, uses the
autobiographical format to meditate on the history of France, the passing of time, and the vanity
of human desires. His lyrical and rhythmic prose left a deep impression on many Romantic
writers.
Mme de Staël and the debate on literature
Mme de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein) was truly
encyclopaedic in her interests. Her contribution to intellectual debate far exceeded any narrow
definition of literature. At first liberal and then, after her offer of support was rebuffed, fiercely
anti-Napoleon in politics, eclectic in philosophy, mixing rationalism and spiritualism, and
determinedly internationalist in her feeling for literature, she moved most easily in a world of
ideas, surrounding herself with the salon of intellectuals she founded at Coppet, Switzerland. Her
two novels, Delphine (1802; Delphine) and Corinne (1807; Corinne, or Italy), focus on the limits
society tries to impose on the independent woman and the woman of genius. The account of
Corinne’s personal drama is combined with an examination of national identities in
postrevolutionary Europe, offering original insights into how new alliances can be forged across
old, hostile boundaries and what part artistic form and women’s influence could play in making
new communities. Her two most influential works, De la littérature (1800; The Influence of
Literature upon Society) and De l’Allemagne (1810; Germany), expanded conceptions of
literature with the claim that different social forms needed different literary modes: in particular,
postrevolutionary society required a new literature. She explored the contrast, as she saw it,
between the literature of the south (rational, Classical) and the literature of the north (emotional,
Romantic), and she explored the potential interest for French culture of foreign writers such as
William Shakespeare, Ossian, and above all the German Romantics.
Many of these ideas emerged from discussions with August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose
work on the drama was widely translated, and from meetings with and readings of the Germans
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The Genevan economist and writer Jean-
Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi reinforced many of Mme de Staël’s points in his De la
littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813; Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe).
This cosmopolitan cultural relativism was infuriating to many of Staël’s French contemporaries
in the prevailing Neoclassical literary climate.
Romanticism
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain,
with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of
revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very
particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of
history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle
(literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for
his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or
whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was
sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any
simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of
1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness,
loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often
in the form of frustrated dynamism.
Foreign influences
When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France,
they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and
Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative
writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon,
was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European
cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence
of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a
model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of
Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy
and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their
literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these
countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and
revenge tales.
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one
of the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding
poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a
variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving
frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing
ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830,
there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics
and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of
l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a
reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the
intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.
Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Méditations poétiques
(1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and remaining
unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating through the musicality of
his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings unfulfilled. This soft-centred
elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and Byronic revolt. The Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses (1830; “Poetic and Religious Harmonies”; Eng. trans. in A Biographical
Sketch), with their religious emotion, reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened
by unease and disquiet. Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d’un ange (1838; “The
Fall of an Angel”) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine’s
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading role in the
provisional government.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In
his first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman
Catholic legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to
Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous
quality of Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there
are already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and
problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of
poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of
pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating
on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is
interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic
consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic,
prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.
Vigny
In contrast to Hugo’s scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more limited
and controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however, he proposed
the poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified, moralizing
philosopher, using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense expression of his
thought. Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble stoicism, his work focuses
on figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His
Les Destinées (1864; “The Fates”), composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies
the high spiritual aspiration that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and
concentration of expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.
Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his
Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; “Tales of Spain and Italy”). His exuberant sense of humour
led him to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them ironically. Later, a
trajectory from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of emptiness and futility, sustained only
intermittently by the linking of suffering with love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense
of self. The Nuits (“Nights”) poems (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit
d’août,” “La Nuit d’octobre,” 1835–37) express the purifying power of suffering in verse of
sustained sincerity, purged of all the early showiness.
Nerval
For a long while Gérard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature (notably
Goethe’s Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as his real
contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimères (The Chimeras), composed between about
1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual odyssey Aurélia (1853–54; Eng. trans.
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an
anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of
literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of
achievement of that side of the Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the
spiritual reintegration of the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the
prose poem and his use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays
from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the
period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging
audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism.
Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such
battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in
the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a
contemporary public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play
Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—
which he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could
transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited
from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a
sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic
local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young
Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a
dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a
similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the
mingling of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic
drama. The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic
melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.
Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most
famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many
analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by
Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of
poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic
estrangement.
Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of
his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued
to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—
almost charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather
in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying
disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one
indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with
clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological
study of a once pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted
youth and lost illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a
prose that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of
Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and
crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison
with Shakespeare.
The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the complex literary culture
of the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feeling—whether based on reason, sentiment,
or an exacerbated sensibility—and most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789 to
1815. Certainly, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The
insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly
underlined the regime’s centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This classicism, or, strictly
speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and literary forms
that had dominated “serious” literature—and drama in particular—in France for almost two
centuries. But Rousseau’s emphasis on subjectivity and sentiment still had its heirs, as did the
new forms of writing he had helped to evolve. Likewise, while the Gothic violence that had
emerged in early Revolutionary drama and novels was curbed, its dynamic remained. The seeds
of French Romanticism had been sown in national ground, long before writers began to turn to
other nations to kindle their inspiration.
The poetry of Chénier
André Chénier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in
volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets, who
saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical spirit,
especially that of Greece, Chénier exploited Classical myths for modern purposes. He began
work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, “Hermès,” a history of the universe and human
progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit but also anticipate the
episodic epic poems of the later Romantics. Chénier, though a moderate in revolutionary terms,
was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in the scathing fierceness of his lyrical
satires, the Ïambes, many of which were written from prison shortly before his execution. His
best-known poems, however, are elegies that sing of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and
lost happiness.
Revolutionary oratory and polemic
The intensity of political debate in Paris during the Revolution, whether in clubs, in the
National Assembly, or before tribunals, threw into prominence the arts of oratory. Speaking in
the name of reason, virtue, and liberty and using the Roman Republic or the city-states of Greece
as a frame of reference, Revolutionary leaders such as Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, and Louis de Saint-Just infused the
intellectual preoccupations of the Enlightenment with a sense of drama and passion. This
renewal of rhetoric is echoed in the enormously expanded political press, including Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Jacques-René Hébert’s Le Père Duchesne (“Old
Duchesne”), and Gracchus Babeuf’s Le Tribun du peuple (“The Defender of the People”). To
some extent the proclamations and communiqués of Napoleon prolonged this Revolutionary
eloquence.
Chateaubriand
The French Revolution made an émigré of François-Auguste-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, and his first major work, the Essai sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”; Eng. trans. An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and
Modern), is a complex and sometimes confused attempt to understand revolution in general, the
French Revolution in particular, and the individual’s relationship to these phenomena.
Chateaubriand took as his model the stance of the 18th-century philosophe, but his Génie du
christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) caught a new mood of return to religious faith
based on emotional appeals and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Christianity. The impact
of this work was enormous, not least in its reinstatement of nature, and natural landscape, as the
lodging place of spiritual repose and renewal. Within it were two short narratives, Atala (Eng.
trans. Atala, also translated in Atala, René), a tale of fatal passion and savage (Indian) nobility,
and René (Eng. trans. René). A young hero not dissimilar to Goethe’s Werther, René, who flees
pain and suffering in Europe to look vainly for refuge in the wilds of America, came to represent
the mal du siècle (world-weariness, literally “sickness of the century”), the essence of Romantic
sensibility; he is insecure, solitary, disorientated, and in flight, searching for a happiness that will
always evade him.
Behind all Chateaubriand’s works lies the sense of a break, caused by the French
Revolution, in a stable, ordered existence. His Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848–50; “Memoirs
from Beyond the Tomb”; Eng. trans. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand), the masterpiece he
worked on most of his adult life and intended for posthumous publication, uses the
autobiographical format to meditate on the history of France, the passing of time, and the vanity
of human desires. His lyrical and rhythmic prose left a deep impression on many Romantic
writers.
Mme de Staël and the debate on literature
Mme de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein) was truly
encyclopaedic in her interests. Her contribution to intellectual debate far exceeded any narrow
definition of literature. At first liberal and then, after her offer of support was rebuffed, fiercely
anti-Napoleon in politics, eclectic in philosophy, mixing rationalism and spiritualism, and
determinedly internationalist in her feeling for literature, she moved most easily in a world of
ideas, surrounding herself with the salon of intellectuals she founded at Coppet, Switzerland. Her
two novels, Delphine (1802; Delphine) and Corinne (1807; Corinne, or Italy), focus on the limits
society tries to impose on the independent woman and the woman of genius. The account of
Corinne’s personal drama is combined with an examination of national identities in
postrevolutionary Europe, offering original insights into how new alliances can be forged across
old, hostile boundaries and what part artistic form and women’s influence could play in making
new communities. Her two most influential works, De la littérature (1800; The Influence of
Literature upon Society) and De l’Allemagne (1810; Germany), expanded conceptions of
literature with the claim that different social forms needed different literary modes: in particular,
postrevolutionary society required a new literature. She explored the contrast, as she saw it,
between the literature of the south (rational, Classical) and the literature of the north (emotional,
Romantic), and she explored the potential interest for French culture of foreign writers such as
William Shakespeare, Ossian, and above all the German Romantics.
Many of these ideas emerged from discussions with August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose
work on the drama was widely translated, and from meetings with and readings of the Germans
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The Genevan economist and writer Jean-
Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi reinforced many of Mme de Staël’s points in his De la
littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813; Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe).
This cosmopolitan cultural relativism was infuriating to many of Staël’s French contemporaries
in the prevailing Neoclassical literary climate.
Romanticism
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain,
with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of
revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very
particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of
history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle
(literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for
his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or
whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was
sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any
simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of
1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness,
loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often
in the form of frustrated dynamism.
Foreign influences
When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France,
they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and
Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative
writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon,
was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European
cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence
of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a
model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of
Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy
and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their
literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these
countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and
revenge tales.
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one
of the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding
poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a
variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving
frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing
ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830,
there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics
and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of
l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a
reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the
intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.
Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Méditations poétiques
(1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and remaining
unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating through the musicality of
his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings unfulfilled. This soft-centred
elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and Byronic revolt. The Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses (1830; “Poetic and Religious Harmonies”; Eng. trans. in A Biographical
Sketch), with their religious emotion, reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened
by unease and disquiet. Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d’un ange (1838; “The
Fall of an Angel”) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine’s
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading role in the
provisional government.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In
his first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman
Catholic legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to
Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous
quality of Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there
are already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and
problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of
poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of
pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating
on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is
interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic
consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic,
prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.
Vigny
In contrast to Hugo’s scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more limited
and controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however, he proposed
the poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified, moralizing
philosopher, using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense expression of his
thought. Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble stoicism, his work focuses
on figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His
Les Destinées (1864; “The Fates”), composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies
the high spiritual aspiration that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and
concentration of expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.
Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his
Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; “Tales of Spain and Italy”). His exuberant sense of humour
led him to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them ironically. Later, a
trajectory from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of emptiness and futility, sustained only
intermittently by the linking of suffering with love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense
of self. The Nuits (“Nights”) poems (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit
d’août,” “La Nuit d’octobre,” 1835–37) express the purifying power of suffering in verse of
sustained sincerity, purged of all the early showiness.
Nerval
For a long while Gérard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature (notably
Goethe’s Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as his real
contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimères (The Chimeras), composed between about
1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual odyssey Aurélia (1853–54; Eng. trans.
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an
anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of
literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of
achievement of that side of the Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the
spiritual reintegration of the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the
prose poem and his use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays
from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the
period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging
audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism.
Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such
battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in
the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a
contemporary public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play
Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—
which he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could
transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited
from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a
sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic
local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young
Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a
dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a
similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the
mingling of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic
drama. The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic
melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.
Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most
famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many
analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by
Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of
poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic
estrangement.
Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of
his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued
to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—
almost charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather
in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying
disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one
indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with
clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological
study of a once pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted
youth and lost illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a
prose that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of
Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and
crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison
with Shakespeare.
The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the complex literary culture
of the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feeling—whether based on reason, sentiment,
or an exacerbated sensibility—and most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789 to
1815. Certainly, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The
insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly
underlined the regime’s centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This classicism, or, strictly
speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and literary forms
that had dominated “serious” literature—and drama in particular—in France for almost two
centuries. But Rousseau’s emphasis on subjectivity and sentiment still had its heirs, as did the
new forms of writing he had helped to evolve. Likewise, while the Gothic violence that had
emerged in early Revolutionary drama and novels was curbed, its dynamic remained. The seeds
of French Romanticism had been sown in national ground, long before writers began to turn to
other nations to kindle their inspiration.
The poetry of Chénier
André Chénier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in
volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets, who
saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical spirit,
especially that of Greece, Chénier exploited Classical myths for modern purposes. He began
work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, “Hermès,” a history of the universe and human
progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit but also anticipate the
episodic epic poems of the later Romantics. Chénier, though a moderate in revolutionary terms,
was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in the scathing fierceness of his lyrical
satires, the Ïambes, many of which were written from prison shortly before his execution. His
best-known poems, however, are elegies that sing of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and
lost happiness.
Revolutionary oratory and polemic
The intensity of political debate in Paris during the Revolution, whether in clubs, in the
National Assembly, or before tribunals, threw into prominence the arts of oratory. Speaking in
the name of reason, virtue, and liberty and using the Roman Republic or the city-states of Greece
as a frame of reference, Revolutionary leaders such as Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, and Louis de Saint-Just infused the
intellectual preoccupations of the Enlightenment with a sense of drama and passion. This
renewal of rhetoric is echoed in the enormously expanded political press, including Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Jacques-René Hébert’s Le Père Duchesne (“Old
Duchesne”), and Gracchus Babeuf’s Le Tribun du peuple (“The Defender of the People”). To
some extent the proclamations and communiqués of Napoleon prolonged this Revolutionary
eloquence.
Chateaubriand
The French Revolution made an émigré of François-Auguste-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, and his first major work, the Essai sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”; Eng. trans. An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and
Modern), is a complex and sometimes confused attempt to understand revolution in general, the
French Revolution in particular, and the individual’s relationship to these phenomena.
Chateaubriand took as his model the stance of the 18th-century philosophe, but his Génie du
christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) caught a new mood of return to religious faith
based on emotional appeals and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Christianity. The impact
of this work was enormous, not least in its reinstatement of nature, and natural landscape, as the
lodging place of spiritual repose and renewal. Within it were two short narratives, Atala (Eng.
trans. Atala, also translated in Atala, René), a tale of fatal passion and savage (Indian) nobility,
and René (Eng. trans. René). A young hero not dissimilar to Goethe’s Werther, René, who flees
pain and suffering in Europe to look vainly for refuge in the wilds of America, came to represent
the mal du siècle (world-weariness, literally “sickness of the century”), the essence of Romantic
sensibility; he is insecure, solitary, disorientated, and in flight, searching for a happiness that will
always evade him.
Behind all Chateaubriand’s works lies the sense of a break, caused by the French
Revolution, in a stable, ordered existence. His Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848–50; “Memoirs
from Beyond the Tomb”; Eng. trans. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand), the masterpiece he
worked on most of his adult life and intended for posthumous publication, uses the
autobiographical format to meditate on the history of France, the passing of time, and the vanity
of human desires. His lyrical and rhythmic prose left a deep impression on many Romantic
writers.
Mme de Staël and the debate on literature
Mme de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein) was truly
encyclopaedic in her interests. Her contribution to intellectual debate far exceeded any narrow
definition of literature. At first liberal and then, after her offer of support was rebuffed, fiercely
anti-Napoleon in politics, eclectic in philosophy, mixing rationalism and spiritualism, and
determinedly internationalist in her feeling for literature, she moved most easily in a world of
ideas, surrounding herself with the salon of intellectuals she founded at Coppet, Switzerland. Her
two novels, Delphine (1802; Delphine) and Corinne (1807; Corinne, or Italy), focus on the limits
society tries to impose on the independent woman and the woman of genius. The account of
Corinne’s personal drama is combined with an examination of national identities in
postrevolutionary Europe, offering original insights into how new alliances can be forged across
old, hostile boundaries and what part artistic form and women’s influence could play in making
new communities. Her two most influential works, De la littérature (1800; The Influence of
Literature upon Society) and De l’Allemagne (1810; Germany), expanded conceptions of
literature with the claim that different social forms needed different literary modes: in particular,
postrevolutionary society required a new literature. She explored the contrast, as she saw it,
between the literature of the south (rational, Classical) and the literature of the north (emotional,
Romantic), and she explored the potential interest for French culture of foreign writers such as
William Shakespeare, Ossian, and above all the German Romantics.
Many of these ideas emerged from discussions with August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose
work on the drama was widely translated, and from meetings with and readings of the Germans
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The Genevan economist and writer Jean-
Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi reinforced many of Mme de Staël’s points in his De la
littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813; Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe).
This cosmopolitan cultural relativism was infuriating to many of Staël’s French contemporaries
in the prevailing Neoclassical literary climate.
Romanticism
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain,
with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of
revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very
particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of
history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle
(literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for
his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or
whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was
sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any
simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of
1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness,
loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often
in the form of frustrated dynamism.
Foreign influences
When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France,
they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and
Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative
writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon,
was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European
cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence
of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a
model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of
Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy
and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their
literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these
countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and
revenge tales.
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one
of the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding
poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a
variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving
frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing
ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830,
there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics
and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of
l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a
reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the
intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.
Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Méditations poétiques
(1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and remaining
unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating through the musicality of
his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings unfulfilled. This soft-centred
elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and Byronic revolt. The Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses (1830; “Poetic and Religious Harmonies”; Eng. trans. in A Biographical
Sketch), with their religious emotion, reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened
by unease and disquiet. Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d’un ange (1838; “The
Fall of an Angel”) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine’s
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading role in the
provisional government.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In
his first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman
Catholic legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to
Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous
quality of Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there
are already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and
problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of
poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of
pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating
on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is
interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic
consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic,
prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.
Vigny
In contrast to Hugo’s scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more limited
and controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however, he proposed
the poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified, moralizing
philosopher, using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense expression of his
thought. Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble stoicism, his work focuses
on figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His
Les Destinées (1864; “The Fates”), composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies
the high spiritual aspiration that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and
concentration of expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.
Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his
Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; “Tales of Spain and Italy”). His exuberant sense of humour
led him to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them ironically. Later, a
trajectory from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of emptiness and futility, sustained only
intermittently by the linking of suffering with love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense
of self. The Nuits (“Nights”) poems (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit
d’août,” “La Nuit d’octobre,” 1835–37) express the purifying power of suffering in verse of
sustained sincerity, purged of all the early showiness.
Nerval
For a long while Gérard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature (notably
Goethe’s Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as his real
contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimères (The Chimeras), composed between about
1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual odyssey Aurélia (1853–54; Eng. trans.
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an
anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of
literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of
achievement of that side of the Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the
spiritual reintegration of the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the
prose poem and his use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays
from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the
period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging
audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism.
Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such
battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in
the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a
contemporary public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play
Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—
which he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could
transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited
from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a
sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic
local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young
Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a
dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a
similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the
mingling of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic
drama. The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic
melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.
Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most
famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many
analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by
Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of
poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic
estrangement.
Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of
his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued
to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—
almost charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather
in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying
disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one
indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with
clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological
study of a once pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted
youth and lost illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a
prose that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of
Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and
crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison
with Shakespeare.
The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the complex literary culture
of the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feeling—whether based on reason, sentiment,
or an exacerbated sensibility—and most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789 to
1815. Certainly, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The
insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly
underlined the regime’s centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This classicism, or, strictly
speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and literary forms
that had dominated “serious” literature—and drama in particular—in France for almost two
centuries. But Rousseau’s emphasis on subjectivity and sentiment still had its heirs, as did the
new forms of writing he had helped to evolve. Likewise, while the Gothic violence that had
emerged in early Revolutionary drama and novels was curbed, its dynamic remained. The seeds
of French Romanticism had been sown in national ground, long before writers began to turn to
other nations to kindle their inspiration.
The poetry of Chénier
André Chénier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in
volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets, who
saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical spirit,
especially that of Greece, Chénier exploited Classical myths for modern purposes. He began
work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, “Hermès,” a history of the universe and human
progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit but also anticipate the
episodic epic poems of the later Romantics. Chénier, though a moderate in revolutionary terms,
was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in the scathing fierceness of his lyrical
satires, the Ïambes, many of which were written from prison shortly before his execution. His
best-known poems, however, are elegies that sing of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and
lost happiness.
Revolutionary oratory and polemic
The intensity of political debate in Paris during the Revolution, whether in clubs, in the
National Assembly, or before tribunals, threw into prominence the arts of oratory. Speaking in
the name of reason, virtue, and liberty and using the Roman Republic or the city-states of Greece
as a frame of reference, Revolutionary leaders such as Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, and Louis de Saint-Just infused the
intellectual preoccupations of the Enlightenment with a sense of drama and passion. This
renewal of rhetoric is echoed in the enormously expanded political press, including Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Jacques-René Hébert’s Le Père Duchesne (“Old
Duchesne”), and Gracchus Babeuf’s Le Tribun du peuple (“The Defender of the People”). To
some extent the proclamations and communiqués of Napoleon prolonged this Revolutionary
eloquence.
Chateaubriand
The French Revolution made an émigré of François-Auguste-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, and his first major work, the Essai sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”; Eng. trans. An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and
Modern), is a complex and sometimes confused attempt to understand revolution in general, the
French Revolution in particular, and the individual’s relationship to these phenomena.
Chateaubriand took as his model the stance of the 18th-century philosophe, but his Génie du
christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) caught a new mood of return to religious faith
based on emotional appeals and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Christianity. The impact
of this work was enormous, not least in its reinstatement of nature, and natural landscape, as the
lodging place of spiritual repose and renewal. Within it were two short narratives, Atala (Eng.
trans. Atala, also translated in Atala, René), a tale of fatal passion and savage (Indian) nobility,
and René (Eng. trans. René). A young hero not dissimilar to Goethe’s Werther, René, who flees
pain and suffering in Europe to look vainly for refuge in the wilds of America, came to represent
the mal du siècle (world-weariness, literally “sickness of the century”), the essence of Romantic
sensibility; he is insecure, solitary, disorientated, and in flight, searching for a happiness that will
always evade him.
Behind all Chateaubriand’s works lies the sense of a break, caused by the French
Revolution, in a stable, ordered existence. His Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848–50; “Memoirs
from Beyond the Tomb”; Eng. trans. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand), the masterpiece he
worked on most of his adult life and intended for posthumous publication, uses the
autobiographical format to meditate on the history of France, the passing of time, and the vanity
of human desires. His lyrical and rhythmic prose left a deep impression on many Romantic
writers.
Mme de Staël and the debate on literature
Mme de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein) was truly
encyclopaedic in her interests. Her contribution to intellectual debate far exceeded any narrow
definition of literature. At first liberal and then, after her offer of support was rebuffed, fiercely
anti-Napoleon in politics, eclectic in philosophy, mixing rationalism and spiritualism, and
determinedly internationalist in her feeling for literature, she moved most easily in a world of
ideas, surrounding herself with the salon of intellectuals she founded at Coppet, Switzerland. Her
two novels, Delphine (1802; Delphine) and Corinne (1807; Corinne, or Italy), focus on the limits
society tries to impose on the independent woman and the woman of genius. The account of
Corinne’s personal drama is combined with an examination of national identities in
postrevolutionary Europe, offering original insights into how new alliances can be forged across
old, hostile boundaries and what part artistic form and women’s influence could play in making
new communities. Her two most influential works, De la littérature (1800; The Influence of
Literature upon Society) and De l’Allemagne (1810; Germany), expanded conceptions of
literature with the claim that different social forms needed different literary modes: in particular,
postrevolutionary society required a new literature. She explored the contrast, as she saw it,
between the literature of the south (rational, Classical) and the literature of the north (emotional,
Romantic), and she explored the potential interest for French culture of foreign writers such as
William Shakespeare, Ossian, and above all the German Romantics.
Many of these ideas emerged from discussions with August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose
work on the drama was widely translated, and from meetings with and readings of the Germans
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The Genevan economist and writer Jean-
Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi reinforced many of Mme de Staël’s points in his De la
littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813; Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe).
This cosmopolitan cultural relativism was infuriating to many of Staël’s French contemporaries
in the prevailing Neoclassical literary climate.
Romanticism
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain,
with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of
revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very
particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of
history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle
(literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for
his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or
whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was
sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any
simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of
1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness,
loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often
in the form of frustrated dynamism.
Foreign influences
When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France,
they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and
Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative
writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon,
was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European
cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence
of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a
model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of
Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy
and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their
literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these
countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and
revenge tales.
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one
of the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding
poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a
variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving
frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing
ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830,
there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics
and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of
l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a
reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the
intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.
Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Méditations poétiques
(1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and remaining
unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating through the musicality of
his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings unfulfilled. This soft-centred
elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and Byronic revolt. The Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses (1830; “Poetic and Religious Harmonies”; Eng. trans. in A Biographical
Sketch), with their religious emotion, reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened
by unease and disquiet. Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d’un ange (1838; “The
Fall of an Angel”) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine’s
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading role in the
provisional government.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In
his first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman
Catholic legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to
Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous
quality of Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there
are already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and
problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of
poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of
pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating
on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is
interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic
consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic,
prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.
Vigny
In contrast to Hugo’s scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more limited
and controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however, he proposed
the poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified, moralizing
philosopher, using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense expression of his
thought. Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble stoicism, his work focuses
on figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His
Les Destinées (1864; “The Fates”), composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies
the high spiritual aspiration that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and
concentration of expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.
Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his
Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; “Tales of Spain and Italy”). His exuberant sense of humour
led him to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them ironically. Later, a
trajectory from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of emptiness and futility, sustained only
intermittently by the linking of suffering with love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense
of self. The Nuits (“Nights”) poems (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit
d’août,” “La Nuit d’octobre,” 1835–37) express the purifying power of suffering in verse of
sustained sincerity, purged of all the early showiness.
Nerval
For a long while Gérard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature (notably
Goethe’s Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as his real
contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimères (The Chimeras), composed between about
1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual odyssey Aurélia (1853–54; Eng. trans.
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an
anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of
literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of
achievement of that side of the Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the
spiritual reintegration of the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the
prose poem and his use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays
from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the
period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging
audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism.
Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such
battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in
the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a
contemporary public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play
Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—
which he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could
transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited
from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a
sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic
local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young
Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a
dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a
similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the
mingling of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic
drama. The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic
melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.
Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most
famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many
analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by
Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of
poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic
estrangement.
Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of
his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued
to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—
almost charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather
in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying
disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one
indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with
clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological
study of a once pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted
youth and lost illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a
prose that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of
Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and
crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison
with Shakespeare.
The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the complex literary culture
of the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feeling—whether based on reason, sentiment,
or an exacerbated sensibility—and most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789 to
1815. Certainly, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The
insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly
underlined the regime’s centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This classicism, or, strictly
speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and literary forms
that had dominated “serious” literature—and drama in particular—in France for almost two
centuries. But Rousseau’s emphasis on subjectivity and sentiment still had its heirs, as did the
new forms of writing he had helped to evolve. Likewise, while the Gothic violence that had
emerged in early Revolutionary drama and novels was curbed, its dynamic remained. The seeds
of French Romanticism had been sown in national ground, long before writers began to turn to
other nations to kindle their inspiration.
The poetry of Chénier
André Chénier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in
volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets, who
saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical spirit,
especially that of Greece, Chénier exploited Classical myths for modern purposes. He began
work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, “Hermès,” a history of the universe and human
progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit but also anticipate the
episodic epic poems of the later Romantics. Chénier, though a moderate in revolutionary terms,
was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in the scathing fierceness of his lyrical
satires, the Ïambes, many of which were written from prison shortly before his execution. His
best-known poems, however, are elegies that sing of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and
lost happiness.
Revolutionary oratory and polemic
The intensity of political debate in Paris during the Revolution, whether in clubs, in the
National Assembly, or before tribunals, threw into prominence the arts of oratory. Speaking in
the name of reason, virtue, and liberty and using the Roman Republic or the city-states of Greece
as a frame of reference, Revolutionary leaders such as Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, and Louis de Saint-Just infused the
intellectual preoccupations of the Enlightenment with a sense of drama and passion. This
renewal of rhetoric is echoed in the enormously expanded political press, including Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Jacques-René Hébert’s Le Père Duchesne (“Old
Duchesne”), and Gracchus Babeuf’s Le Tribun du peuple (“The Defender of the People”). To
some extent the proclamations and communiqués of Napoleon prolonged this Revolutionary
eloquence.
Chateaubriand
The French Revolution made an émigré of François-Auguste-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, and his first major work, the Essai sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”; Eng. trans. An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and
Modern), is a complex and sometimes confused attempt to understand revolution in general, the
French Revolution in particular, and the individual’s relationship to these phenomena.
Chateaubriand took as his model the stance of the 18th-century philosophe, but his Génie du
christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) caught a new mood of return to religious faith
based on emotional appeals and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Christianity. The impact
of this work was enormous, not least in its reinstatement of nature, and natural landscape, as the
lodging place of spiritual repose and renewal. Within it were two short narratives, Atala (Eng.
trans. Atala, also translated in Atala, René), a tale of fatal passion and savage (Indian) nobility,
and René (Eng. trans. René). A young hero not dissimilar to Goethe’s Werther, René, who flees
pain and suffering in Europe to look vainly for refuge in the wilds of America, came to represent
the mal du siècle (world-weariness, literally “sickness of the century”), the essence of Romantic
sensibility; he is insecure, solitary, disorientated, and in flight, searching for a happiness that will
always evade him.
Behind all Chateaubriand’s works lies the sense of a break, caused by the French
Revolution, in a stable, ordered existence. His Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848–50; “Memoirs
from Beyond the Tomb”; Eng. trans. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand), the masterpiece he
worked on most of his adult life and intended for posthumous publication, uses the
autobiographical format to meditate on the history of France, the passing of time, and the vanity
of human desires. His lyrical and rhythmic prose left a deep impression on many Romantic
writers.
Mme de Staël and the debate on literature
Mme de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein) was truly
encyclopaedic in her interests. Her contribution to intellectual debate far exceeded any narrow
definition of literature. At first liberal and then, after her offer of support was rebuffed, fiercely
anti-Napoleon in politics, eclectic in philosophy, mixing rationalism and spiritualism, and
determinedly internationalist in her feeling for literature, she moved most easily in a world of
ideas, surrounding herself with the salon of intellectuals she founded at Coppet, Switzerland. Her
two novels, Delphine (1802; Delphine) and Corinne (1807; Corinne, or Italy), focus on the limits
society tries to impose on the independent woman and the woman of genius. The account of
Corinne’s personal drama is combined with an examination of national identities in
postrevolutionary Europe, offering original insights into how new alliances can be forged across
old, hostile boundaries and what part artistic form and women’s influence could play in making
new communities. Her two most influential works, De la littérature (1800; The Influence of
Literature upon Society) and De l’Allemagne (1810; Germany), expanded conceptions of
literature with the claim that different social forms needed different literary modes: in particular,
postrevolutionary society required a new literature. She explored the contrast, as she saw it,
between the literature of the south (rational, Classical) and the literature of the north (emotional,
Romantic), and she explored the potential interest for French culture of foreign writers such as
William Shakespeare, Ossian, and above all the German Romantics.
Many of these ideas emerged from discussions with August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose
work on the drama was widely translated, and from meetings with and readings of the Germans
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The Genevan economist and writer Jean-
Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi reinforced many of Mme de Staël’s points in his De la
littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813; Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe).
This cosmopolitan cultural relativism was infuriating to many of Staël’s French contemporaries
in the prevailing Neoclassical literary climate.
Romanticism
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain,
with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of
revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very
particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of
history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle
(literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for
his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or
whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was
sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any
simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of
1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness,
loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often
in the form of frustrated dynamism.
Foreign influences
When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France,
they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and
Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative
writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon,
was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European
cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence
of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a
model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of
Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy
and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their
literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these
countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and
revenge tales.
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one
of the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding
poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a
variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving
frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing
ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830,
there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics
and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of
l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a
reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the
intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.
Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Méditations poétiques
(1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and remaining
unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating through the musicality of
his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings unfulfilled. This soft-centred
elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and Byronic revolt. The Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses (1830; “Poetic and Religious Harmonies”; Eng. trans. in A Biographical
Sketch), with their religious emotion, reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened
by unease and disquiet. Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d’un ange (1838; “The
Fall of an Angel”) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine’s
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading role in the
provisional government.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In
his first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman
Catholic legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to
Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous
quality of Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there
are already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and
problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of
poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of
pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating
on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is
interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic
consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic,
prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.
Vigny
In contrast to Hugo’s scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more limited
and controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however, he proposed
the poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified, moralizing
philosopher, using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense expression of his
thought. Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble stoicism, his work focuses
on figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His
Les Destinées (1864; “The Fates”), composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies
the high spiritual aspiration that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and
concentration of expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.
Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his
Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; “Tales of Spain and Italy”). His exuberant sense of humour
led him to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them ironically. Later, a
trajectory from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of emptiness and futility, sustained only
intermittently by the linking of suffering with love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense
of self. The Nuits (“Nights”) poems (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit
d’août,” “La Nuit d’octobre,” 1835–37) express the purifying power of suffering in verse of
sustained sincerity, purged of all the early showiness.
Nerval
For a long while Gérard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature (notably
Goethe’s Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as his real
contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimères (The Chimeras), composed between about
1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual odyssey Aurélia (1853–54; Eng. trans.
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an
anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of
literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of
achievement of that side of the Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the
spiritual reintegration of the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the
prose poem and his use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays
from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the
period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging
audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism.
Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such
battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in
the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a
contemporary public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play
Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—
which he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could
transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited
from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a
sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic
local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young
Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a
dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a
similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the
mingling of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic
drama. The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic
melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.
Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most
famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many
analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by
Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of
poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic
estrangement.
Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of
his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued
to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—
almost charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather
in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying
disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one
indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with
clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological
study of a once pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted
youth and lost illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a
prose that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of
Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and
crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison
with Shakespeare.
The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the complex literary culture
of the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feeling—whether based on reason, sentiment,
or an exacerbated sensibility—and most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789 to
1815. Certainly, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The
insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly
underlined the regime’s centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This classicism, or, strictly
speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and literary forms
that had dominated “serious” literature—and drama in particular—in France for almost two
centuries. But Rousseau’s emphasis on subjectivity and sentiment still had its heirs, as did the
new forms of writing he had helped to evolve. Likewise, while the Gothic violence that had
emerged in early Revolutionary drama and novels was curbed, its dynamic remained. The seeds
of French Romanticism had been sown in national ground, long before writers began to turn to
other nations to kindle their inspiration.
The poetry of Chénier
André Chénier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in
volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets, who
saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical spirit,
especially that of Greece, Chénier exploited Classical myths for modern purposes. He began
work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, “Hermès,” a history of the universe and human
progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit but also anticipate the
episodic epic poems of the later Romantics. Chénier, though a moderate in revolutionary terms,
was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in the scathing fierceness of his lyrical
satires, the Ïambes, many of which were written from prison shortly before his execution. His
best-known poems, however, are elegies that sing of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and
lost happiness.
Revolutionary oratory and polemic
The intensity of political debate in Paris during the Revolution, whether in clubs, in the
National Assembly, or before tribunals, threw into prominence the arts of oratory. Speaking in
the name of reason, virtue, and liberty and using the Roman Republic or the city-states of Greece
as a frame of reference, Revolutionary leaders such as Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, and Louis de Saint-Just infused the
intellectual preoccupations of the Enlightenment with a sense of drama and passion. This
renewal of rhetoric is echoed in the enormously expanded political press, including Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Jacques-René Hébert’s Le Père Duchesne (“Old
Duchesne”), and Gracchus Babeuf’s Le Tribun du peuple (“The Defender of the People”). To
some extent the proclamations and communiqués of Napoleon prolonged this Revolutionary
eloquence.
Chateaubriand
The French Revolution made an émigré of François-Auguste-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, and his first major work, the Essai sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”; Eng. trans. An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and
Modern), is a complex and sometimes confused attempt to understand revolution in general, the
French Revolution in particular, and the individual’s relationship to these phenomena.
Chateaubriand took as his model the stance of the 18th-century philosophe, but his Génie du
christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) caught a new mood of return to religious faith
based on emotional appeals and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Christianity. The impact
of this work was enormous, not least in its reinstatement of nature, and natural landscape, as the
lodging place of spiritual repose and renewal. Within it were two short narratives, Atala (Eng.
trans. Atala, also translated in Atala, René), a tale of fatal passion and savage (Indian) nobility,
and René (Eng. trans. René). A young hero not dissimilar to Goethe’s Werther, René, who flees
pain and suffering in Europe to look vainly for refuge in the wilds of America, came to represent
the mal du siècle (world-weariness, literally “sickness of the century”), the essence of Romantic
sensibility; he is insecure, solitary, disorientated, and in flight, searching for a happiness that will
always evade him.
Behind all Chateaubriand’s works lies the sense of a break, caused by the French
Revolution, in a stable, ordered existence. His Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848–50; “Memoirs
from Beyond the Tomb”; Eng. trans. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand), the masterpiece he
worked on most of his adult life and intended for posthumous publication, uses the
autobiographical format to meditate on the history of France, the passing of time, and the vanity
of human desires. His lyrical and rhythmic prose left a deep impression on many Romantic
writers.
Mme de Staël and the debate on literature
Mme de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein) was truly
encyclopaedic in her interests. Her contribution to intellectual debate far exceeded any narrow
definition of literature. At first liberal and then, after her offer of support was rebuffed, fiercely
anti-Napoleon in politics, eclectic in philosophy, mixing rationalism and spiritualism, and
determinedly internationalist in her feeling for literature, she moved most easily in a world of
ideas, surrounding herself with the salon of intellectuals she founded at Coppet, Switzerland. Her
two novels, Delphine (1802; Delphine) and Corinne (1807; Corinne, or Italy), focus on the limits
society tries to impose on the independent woman and the woman of genius. The account of
Corinne’s personal drama is combined with an examination of national identities in
postrevolutionary Europe, offering original insights into how new alliances can be forged across
old, hostile boundaries and what part artistic form and women’s influence could play in making
new communities. Her two most influential works, De la littérature (1800; The Influence of
Literature upon Society) and De l’Allemagne (1810; Germany), expanded conceptions of
literature with the claim that different social forms needed different literary modes: in particular,
postrevolutionary society required a new literature. She explored the contrast, as she saw it,
between the literature of the south (rational, Classical) and the literature of the north (emotional,
Romantic), and she explored the potential interest for French culture of foreign writers such as
William Shakespeare, Ossian, and above all the German Romantics.
Many of these ideas emerged from discussions with August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose
work on the drama was widely translated, and from meetings with and readings of the Germans
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The Genevan economist and writer Jean-
Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi reinforced many of Mme de Staël’s points in his De la
littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813; Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe).
This cosmopolitan cultural relativism was infuriating to many of Staël’s French contemporaries
in the prevailing Neoclassical literary climate.
Romanticism
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain,
with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of
revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very
particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of
history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle
(literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for
his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or
whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was
sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any
simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of
1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness,
loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often
in the form of frustrated dynamism.
Foreign influences
When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France,
they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and
Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative
writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon,
was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European
cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence
of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a
model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of
Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy
and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their
literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these
countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and
revenge tales.
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one
of the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding
poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a
variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving
frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing
ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830,
there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics
and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of
l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a
reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the
intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.
Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Méditations poétiques
(1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and remaining
unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating through the musicality of
his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings unfulfilled. This soft-centred
elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and Byronic revolt. The Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses (1830; “Poetic and Religious Harmonies”; Eng. trans. in A Biographical
Sketch), with their religious emotion, reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened
by unease and disquiet. Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d’un ange (1838; “The
Fall of an Angel”) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine’s
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading role in the
provisional government.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In
his first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman
Catholic legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to
Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous
quality of Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there
are already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and
problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of
poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of
pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating
on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is
interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic
consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic,
prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.
Vigny
In contrast to Hugo’s scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more limited
and controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however, he proposed
the poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified, moralizing
philosopher, using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense expression of his
thought. Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble stoicism, his work focuses
on figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His
Les Destinées (1864; “The Fates”), composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies
the high spiritual aspiration that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and
concentration of expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.
Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his
Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; “Tales of Spain and Italy”). His exuberant sense of humour
led him to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them ironically. Later, a
trajectory from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of emptiness and futility, sustained only
intermittently by the linking of suffering with love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense
of self. The Nuits (“Nights”) poems (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit
d’août,” “La Nuit d’octobre,” 1835–37) express the purifying power of suffering in verse of
sustained sincerity, purged of all the early showiness.
Nerval
For a long while Gérard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature (notably
Goethe’s Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as his real
contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimères (The Chimeras), composed between about
1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual odyssey Aurélia (1853–54; Eng. trans.
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an
anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of
literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of
achievement of that side of the Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the
spiritual reintegration of the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the
prose poem and his use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays
from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the
period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging
audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism.
Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such
battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in
the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a
contemporary public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play
Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—
which he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could
transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited
from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a
sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic
local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young
Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a
dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a
similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the
mingling of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic
drama. The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic
melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.
Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most
famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many
analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by
Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of
poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic
estrangement.
Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of
his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued
to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—
almost charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather
in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying
disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one
indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with
clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological
study of a once pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted
youth and lost illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a
prose that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of
Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and
crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison
with Shakespeare.
The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the complex literary culture
of the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feeling—whether based on reason, sentiment,
or an exacerbated sensibility—and most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789 to
1815. Certainly, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The
insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly
underlined the regime’s centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This classicism, or, strictly
speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and literary forms
that had dominated “serious” literature—and drama in particular—in France for almost two
centuries. But Rousseau’s emphasis on subjectivity and sentiment still had its heirs, as did the
new forms of writing he had helped to evolve. Likewise, while the Gothic violence that had
emerged in early Revolutionary drama and novels was curbed, its dynamic remained. The seeds
of French Romanticism had been sown in national ground, long before writers began to turn to
other nations to kindle their inspiration.
The poetry of Chénier
André Chénier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in
volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets, who
saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical spirit,
especially that of Greece, Chénier exploited Classical myths for modern purposes. He began
work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, “Hermès,” a history of the universe and human
progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit but also anticipate the
episodic epic poems of the later Romantics. Chénier, though a moderate in revolutionary terms,
was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in the scathing fierceness of his lyrical
satires, the Ïambes, many of which were written from prison shortly before his execution. His
best-known poems, however, are elegies that sing of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and
lost happiness.
Revolutionary oratory and polemic
The intensity of political debate in Paris during the Revolution, whether in clubs, in the
National Assembly, or before tribunals, threw into prominence the arts of oratory. Speaking in
the name of reason, virtue, and liberty and using the Roman Republic or the city-states of Greece
as a frame of reference, Revolutionary leaders such as Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, and Louis de Saint-Just infused the
intellectual preoccupations of the Enlightenment with a sense of drama and passion. This
renewal of rhetoric is echoed in the enormously expanded political press, including Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Jacques-René Hébert’s Le Père Duchesne (“Old
Duchesne”), and Gracchus Babeuf’s Le Tribun du peuple (“The Defender of the People”). To
some extent the proclamations and communiqués of Napoleon prolonged this Revolutionary
eloquence.
Chateaubriand
The French Revolution made an émigré of François-Auguste-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, and his first major work, the Essai sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”; Eng. trans. An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and
Modern), is a complex and sometimes confused attempt to understand revolution in general, the
French Revolution in particular, and the individual’s relationship to these phenomena.
Chateaubriand took as his model the stance of the 18th-century philosophe, but his Génie du
christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) caught a new mood of return to religious faith
based on emotional appeals and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Christianity. The impact
of this work was enormous, not least in its reinstatement of nature, and natural landscape, as the
lodging place of spiritual repose and renewal. Within it were two short narratives, Atala (Eng.
trans. Atala, also translated in Atala, René), a tale of fatal passion and savage (Indian) nobility,
and René (Eng. trans. René). A young hero not dissimilar to Goethe’s Werther, René, who flees
pain and suffering in Europe to look vainly for refuge in the wilds of America, came to represent
the mal du siècle (world-weariness, literally “sickness of the century”), the essence of Romantic
sensibility; he is insecure, solitary, disorientated, and in flight, searching for a happiness that will
always evade him.
Behind all Chateaubriand’s works lies the sense of a break, caused by the French
Revolution, in a stable, ordered existence. His Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848–50; “Memoirs
from Beyond the Tomb”; Eng. trans. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand), the masterpiece he
worked on most of his adult life and intended for posthumous publication, uses the
autobiographical format to meditate on the history of France, the passing of time, and the vanity
of human desires. His lyrical and rhythmic prose left a deep impression on many Romantic
writers.
Mme de Staël and the debate on literature
Mme de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein) was truly
encyclopaedic in her interests. Her contribution to intellectual debate far exceeded any narrow
definition of literature. At first liberal and then, after her offer of support was rebuffed, fiercely
anti-Napoleon in politics, eclectic in philosophy, mixing rationalism and spiritualism, and
determinedly internationalist in her feeling for literature, she moved most easily in a world of
ideas, surrounding herself with the salon of intellectuals she founded at Coppet, Switzerland. Her
two novels, Delphine (1802; Delphine) and Corinne (1807; Corinne, or Italy), focus on the limits
society tries to impose on the independent woman and the woman of genius. The account of
Corinne’s personal drama is combined with an examination of national identities in
postrevolutionary Europe, offering original insights into how new alliances can be forged across
old, hostile boundaries and what part artistic form and women’s influence could play in making
new communities. Her two most influential works, De la littérature (1800; The Influence of
Literature upon Society) and De l’Allemagne (1810; Germany), expanded conceptions of
literature with the claim that different social forms needed different literary modes: in particular,
postrevolutionary society required a new literature. She explored the contrast, as she saw it,
between the literature of the south (rational, Classical) and the literature of the north (emotional,
Romantic), and she explored the potential interest for French culture of foreign writers such as
William Shakespeare, Ossian, and above all the German Romantics.
Many of these ideas emerged from discussions with August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose
work on the drama was widely translated, and from meetings with and readings of the Germans
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The Genevan economist and writer Jean-
Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi reinforced many of Mme de Staël’s points in his De la
littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813; Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe).
This cosmopolitan cultural relativism was infuriating to many of Staël’s French contemporaries
in the prevailing Neoclassical literary climate.
Romanticism
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain,
with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of
revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very
particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of
history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle
(literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for
his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or
whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was
sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any
simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of
1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness,
loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often
in the form of frustrated dynamism.
Foreign influences
When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France,
they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and
Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative
writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon,
was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European
cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence
of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a
model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of
Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy
and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their
literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these
countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and
revenge tales.
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one
of the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding
poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a
variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving
frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing
ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830,
there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics
and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of
l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a
reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the
intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.
Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Méditations poétiques
(1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and remaining
unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating through the musicality of
his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings unfulfilled. This soft-centred
elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and Byronic revolt. The Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses (1830; “Poetic and Religious Harmonies”; Eng. trans. in A Biographical
Sketch), with their religious emotion, reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened
by unease and disquiet. Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d’un ange (1838; “The
Fall of an Angel”) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine’s
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading role in the
provisional government.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In
his first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman
Catholic legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to
Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous
quality of Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there
are already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and
problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of
poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of
pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating
on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is
interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic
consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic,
prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.
Vigny
In contrast to Hugo’s scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more limited
and controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however, he proposed
the poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified, moralizing
philosopher, using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense expression of his
thought. Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble stoicism, his work focuses
on figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His
Les Destinées (1864; “The Fates”), composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies
the high spiritual aspiration that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and
concentration of expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.
Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his
Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; “Tales of Spain and Italy”). His exuberant sense of humour
led him to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them ironically. Later, a
trajectory from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of emptiness and futility, sustained only
intermittently by the linking of suffering with love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense
of self. The Nuits (“Nights”) poems (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit
d’août,” “La Nuit d’octobre,” 1835–37) express the purifying power of suffering in verse of
sustained sincerity, purged of all the early showiness.
Nerval
For a long while Gérard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature (notably
Goethe’s Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as his real
contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimères (The Chimeras), composed between about
1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual odyssey Aurélia (1853–54; Eng. trans.
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an
anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of
literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of
achievement of that side of the Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the
spiritual reintegration of the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the
prose poem and his use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays
from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the
period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging
audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism.
Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such
battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in
the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a
contemporary public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play
Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—
which he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could
transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited
from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a
sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic
local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young
Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a
dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a
similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the
mingling of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic
drama. The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic
melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.
Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most
famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many
analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by
Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of
poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic
estrangement.
Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of
his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued
to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—
almost charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather
in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying
disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one
indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with
clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological
study of a once pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted
youth and lost illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a
prose that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of
Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and
crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison
with Shakespeare.
The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the complex literary culture
of the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feeling—whether based on reason, sentiment,
or an exacerbated sensibility—and most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789 to
1815. Certainly, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The
insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly
underlined the regime’s centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This classicism, or, strictly
speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and literary forms
that had dominated “serious” literature—and drama in particular—in France for almost two
centuries. But Rousseau’s emphasis on subjectivity and sentiment still had its heirs, as did the
new forms of writing he had helped to evolve. Likewise, while the Gothic violence that had
emerged in early Revolutionary drama and novels was curbed, its dynamic remained. The seeds
of French Romanticism had been sown in national ground, long before writers began to turn to
other nations to kindle their inspiration.
The poetry of Chénier
André Chénier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in
volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets, who
saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical spirit,
especially that of Greece, Chénier exploited Classical myths for modern purposes. He began
work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, “Hermès,” a history of the universe and human
progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit but also anticipate the
episodic epic poems of the later Romantics. Chénier, though a moderate in revolutionary terms,
was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in the scathing fierceness of his lyrical
satires, the Ïambes, many of which were written from prison shortly before his execution. His
best-known poems, however, are elegies that sing of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and
lost happiness.
Revolutionary oratory and polemic
The intensity of political debate in Paris during the Revolution, whether in clubs, in the
National Assembly, or before tribunals, threw into prominence the arts of oratory. Speaking in
the name of reason, virtue, and liberty and using the Roman Republic or the city-states of Greece
as a frame of reference, Revolutionary leaders such as Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, and Louis de Saint-Just infused the
intellectual preoccupations of the Enlightenment with a sense of drama and passion. This
renewal of rhetoric is echoed in the enormously expanded political press, including Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Jacques-René Hébert’s Le Père Duchesne (“Old
Duchesne”), and Gracchus Babeuf’s Le Tribun du peuple (“The Defender of the People”). To
some extent the proclamations and communiqués of Napoleon prolonged this Revolutionary
eloquence.
Chateaubriand
The French Revolution made an émigré of François-Auguste-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, and his first major work, the Essai sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”; Eng. trans. An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and
Modern), is a complex and sometimes confused attempt to understand revolution in general, the
French Revolution in particular, and the individual’s relationship to these phenomena.
Chateaubriand took as his model the stance of the 18th-century philosophe, but his Génie du
christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) caught a new mood of return to religious faith
based on emotional appeals and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Christianity. The impact
of this work was enormous, not least in its reinstatement of nature, and natural landscape, as the
lodging place of spiritual repose and renewal. Within it were two short narratives, Atala (Eng.
trans. Atala, also translated in Atala, René), a tale of fatal passion and savage (Indian) nobility,
and René (Eng. trans. René). A young hero not dissimilar to Goethe’s Werther, René, who flees
pain and suffering in Europe to look vainly for refuge in the wilds of America, came to represent
the mal du siècle (world-weariness, literally “sickness of the century”), the essence of Romantic
sensibility; he is insecure, solitary, disorientated, and in flight, searching for a happiness that will
always evade him.
Behind all Chateaubriand’s works lies the sense of a break, caused by the French
Revolution, in a stable, ordered existence. His Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848–50; “Memoirs
from Beyond the Tomb”; Eng. trans. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand), the masterpiece he
worked on most of his adult life and intended for posthumous publication, uses the
autobiographical format to meditate on the history of France, the passing of time, and the vanity
of human desires. His lyrical and rhythmic prose left a deep impression on many Romantic
writers.
Mme de Staël and the debate on literature
Mme de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein) was truly
encyclopaedic in her interests. Her contribution to intellectual debate far exceeded any narrow
definition of literature. At first liberal and then, after her offer of support was rebuffed, fiercely
anti-Napoleon in politics, eclectic in philosophy, mixing rationalism and spiritualism, and
determinedly internationalist in her feeling for literature, she moved most easily in a world of
ideas, surrounding herself with the salon of intellectuals she founded at Coppet, Switzerland. Her
two novels, Delphine (1802; Delphine) and Corinne (1807; Corinne, or Italy), focus on the limits
society tries to impose on the independent woman and the woman of genius. The account of
Corinne’s personal drama is combined with an examination of national identities in
postrevolutionary Europe, offering original insights into how new alliances can be forged across
old, hostile boundaries and what part artistic form and women’s influence could play in making
new communities. Her two most influential works, De la littérature (1800; The Influence of
Literature upon Society) and De l’Allemagne (1810; Germany), expanded conceptions of
literature with the claim that different social forms needed different literary modes: in particular,
postrevolutionary society required a new literature. She explored the contrast, as she saw it,
between the literature of the south (rational, Classical) and the literature of the north (emotional,
Romantic), and she explored the potential interest for French culture of foreign writers such as
William Shakespeare, Ossian, and above all the German Romantics.
Many of these ideas emerged from discussions with August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose
work on the drama was widely translated, and from meetings with and readings of the Germans
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The Genevan economist and writer Jean-
Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi reinforced many of Mme de Staël’s points in his De la
littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813; Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe).
This cosmopolitan cultural relativism was infuriating to many of Staël’s French contemporaries
in the prevailing Neoclassical literary climate.
Romanticism
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain,
with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of
revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very
particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of
history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle
(literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for
his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or
whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was
sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any
simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of
1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness,
loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often
in the form of frustrated dynamism.
Foreign influences
When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France,
they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and
Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative
writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon,
was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European
cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence
of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a
model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of
Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy
and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their
literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these
countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and
revenge tales.
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one
of the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding
poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a
variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving
frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing
ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830,
there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics
and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of
l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a
reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the
intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.
Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Méditations poétiques
(1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and remaining
unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating through the musicality of
his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings unfulfilled. This soft-centred
elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and Byronic revolt. The Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses (1830; “Poetic and Religious Harmonies”; Eng. trans. in A Biographical
Sketch), with their religious emotion, reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened
by unease and disquiet. Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d’un ange (1838; “The
Fall of an Angel”) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine’s
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading role in the
provisional government.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In
his first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman
Catholic legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to
Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous
quality of Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there
are already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and
problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of
poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of
pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating
on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is
interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic
consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic,
prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.
Vigny
In contrast to Hugo’s scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more limited
and controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however, he proposed
the poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified, moralizing
philosopher, using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense expression of his
thought. Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble stoicism, his work focuses
on figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His
Les Destinées (1864; “The Fates”), composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies
the high spiritual aspiration that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and
concentration of expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.
Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his
Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; “Tales of Spain and Italy”). His exuberant sense of humour
led him to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them ironically. Later, a
trajectory from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of emptiness and futility, sustained only
intermittently by the linking of suffering with love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense
of self. The Nuits (“Nights”) poems (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit
d’août,” “La Nuit d’octobre,” 1835–37) express the purifying power of suffering in verse of
sustained sincerity, purged of all the early showiness.
Nerval
For a long while Gérard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature (notably
Goethe’s Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as his real
contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimères (The Chimeras), composed between about
1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual odyssey Aurélia (1853–54; Eng. trans.
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an
anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of
literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of
achievement of that side of the Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the
spiritual reintegration of the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the
prose poem and his use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays
from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the
period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging
audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism.
Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such
battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in
the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a
contemporary public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play
Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—
which he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could
transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited
from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a
sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic
local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young
Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a
dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a
similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the
mingling of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic
drama. The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic
melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.
Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most
famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many
analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by
Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of
poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic
estrangement.
Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of
his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued
to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—
almost charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather
in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying
disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one
indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with
clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological
study of a once pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted
youth and lost illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a
prose that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of
Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and
crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison
with Shakespeare.
The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the complex literary culture
of the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feeling—whether based on reason, sentiment,
or an exacerbated sensibility—and most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789 to
1815. Certainly, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The
insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly
underlined the regime’s centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This classicism, or, strictly
speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and literary forms
that had dominated “serious” literature—and drama in particular—in France for almost two
centuries. But Rousseau’s emphasis on subjectivity and sentiment still had its heirs, as did the
new forms of writing he had helped to evolve. Likewise, while the Gothic violence that had
emerged in early Revolutionary drama and novels was curbed, its dynamic remained. The seeds
of French Romanticism had been sown in national ground, long before writers began to turn to
other nations to kindle their inspiration.
The poetry of Chénier
André Chénier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in
volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets, who
saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical spirit,
especially that of Greece, Chénier exploited Classical myths for modern purposes. He began
work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, “Hermès,” a history of the universe and human
progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit but also anticipate the
episodic epic poems of the later Romantics. Chénier, though a moderate in revolutionary terms,
was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in the scathing fierceness of his lyrical
satires, the Ïambes, many of which were written from prison shortly before his execution. His
best-known poems, however, are elegies that sing of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and
lost happiness.
Revolutionary oratory and polemic
The intensity of political debate in Paris during the Revolution, whether in clubs, in the
National Assembly, or before tribunals, threw into prominence the arts of oratory. Speaking in
the name of reason, virtue, and liberty and using the Roman Republic or the city-states of Greece
as a frame of reference, Revolutionary leaders such as Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, and Louis de Saint-Just infused the
intellectual preoccupations of the Enlightenment with a sense of drama and passion. This
renewal of rhetoric is echoed in the enormously expanded political press, including Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Jacques-René Hébert’s Le Père Duchesne (“Old
Duchesne”), and Gracchus Babeuf’s Le Tribun du peuple (“The Defender of the People”). To
some extent the proclamations and communiqués of Napoleon prolonged this Revolutionary
eloquence.
Chateaubriand
The French Revolution made an émigré of François-Auguste-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, and his first major work, the Essai sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”; Eng. trans. An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and
Modern), is a complex and sometimes confused attempt to understand revolution in general, the
French Revolution in particular, and the individual’s relationship to these phenomena.
Chateaubriand took as his model the stance of the 18th-century philosophe, but his Génie du
christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) caught a new mood of return to religious faith
based on emotional appeals and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Christianity. The impact
of this work was enormous, not least in its reinstatement of nature, and natural landscape, as the
lodging place of spiritual repose and renewal. Within it were two short narratives, Atala (Eng.
trans. Atala, also translated in Atala, René), a tale of fatal passion and savage (Indian) nobility,
and René (Eng. trans. René). A young hero not dissimilar to Goethe’s Werther, René, who flees
pain and suffering in Europe to look vainly for refuge in the wilds of America, came to represent
the mal du siècle (world-weariness, literally “sickness of the century”), the essence of Romantic
sensibility; he is insecure, solitary, disorientated, and in flight, searching for a happiness that will
always evade him.
Behind all Chateaubriand’s works lies the sense of a break, caused by the French
Revolution, in a stable, ordered existence. His Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848–50; “Memoirs
from Beyond the Tomb”; Eng. trans. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand), the masterpiece he
worked on most of his adult life and intended for posthumous publication, uses the
autobiographical format to meditate on the history of France, the passing of time, and the vanity
of human desires. His lyrical and rhythmic prose left a deep impression on many Romantic
writers.
Mme de Staël and the debate on literature
Mme de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein) was truly
encyclopaedic in her interests. Her contribution to intellectual debate far exceeded any narrow
definition of literature. At first liberal and then, after her offer of support was rebuffed, fiercely
anti-Napoleon in politics, eclectic in philosophy, mixing rationalism and spiritualism, and
determinedly internationalist in her feeling for literature, she moved most easily in a world of
ideas, surrounding herself with the salon of intellectuals she founded at Coppet, Switzerland. Her
two novels, Delphine (1802; Delphine) and Corinne (1807; Corinne, or Italy), focus on the limits
society tries to impose on the independent woman and the woman of genius. The account of
Corinne’s personal drama is combined with an examination of national identities in
postrevolutionary Europe, offering original insights into how new alliances can be forged across
old, hostile boundaries and what part artistic form and women’s influence could play in making
new communities. Her two most influential works, De la littérature (1800; The Influence of
Literature upon Society) and De l’Allemagne (1810; Germany), expanded conceptions of
literature with the claim that different social forms needed different literary modes: in particular,
postrevolutionary society required a new literature. She explored the contrast, as she saw it,
between the literature of the south (rational, Classical) and the literature of the north (emotional,
Romantic), and she explored the potential interest for French culture of foreign writers such as
William Shakespeare, Ossian, and above all the German Romantics.
Many of these ideas emerged from discussions with August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose
work on the drama was widely translated, and from meetings with and readings of the Germans
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The Genevan economist and writer Jean-
Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi reinforced many of Mme de Staël’s points in his De la
littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813; Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe).
This cosmopolitan cultural relativism was infuriating to many of Staël’s French contemporaries
in the prevailing Neoclassical literary climate.
Romanticism
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain,
with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of
revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very
particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of
history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle
(literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for
his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or
whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was
sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any
simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of
1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness,
loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often
in the form of frustrated dynamism.
Foreign influences
When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France,
they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and
Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative
writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon,
was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European
cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence
of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a
model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of
Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy
and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their
literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these
countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and
revenge tales.
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one
of the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding
poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a
variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving
frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing
ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830,
there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics
and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of
l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a
reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the
intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.
Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Méditations poétiques
(1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and remaining
unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating through the musicality of
his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings unfulfilled. This soft-centred
elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and Byronic revolt. The Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses (1830; “Poetic and Religious Harmonies”; Eng. trans. in A Biographical
Sketch), with their religious emotion, reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened
by unease and disquiet. Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d’un ange (1838; “The
Fall of an Angel”) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine’s
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading role in the
provisional government.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In
his first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman
Catholic legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to
Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous
quality of Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there
are already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and
problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of
poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of
pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating
on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is
interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic
consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic,
prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.
Vigny
In contrast to Hugo’s scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more limited
and controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however, he proposed
the poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified, moralizing
philosopher, using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense expression of his
thought. Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble stoicism, his work focuses
on figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His
Les Destinées (1864; “The Fates”), composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies
the high spiritual aspiration that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and
concentration of expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.
Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his
Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; “Tales of Spain and Italy”). His exuberant sense of humour
led him to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them ironically. Later, a
trajectory from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of emptiness and futility, sustained only
intermittently by the linking of suffering with love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense
of self. The Nuits (“Nights”) poems (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit
d’août,” “La Nuit d’octobre,” 1835–37) express the purifying power of suffering in verse of
sustained sincerity, purged of all the early showiness.
Nerval
For a long while Gérard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature (notably
Goethe’s Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as his real
contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimères (The Chimeras), composed between about
1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual odyssey Aurélia (1853–54; Eng. trans.
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an
anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of
literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of
achievement of that side of the Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the
spiritual reintegration of the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the
prose poem and his use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays
from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the
period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging
audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism.
Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such
battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in
the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a
contemporary public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play
Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—
which he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could
transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited
from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a
sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic
local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young
Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a
dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a
similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the
mingling of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic
drama. The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic
melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.
Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most
famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many
analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by
Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of
poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic
estrangement.
Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of
his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued
to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—
almost charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather
in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying
disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one
indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with
clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological
study of a once pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted
youth and lost illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a
prose that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of
Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and
crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison
with Shakespeare.
The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the complex literary culture
of the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feeling—whether based on reason, sentiment,
or an exacerbated sensibility—and most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789 to
1815. Certainly, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The
insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly
underlined the regime’s centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This classicism, or, strictly
speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and literary forms
that had dominated “serious” literature—and drama in particular—in France for almost two
centuries. But Rousseau’s emphasis on subjectivity and sentiment still had its heirs, as did the
new forms of writing he had helped to evolve. Likewise, while the Gothic violence that had
emerged in early Revolutionary drama and novels was curbed, its dynamic remained. The seeds
of French Romanticism had been sown in national ground, long before writers began to turn to
other nations to kindle their inspiration.
The poetry of Chénier
André Chénier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in
volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets, who
saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical spirit,
especially that of Greece, Chénier exploited Classical myths for modern purposes. He began
work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, “Hermès,” a history of the universe and human
progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit but also anticipate the
episodic epic poems of the later Romantics. Chénier, though a moderate in revolutionary terms,
was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in the scathing fierceness of his lyrical
satires, the Ïambes, many of which were written from prison shortly before his execution. His
best-known poems, however, are elegies that sing of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and
lost happiness.
Revolutionary oratory and polemic
The intensity of political debate in Paris during the Revolution, whether in clubs, in the
National Assembly, or before tribunals, threw into prominence the arts of oratory. Speaking in
the name of reason, virtue, and liberty and using the Roman Republic or the city-states of Greece
as a frame of reference, Revolutionary leaders such as Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, and Louis de Saint-Just infused the
intellectual preoccupations of the Enlightenment with a sense of drama and passion. This
renewal of rhetoric is echoed in the enormously expanded political press, including Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Jacques-René Hébert’s Le Père Duchesne (“Old
Duchesne”), and Gracchus Babeuf’s Le Tribun du peuple (“The Defender of the People”). To
some extent the proclamations and communiqués of Napoleon prolonged this Revolutionary
eloquence.
Chateaubriand
The French Revolution made an émigré of François-Auguste-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, and his first major work, the Essai sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”; Eng. trans. An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and
Modern), is a complex and sometimes confused attempt to understand revolution in general, the
French Revolution in particular, and the individual’s relationship to these phenomena.
Chateaubriand took as his model the stance of the 18th-century philosophe, but his Génie du
christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) caught a new mood of return to religious faith
based on emotional appeals and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Christianity. The impact
of this work was enormous, not least in its reinstatement of nature, and natural landscape, as the
lodging place of spiritual repose and renewal. Within it were two short narratives, Atala (Eng.
trans. Atala, also translated in Atala, René), a tale of fatal passion and savage (Indian) nobility,
and René (Eng. trans. René). A young hero not dissimilar to Goethe’s Werther, René, who flees
pain and suffering in Europe to look vainly for refuge in the wilds of America, came to represent
the mal du siècle (world-weariness, literally “sickness of the century”), the essence of Romantic
sensibility; he is insecure, solitary, disorientated, and in flight, searching for a happiness that will
always evade him.
Behind all Chateaubriand’s works lies the sense of a break, caused by the French
Revolution, in a stable, ordered existence. His Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848–50; “Memoirs
from Beyond the Tomb”; Eng. trans. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand), the masterpiece he
worked on most of his adult life and intended for posthumous publication, uses the
autobiographical format to meditate on the history of France, the passing of time, and the vanity
of human desires. His lyrical and rhythmic prose left a deep impression on many Romantic
writers.
Mme de Staël and the debate on literature
Mme de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein) was truly
encyclopaedic in her interests. Her contribution to intellectual debate far exceeded any narrow
definition of literature. At first liberal and then, after her offer of support was rebuffed, fiercely
anti-Napoleon in politics, eclectic in philosophy, mixing rationalism and spiritualism, and
determinedly internationalist in her feeling for literature, she moved most easily in a world of
ideas, surrounding herself with the salon of intellectuals she founded at Coppet, Switzerland. Her
two novels, Delphine (1802; Delphine) and Corinne (1807; Corinne, or Italy), focus on the limits
society tries to impose on the independent woman and the woman of genius. The account of
Corinne’s personal drama is combined with an examination of national identities in
postrevolutionary Europe, offering original insights into how new alliances can be forged across
old, hostile boundaries and what part artistic form and women’s influence could play in making
new communities. Her two most influential works, De la littérature (1800; The Influence of
Literature upon Society) and De l’Allemagne (1810; Germany), expanded conceptions of
literature with the claim that different social forms needed different literary modes: in particular,
postrevolutionary society required a new literature. She explored the contrast, as she saw it,
between the literature of the south (rational, Classical) and the literature of the north (emotional,
Romantic), and she explored the potential interest for French culture of foreign writers such as
William Shakespeare, Ossian, and above all the German Romantics.
Many of these ideas emerged from discussions with August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose
work on the drama was widely translated, and from meetings with and readings of the Germans
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The Genevan economist and writer Jean-
Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi reinforced many of Mme de Staël’s points in his De la
littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813; Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe).
This cosmopolitan cultural relativism was infuriating to many of Staël’s French contemporaries
in the prevailing Neoclassical literary climate.
Romanticism
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain,
with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of
revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very
particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of
history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle
(literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for
his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or
whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was
sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any
simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of
1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness,
loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often
in the form of frustrated dynamism.
Foreign influences
When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France,
they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and
Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative
writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon,
was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European
cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence
of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a
model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of
Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy
and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their
literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these
countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and
revenge tales.
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one
of the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding
poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a
variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving
frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing
ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830,
there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics
and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of
l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a
reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the
intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.
Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Méditations poétiques
(1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and remaining
unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating through the musicality of
his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings unfulfilled. This soft-centred
elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and Byronic revolt. The Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses (1830; “Poetic and Religious Harmonies”; Eng. trans. in A Biographical
Sketch), with their religious emotion, reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened
by unease and disquiet. Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d’un ange (1838; “The
Fall of an Angel”) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine’s
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading role in the
provisional government.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In
his first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman
Catholic legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to
Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous
quality of Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there
are already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and
problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of
poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of
pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating
on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is
interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic
consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic,
prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.
Vigny
In contrast to Hugo’s scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more limited
and controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however, he proposed
the poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified, moralizing
philosopher, using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense expression of his
thought. Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble stoicism, his work focuses
on figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His
Les Destinées (1864; “The Fates”), composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies
the high spiritual aspiration that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and
concentration of expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.
Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his
Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; “Tales of Spain and Italy”). His exuberant sense of humour
led him to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them ironically. Later, a
trajectory from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of emptiness and futility, sustained only
intermittently by the linking of suffering with love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense
of self. The Nuits (“Nights”) poems (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit
d’août,” “La Nuit d’octobre,” 1835–37) express the purifying power of suffering in verse of
sustained sincerity, purged of all the early showiness.
Nerval
For a long while Gérard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature (notably
Goethe’s Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as his real
contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimères (The Chimeras), composed between about
1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual odyssey Aurélia (1853–54; Eng. trans.
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an
anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of
literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of
achievement of that side of the Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the
spiritual reintegration of the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the
prose poem and his use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays
from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the
period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging
audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism.
Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such
battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in
the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a
contemporary public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play
Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—
which he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could
transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited
from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a
sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic
local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young
Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a
dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a
similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the
mingling of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic
drama. The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic
melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.
Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most
famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many
analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by
Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of
poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic
estrangement.
Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of
his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued
to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—
almost charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather
in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying
disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one
indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with
clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological
study of a once pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted
youth and lost illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a
prose that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of
Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and
crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison
with Shakespeare.
The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the complex literary culture
of the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feeling—whether based on reason, sentiment,
or an exacerbated sensibility—and most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789 to
1815. Certainly, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The
insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly
underlined the regime’s centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This classicism, or, strictly
speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and literary forms
that had dominated “serious” literature—and drama in particular—in France for almost two
centuries. But Rousseau’s emphasis on subjectivity and sentiment still had its heirs, as did the
new forms of writing he had helped to evolve. Likewise, while the Gothic violence that had
emerged in early Revolutionary drama and novels was curbed, its dynamic remained. The seeds
of French Romanticism had been sown in national ground, long before writers began to turn to
other nations to kindle their inspiration.
The poetry of Chénier
André Chénier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in
volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets, who
saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical spirit,
especially that of Greece, Chénier exploited Classical myths for modern purposes. He began
work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, “Hermès,” a history of the universe and human
progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit but also anticipate the
episodic epic poems of the later Romantics. Chénier, though a moderate in revolutionary terms,
was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in the scathing fierceness of his lyrical
satires, the Ïambes, many of which were written from prison shortly before his execution. His
best-known poems, however, are elegies that sing of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and
lost happiness.
Revolutionary oratory and polemic
The intensity of political debate in Paris during the Revolution, whether in clubs, in the
National Assembly, or before tribunals, threw into prominence the arts of oratory. Speaking in
the name of reason, virtue, and liberty and using the Roman Republic or the city-states of Greece
as a frame of reference, Revolutionary leaders such as Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, and Louis de Saint-Just infused the
intellectual preoccupations of the Enlightenment with a sense of drama and passion. This
renewal of rhetoric is echoed in the enormously expanded political press, including Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Jacques-René Hébert’s Le Père Duchesne (“Old
Duchesne”), and Gracchus Babeuf’s Le Tribun du peuple (“The Defender of the People”). To
some extent the proclamations and communiqués of Napoleon prolonged this Revolutionary
eloquence.
Chateaubriand
The French Revolution made an émigré of François-Auguste-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, and his first major work, the Essai sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”; Eng. trans. An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and
Modern), is a complex and sometimes confused attempt to understand revolution in general, the
French Revolution in particular, and the individual’s relationship to these phenomena.
Chateaubriand took as his model the stance of the 18th-century philosophe, but his Génie du
christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) caught a new mood of return to religious faith
based on emotional appeals and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Christianity. The impact
of this work was enormous, not least in its reinstatement of nature, and natural landscape, as the
lodging place of spiritual repose and renewal. Within it were two short narratives, Atala (Eng.
trans. Atala, also translated in Atala, René), a tale of fatal passion and savage (Indian) nobility,
and René (Eng. trans. René). A young hero not dissimilar to Goethe’s Werther, René, who flees
pain and suffering in Europe to look vainly for refuge in the wilds of America, came to represent
the mal du siècle (world-weariness, literally “sickness of the century”), the essence of Romantic
sensibility; he is insecure, solitary, disorientated, and in flight, searching for a happiness that will
always evade him.
Behind all Chateaubriand’s works lies the sense of a break, caused by the French
Revolution, in a stable, ordered existence. His Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848–50; “Memoirs
from Beyond the Tomb”; Eng. trans. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand), the masterpiece he
worked on most of his adult life and intended for posthumous publication, uses the
autobiographical format to meditate on the history of France, the passing of time, and the vanity
of human desires. His lyrical and rhythmic prose left a deep impression on many Romantic
writers.
Mme de Staël and the debate on literature
Mme de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein) was truly
encyclopaedic in her interests. Her contribution to intellectual debate far exceeded any narrow
definition of literature. At first liberal and then, after her offer of support was rebuffed, fiercely
anti-Napoleon in politics, eclectic in philosophy, mixing rationalism and spiritualism, and
determinedly internationalist in her feeling for literature, she moved most easily in a world of
ideas, surrounding herself with the salon of intellectuals she founded at Coppet, Switzerland. Her
two novels, Delphine (1802; Delphine) and Corinne (1807; Corinne, or Italy), focus on the limits
society tries to impose on the independent woman and the woman of genius. The account of
Corinne’s personal drama is combined with an examination of national identities in
postrevolutionary Europe, offering original insights into how new alliances can be forged across
old, hostile boundaries and what part artistic form and women’s influence could play in making
new communities. Her two most influential works, De la littérature (1800; The Influence of
Literature upon Society) and De l’Allemagne (1810; Germany), expanded conceptions of
literature with the claim that different social forms needed different literary modes: in particular,
postrevolutionary society required a new literature. She explored the contrast, as she saw it,
between the literature of the south (rational, Classical) and the literature of the north (emotional,
Romantic), and she explored the potential interest for French culture of foreign writers such as
William Shakespeare, Ossian, and above all the German Romantics.
Many of these ideas emerged from discussions with August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose
work on the drama was widely translated, and from meetings with and readings of the Germans
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The Genevan economist and writer Jean-
Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi reinforced many of Mme de Staël’s points in his De la
littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813; Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe).
This cosmopolitan cultural relativism was infuriating to many of Staël’s French contemporaries
in the prevailing Neoclassical literary climate.
Romanticism
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain,
with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of
revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very
particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of
history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle
(literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for
his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or
whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was
sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any
simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of
1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness,
loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often
in the form of frustrated dynamism.
Foreign influences
When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France,
they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and
Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative
writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon,
was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European
cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence
of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a
model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of
Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy
and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their
literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these
countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and
revenge tales.
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one
of the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding
poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a
variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving
frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing
ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830,
there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics
and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of
l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a
reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the
intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.
Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Méditations poétiques
(1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and remaining
unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating through the musicality of
his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings unfulfilled. This soft-centred
elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and Byronic revolt. The Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses (1830; “Poetic and Religious Harmonies”; Eng. trans. in A Biographical
Sketch), with their religious emotion, reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened
by unease and disquiet. Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d’un ange (1838; “The
Fall of an Angel”) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine’s
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading role in the
provisional government.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In
his first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman
Catholic legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to
Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous
quality of Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there
are already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and
problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of
poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of
pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating
on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is
interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic
consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic,
prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.
Vigny
In contrast to Hugo’s scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more limited
and controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however, he proposed
the poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified, moralizing
philosopher, using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense expression of his
thought. Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble stoicism, his work focuses
on figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His
Les Destinées (1864; “The Fates”), composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies
the high spiritual aspiration that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and
concentration of expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.
Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his
Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; “Tales of Spain and Italy”). His exuberant sense of humour
led him to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them ironically. Later, a
trajectory from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of emptiness and futility, sustained only
intermittently by the linking of suffering with love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense
of self. The Nuits (“Nights”) poems (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit
d’août,” “La Nuit d’octobre,” 1835–37) express the purifying power of suffering in verse of
sustained sincerity, purged of all the early showiness.
Nerval
For a long while Gérard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature (notably
Goethe’s Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as his real
contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimères (The Chimeras), composed between about
1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual odyssey Aurélia (1853–54; Eng. trans.
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an
anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of
literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of
achievement of that side of the Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the
spiritual reintegration of the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the
prose poem and his use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays
from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the
period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging
audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism.
Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such
battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in
the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a
contemporary public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play
Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—
which he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could
transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited
from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a
sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic
local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young
Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a
dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a
similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the
mingling of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic
drama. The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic
melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.
Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most
famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many
analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by
Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of
poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic
estrangement.
Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of
his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued
to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—
almost charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather
in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying
disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one
indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with
clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological
study of a once pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted
youth and lost illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a
prose that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of
Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and
crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison
with Shakespeare.
The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the complex literary culture
of the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feeling—whether based on reason, sentiment,
or an exacerbated sensibility—and most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789 to
1815. Certainly, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The
insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly
underlined the regime’s centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This classicism, or, strictly
speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and literary forms
that had dominated “serious” literature—and drama in particular—in France for almost two
centuries. But Rousseau’s emphasis on subjectivity and sentiment still had its heirs, as did the
new forms of writing he had helped to evolve. Likewise, while the Gothic violence that had
emerged in early Revolutionary drama and novels was curbed, its dynamic remained. The seeds
of French Romanticism had been sown in national ground, long before writers began to turn to
other nations to kindle their inspiration.
The poetry of Chénier
André Chénier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in
volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets, who
saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical spirit,
especially that of Greece, Chénier exploited Classical myths for modern purposes. He began
work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, “Hermès,” a history of the universe and human
progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit but also anticipate the
episodic epic poems of the later Romantics. Chénier, though a moderate in revolutionary terms,
was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in the scathing fierceness of his lyrical
satires, the Ïambes, many of which were written from prison shortly before his execution. His
best-known poems, however, are elegies that sing of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and
lost happiness.
Revolutionary oratory and polemic
The intensity of political debate in Paris during the Revolution, whether in clubs, in the
National Assembly, or before tribunals, threw into prominence the arts of oratory. Speaking in
the name of reason, virtue, and liberty and using the Roman Republic or the city-states of Greece
as a frame of reference, Revolutionary leaders such as Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, and Louis de Saint-Just infused the
intellectual preoccupations of the Enlightenment with a sense of drama and passion. This
renewal of rhetoric is echoed in the enormously expanded political press, including Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Jacques-René Hébert’s Le Père Duchesne (“Old
Duchesne”), and Gracchus Babeuf’s Le Tribun du peuple (“The Defender of the People”). To
some extent the proclamations and communiqués of Napoleon prolonged this Revolutionary
eloquence.
Chateaubriand
The French Revolution made an émigré of François-Auguste-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, and his first major work, the Essai sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”; Eng. trans. An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and
Modern), is a complex and sometimes confused attempt to understand revolution in general, the
French Revolution in particular, and the individual’s relationship to these phenomena.
Chateaubriand took as his model the stance of the 18th-century philosophe, but his Génie du
christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) caught a new mood of return to religious faith
based on emotional appeals and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Christianity. The impact
of this work was enormous, not least in its reinstatement of nature, and natural landscape, as the
lodging place of spiritual repose and renewal. Within it were two short narratives, Atala (Eng.
trans. Atala, also translated in Atala, René), a tale of fatal passion and savage (Indian) nobility,
and René (Eng. trans. René). A young hero not dissimilar to Goethe’s Werther, René, who flees
pain and suffering in Europe to look vainly for refuge in the wilds of America, came to represent
the mal du siècle (world-weariness, literally “sickness of the century”), the essence of Romantic
sensibility; he is insecure, solitary, disorientated, and in flight, searching for a happiness that will
always evade him.
Behind all Chateaubriand’s works lies the sense of a break, caused by the French
Revolution, in a stable, ordered existence. His Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848–50; “Memoirs
from Beyond the Tomb”; Eng. trans. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand), the masterpiece he
worked on most of his adult life and intended for posthumous publication, uses the
autobiographical format to meditate on the history of France, the passing of time, and the vanity
of human desires. His lyrical and rhythmic prose left a deep impression on many Romantic
writers.
Mme de Staël and the debate on literature
Mme de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein) was truly
encyclopaedic in her interests. Her contribution to intellectual debate far exceeded any narrow
definition of literature. At first liberal and then, after her offer of support was rebuffed, fiercely
anti-Napoleon in politics, eclectic in philosophy, mixing rationalism and spiritualism, and
determinedly internationalist in her feeling for literature, she moved most easily in a world of
ideas, surrounding herself with the salon of intellectuals she founded at Coppet, Switzerland. Her
two novels, Delphine (1802; Delphine) and Corinne (1807; Corinne, or Italy), focus on the limits
society tries to impose on the independent woman and the woman of genius. The account of
Corinne’s personal drama is combined with an examination of national identities in
postrevolutionary Europe, offering original insights into how new alliances can be forged across
old, hostile boundaries and what part artistic form and women’s influence could play in making
new communities. Her two most influential works, De la littérature (1800; The Influence of
Literature upon Society) and De l’Allemagne (1810; Germany), expanded conceptions of
literature with the claim that different social forms needed different literary modes: in particular,
postrevolutionary society required a new literature. She explored the contrast, as she saw it,
between the literature of the south (rational, Classical) and the literature of the north (emotional,
Romantic), and she explored the potential interest for French culture of foreign writers such as
William Shakespeare, Ossian, and above all the German Romantics.
Many of these ideas emerged from discussions with August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose
work on the drama was widely translated, and from meetings with and readings of the Germans
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The Genevan economist and writer Jean-
Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi reinforced many of Mme de Staël’s points in his De la
littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813; Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe).
This cosmopolitan cultural relativism was infuriating to many of Staël’s French contemporaries
in the prevailing Neoclassical literary climate.
Romanticism
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain,
with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of
revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very
particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of
history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle
(literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for
his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or
whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was
sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any
simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of
1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness,
loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often
in the form of frustrated dynamism.
Foreign influences
When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France,
they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and
Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative
writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon,
was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European
cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence
of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a
model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of
Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy
and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their
literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these
countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and
revenge tales.
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one
of the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding
poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a
variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving
frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing
ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830,
there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics
and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of
l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a
reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the
intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.
Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Méditations poétiques
(1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and remaining
unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating through the musicality of
his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings unfulfilled. This soft-centred
elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and Byronic revolt. The Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses (1830; “Poetic and Religious Harmonies”; Eng. trans. in A Biographical
Sketch), with their religious emotion, reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened
by unease and disquiet. Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d’un ange (1838; “The
Fall of an Angel”) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine’s
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading role in the
provisional government.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In
his first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman
Catholic legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to
Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous
quality of Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there
are already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and
problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of
poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of
pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating
on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is
interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic
consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic,
prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.
Vigny
In contrast to Hugo’s scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more limited
and controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however, he proposed
the poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified, moralizing
philosopher, using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense expression of his
thought. Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble stoicism, his work focuses
on figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His
Les Destinées (1864; “The Fates”), composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies
the high spiritual aspiration that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and
concentration of expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.
Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his
Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; “Tales of Spain and Italy”). His exuberant sense of humour
led him to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them ironically. Later, a
trajectory from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of emptiness and futility, sustained only
intermittently by the linking of suffering with love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense
of self. The Nuits (“Nights”) poems (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit
d’août,” “La Nuit d’octobre,” 1835–37) express the purifying power of suffering in verse of
sustained sincerity, purged of all the early showiness.
Nerval
For a long while Gérard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature (notably
Goethe’s Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as his real
contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimères (The Chimeras), composed between about
1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual odyssey Aurélia (1853–54; Eng. trans.
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an
anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of
literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of
achievement of that side of the Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the
spiritual reintegration of the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the
prose poem and his use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays
from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the
period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging
audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism.
Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such
battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in
the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a
contemporary public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play
Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—
which he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could
transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited
from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a
sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic
local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young
Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a
dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a
similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the
mingling of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic
drama. The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic
melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.
Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most
famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many
analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by
Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of
poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic
estrangement.
Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of
his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued
to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—
almost charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather
in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying
disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one
indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with
clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological
study of a once pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted
youth and lost illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a
prose that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of
Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and
crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison
with Shakespeare.
The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the complex literary culture
of the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feeling—whether based on reason, sentiment,
or an exacerbated sensibility—and most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789 to
1815. Certainly, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The
insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly
underlined the regime’s centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This classicism, or, strictly
speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and literary forms
that had dominated “serious” literature—and drama in particular—in France for almost two
centuries. But Rousseau’s emphasis on subjectivity and sentiment still had its heirs, as did the
new forms of writing he had helped to evolve. Likewise, while the Gothic violence that had
emerged in early Revolutionary drama and novels was curbed, its dynamic remained. The seeds
of French Romanticism had been sown in national ground, long before writers began to turn to
other nations to kindle their inspiration.
The poetry of Chénier
André Chénier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in
volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets, who
saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical spirit,
especially that of Greece, Chénier exploited Classical myths for modern purposes. He began
work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, “Hermès,” a history of the universe and human
progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit but also anticipate the
episodic epic poems of the later Romantics. Chénier, though a moderate in revolutionary terms,
was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in the scathing fierceness of his lyrical
satires, the Ïambes, many of which were written from prison shortly before his execution. His
best-known poems, however, are elegies that sing of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and
lost happiness.
Revolutionary oratory and polemic
The intensity of political debate in Paris during the Revolution, whether in clubs, in the
National Assembly, or before tribunals, threw into prominence the arts of oratory. Speaking in
the name of reason, virtue, and liberty and using the Roman Republic or the city-states of Greece
as a frame of reference, Revolutionary leaders such as Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, and Louis de Saint-Just infused the
intellectual preoccupations of the Enlightenment with a sense of drama and passion. This
renewal of rhetoric is echoed in the enormously expanded political press, including Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Jacques-René Hébert’s Le Père Duchesne (“Old
Duchesne”), and Gracchus Babeuf’s Le Tribun du peuple (“The Defender of the People”). To
some extent the proclamations and communiqués of Napoleon prolonged this Revolutionary
eloquence.
Chateaubriand
The French Revolution made an émigré of François-Auguste-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, and his first major work, the Essai sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”; Eng. trans. An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and
Modern), is a complex and sometimes confused attempt to understand revolution in general, the
French Revolution in particular, and the individual’s relationship to these phenomena.
Chateaubriand took as his model the stance of the 18th-century philosophe, but his Génie du
christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) caught a new mood of return to religious faith
based on emotional appeals and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Christianity. The impact
of this work was enormous, not least in its reinstatement of nature, and natural landscape, as the
lodging place of spiritual repose and renewal. Within it were two short narratives, Atala (Eng.
trans. Atala, also translated in Atala, René), a tale of fatal passion and savage (Indian) nobility,
and René (Eng. trans. René). A young hero not dissimilar to Goethe’s Werther, René, who flees
pain and suffering in Europe to look vainly for refuge in the wilds of America, came to represent
the mal du siècle (world-weariness, literally “sickness of the century”), the essence of Romantic
sensibility; he is insecure, solitary, disorientated, and in flight, searching for a happiness that will
always evade him.
Behind all Chateaubriand’s works lies the sense of a break, caused by the French
Revolution, in a stable, ordered existence. His Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848–50; “Memoirs
from Beyond the Tomb”; Eng. trans. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand), the masterpiece he
worked on most of his adult life and intended for posthumous publication, uses the
autobiographical format to meditate on the history of France, the passing of time, and the vanity
of human desires. His lyrical and rhythmic prose left a deep impression on many Romantic
writers.
Mme de Staël and the debate on literature
Mme de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein) was truly
encyclopaedic in her interests. Her contribution to intellectual debate far exceeded any narrow
definition of literature. At first liberal and then, after her offer of support was rebuffed, fiercely
anti-Napoleon in politics, eclectic in philosophy, mixing rationalism and spiritualism, and
determinedly internationalist in her feeling for literature, she moved most easily in a world of
ideas, surrounding herself with the salon of intellectuals she founded at Coppet, Switzerland. Her
two novels, Delphine (1802; Delphine) and Corinne (1807; Corinne, or Italy), focus on the limits
society tries to impose on the independent woman and the woman of genius. The account of
Corinne’s personal drama is combined with an examination of national identities in
postrevolutionary Europe, offering original insights into how new alliances can be forged across
old, hostile boundaries and what part artistic form and women’s influence could play in making
new communities. Her two most influential works, De la littérature (1800; The Influence of
Literature upon Society) and De l’Allemagne (1810; Germany), expanded conceptions of
literature with the claim that different social forms needed different literary modes: in particular,
postrevolutionary society required a new literature. She explored the contrast, as she saw it,
between the literature of the south (rational, Classical) and the literature of the north (emotional,
Romantic), and she explored the potential interest for French culture of foreign writers such as
William Shakespeare, Ossian, and above all the German Romantics.
Many of these ideas emerged from discussions with August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose
work on the drama was widely translated, and from meetings with and readings of the Germans
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The Genevan economist and writer Jean-
Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi reinforced many of Mme de Staël’s points in his De la
littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813; Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe).
This cosmopolitan cultural relativism was infuriating to many of Staël’s French contemporaries
in the prevailing Neoclassical literary climate.
Romanticism
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain,
with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of
revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very
particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of
history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle
(literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for
his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or
whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was
sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any
simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of
1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness,
loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often
in the form of frustrated dynamism.
Foreign influences
When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France,
they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and
Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative
writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon,
was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European
cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence
of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a
model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of
Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy
and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their
literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these
countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and
revenge tales.
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one
of the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding
poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a
variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving
frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing
ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830,
there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics
and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of
l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a
reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the
intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.
Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Méditations poétiques
(1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and remaining
unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating through the musicality of
his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings unfulfilled. This soft-centred
elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and Byronic revolt. The Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses (1830; “Poetic and Religious Harmonies”; Eng. trans. in A Biographical
Sketch), with their religious emotion, reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened
by unease and disquiet. Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d’un ange (1838; “The
Fall of an Angel”) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine’s
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading role in the
provisional government.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In
his first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman
Catholic legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to
Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous
quality of Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there
are already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and
problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of
poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of
pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating
on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is
interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic
consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic,
prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.
Vigny
In contrast to Hugo’s scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more limited
and controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however, he proposed
the poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified, moralizing
philosopher, using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense expression of his
thought. Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble stoicism, his work focuses
on figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His
Les Destinées (1864; “The Fates”), composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies
the high spiritual aspiration that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and
concentration of expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.
Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his
Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; “Tales of Spain and Italy”). His exuberant sense of humour
led him to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them ironically. Later, a
trajectory from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of emptiness and futility, sustained only
intermittently by the linking of suffering with love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense
of self. The Nuits (“Nights”) poems (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit
d’août,” “La Nuit d’octobre,” 1835–37) express the purifying power of suffering in verse of
sustained sincerity, purged of all the early showiness.
Nerval
For a long while Gérard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature (notably
Goethe’s Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as his real
contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimères (The Chimeras), composed between about
1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual odyssey Aurélia (1853–54; Eng. trans.
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an
anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of
literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of
achievement of that side of the Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the
spiritual reintegration of the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the
prose poem and his use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays
from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the
period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging
audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism.
Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such
battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in
the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a
contemporary public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play
Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—
which he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could
transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited
from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a
sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic
local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young
Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a
dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a
similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the
mingling of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic
drama. The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic
melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.
Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most
famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many
analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by
Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of
poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic
estrangement.
Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of
his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued
to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—
almost charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather
in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying
disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one
indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with
clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological
study of a once pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted
youth and lost illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a
prose that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of
Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and
crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison
with Shakespeare.
The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the complex literary culture
of the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feeling—whether based on reason, sentiment,
or an exacerbated sensibility—and most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789 to
1815. Certainly, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The
insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly
underlined the regime’s centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This classicism, or, strictly
speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and literary forms
that had dominated “serious” literature—and drama in particular—in France for almost two
centuries. But Rousseau’s emphasis on subjectivity and sentiment still had its heirs, as did the
new forms of writing he had helped to evolve. Likewise, while the Gothic violence that had
emerged in early Revolutionary drama and novels was curbed, its dynamic remained. The seeds
of French Romanticism had been sown in national ground, long before writers began to turn to
other nations to kindle their inspiration.
The poetry of Chénier
André Chénier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in
volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets, who
saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical spirit,
especially that of Greece, Chénier exploited Classical myths for modern purposes. He began
work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, “Hermès,” a history of the universe and human
progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit but also anticipate the
episodic epic poems of the later Romantics. Chénier, though a moderate in revolutionary terms,
was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in the scathing fierceness of his lyrical
satires, the Ïambes, many of which were written from prison shortly before his execution. His
best-known poems, however, are elegies that sing of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and
lost happiness.
Revolutionary oratory and polemic
The intensity of political debate in Paris during the Revolution, whether in clubs, in the
National Assembly, or before tribunals, threw into prominence the arts of oratory. Speaking in
the name of reason, virtue, and liberty and using the Roman Republic or the city-states of Greece
as a frame of reference, Revolutionary leaders such as Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, and Louis de Saint-Just infused the
intellectual preoccupations of the Enlightenment with a sense of drama and passion. This
renewal of rhetoric is echoed in the enormously expanded political press, including Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Jacques-René Hébert’s Le Père Duchesne (“Old
Duchesne”), and Gracchus Babeuf’s Le Tribun du peuple (“The Defender of the People”). To
some extent the proclamations and communiqués of Napoleon prolonged this Revolutionary
eloquence.
Chateaubriand
The French Revolution made an émigré of François-Auguste-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, and his first major work, the Essai sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”; Eng. trans. An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and
Modern), is a complex and sometimes confused attempt to understand revolution in general, the
French Revolution in particular, and the individual’s relationship to these phenomena.
Chateaubriand took as his model the stance of the 18th-century philosophe, but his Génie du
christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) caught a new mood of return to religious faith
based on emotional appeals and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Christianity. The impact
of this work was enormous, not least in its reinstatement of nature, and natural landscape, as the
lodging place of spiritual repose and renewal. Within it were two short narratives, Atala (Eng.
trans. Atala, also translated in Atala, René), a tale of fatal passion and savage (Indian) nobility,
and René (Eng. trans. René). A young hero not dissimilar to Goethe’s Werther, René, who flees
pain and suffering in Europe to look vainly for refuge in the wilds of America, came to represent
the mal du siècle (world-weariness, literally “sickness of the century”), the essence of Romantic
sensibility; he is insecure, solitary, disorientated, and in flight, searching for a happiness that will
always evade him.
Behind all Chateaubriand’s works lies the sense of a break, caused by the French
Revolution, in a stable, ordered existence. His Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848–50; “Memoirs
from Beyond the Tomb”; Eng. trans. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand), the masterpiece he
worked on most of his adult life and intended for posthumous publication, uses the
autobiographical format to meditate on the history of France, the passing of time, and the vanity
of human desires. His lyrical and rhythmic prose left a deep impression on many Romantic
writers.
Mme de Staël and the debate on literature
Mme de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein) was truly
encyclopaedic in her interests. Her contribution to intellectual debate far exceeded any narrow
definition of literature. At first liberal and then, after her offer of support was rebuffed, fiercely
anti-Napoleon in politics, eclectic in philosophy, mixing rationalism and spiritualism, and
determinedly internationalist in her feeling for literature, she moved most easily in a world of
ideas, surrounding herself with the salon of intellectuals she founded at Coppet, Switzerland. Her
two novels, Delphine (1802; Delphine) and Corinne (1807; Corinne, or Italy), focus on the limits
society tries to impose on the independent woman and the woman of genius. The account of
Corinne’s personal drama is combined with an examination of national identities in
postrevolutionary Europe, offering original insights into how new alliances can be forged across
old, hostile boundaries and what part artistic form and women’s influence could play in making
new communities. Her two most influential works, De la littérature (1800; The Influence of
Literature upon Society) and De l’Allemagne (1810; Germany), expanded conceptions of
literature with the claim that different social forms needed different literary modes: in particular,
postrevolutionary society required a new literature. She explored the contrast, as she saw it,
between the literature of the south (rational, Classical) and the literature of the north (emotional,
Romantic), and she explored the potential interest for French culture of foreign writers such as
William Shakespeare, Ossian, and above all the German Romantics.
Many of these ideas emerged from discussions with August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose
work on the drama was widely translated, and from meetings with and readings of the Germans
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The Genevan economist and writer Jean-
Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi reinforced many of Mme de Staël’s points in his De la
littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813; Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe).
This cosmopolitan cultural relativism was infuriating to many of Staël’s French contemporaries
in the prevailing Neoclassical literary climate.
Romanticism
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain,
with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of
revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very
particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of
history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle
(literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for
his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or
whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was
sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any
simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of
1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness,
loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often
in the form of frustrated dynamism.
Foreign influences
When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France,
they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and
Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative
writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon,
was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European
cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence
of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a
model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of
Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy
and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their
literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these
countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and
revenge tales.
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one
of the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding
poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a
variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving
frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing
ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830,
there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics
and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of
l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a
reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the
intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.
Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Méditations poétiques
(1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and remaining
unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating through the musicality of
his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings unfulfilled. This soft-centred
elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and Byronic revolt. The Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses (1830; “Poetic and Religious Harmonies”; Eng. trans. in A Biographical
Sketch), with their religious emotion, reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened
by unease and disquiet. Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d’un ange (1838; “The
Fall of an Angel”) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine’s
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading role in the
provisional government.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In
his first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman
Catholic legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to
Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous
quality of Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there
are already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and
problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of
poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of
pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating
on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is
interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic
consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic,
prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.
Vigny
In contrast to Hugo’s scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more limited
and controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however, he proposed
the poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified, moralizing
philosopher, using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense expression of his
thought. Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble stoicism, his work focuses
on figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His
Les Destinées (1864; “The Fates”), composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies
the high spiritual aspiration that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and
concentration of expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.
Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his
Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; “Tales of Spain and Italy”). His exuberant sense of humour
led him to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them ironically. Later, a
trajectory from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of emptiness and futility, sustained only
intermittently by the linking of suffering with love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense
of self. The Nuits (“Nights”) poems (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit
d’août,” “La Nuit d’octobre,” 1835–37) express the purifying power of suffering in verse of
sustained sincerity, purged of all the early showiness.
Nerval
For a long while Gérard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature (notably
Goethe’s Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as his real
contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimères (The Chimeras), composed between about
1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual odyssey Aurélia (1853–54; Eng. trans.
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an
anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of
literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of
achievement of that side of the Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the
spiritual reintegration of the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the
prose poem and his use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays
from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the
period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging
audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism.
Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such
battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in
the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a
contemporary public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play
Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—
which he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could
transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited
from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a
sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic
local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young
Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a
dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a
similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the
mingling of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic
drama. The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic
melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.
Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most
famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many
analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by
Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of
poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic
estrangement.
Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of
his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued
to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—
almost charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather
in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying
disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one
indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with
clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological
study of a once pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted
youth and lost illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a
prose that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of
Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and
crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison
with Shakespeare.
The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the complex literary culture
of the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feeling—whether based on reason, sentiment,
or an exacerbated sensibility—and most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789 to
1815. Certainly, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The
insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly
underlined the regime’s centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This classicism, or, strictly
speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and literary forms
that had dominated “serious” literature—and drama in particular—in France for almost two
centuries. But Rousseau’s emphasis on subjectivity and sentiment still had its heirs, as did the
new forms of writing he had helped to evolve. Likewise, while the Gothic violence that had
emerged in early Revolutionary drama and novels was curbed, its dynamic remained. The seeds
of French Romanticism had been sown in national ground, long before writers began to turn to
other nations to kindle their inspiration.
The poetry of Chénier
André Chénier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in
volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets, who
saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical spirit,
especially that of Greece, Chénier exploited Classical myths for modern purposes. He began
work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, “Hermès,” a history of the universe and human
progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit but also anticipate the
episodic epic poems of the later Romantics. Chénier, though a moderate in revolutionary terms,
was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in the scathing fierceness of his lyrical
satires, the Ïambes, many of which were written from prison shortly before his execution. His
best-known poems, however, are elegies that sing of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and
lost happiness.
Revolutionary oratory and polemic
The intensity of political debate in Paris during the Revolution, whether in clubs, in the
National Assembly, or before tribunals, threw into prominence the arts of oratory. Speaking in
the name of reason, virtue, and liberty and using the Roman Republic or the city-states of Greece
as a frame of reference, Revolutionary leaders such as Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, and Louis de Saint-Just infused the
intellectual preoccupations of the Enlightenment with a sense of drama and passion. This
renewal of rhetoric is echoed in the enormously expanded political press, including Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Jacques-René Hébert’s Le Père Duchesne (“Old
Duchesne”), and Gracchus Babeuf’s Le Tribun du peuple (“The Defender of the People”). To
some extent the proclamations and communiqués of Napoleon prolonged this Revolutionary
eloquence.
Chateaubriand
The French Revolution made an émigré of François-Auguste-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, and his first major work, the Essai sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”; Eng. trans. An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and
Modern), is a complex and sometimes confused attempt to understand revolution in general, the
French Revolution in particular, and the individual’s relationship to these phenomena.
Chateaubriand took as his model the stance of the 18th-century philosophe, but his Génie du
christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) caught a new mood of return to religious faith
based on emotional appeals and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Christianity. The impact
of this work was enormous, not least in its reinstatement of nature, and natural landscape, as the
lodging place of spiritual repose and renewal. Within it were two short narratives, Atala (Eng.
trans. Atala, also translated in Atala, René), a tale of fatal passion and savage (Indian) nobility,
and René (Eng. trans. René). A young hero not dissimilar to Goethe’s Werther, René, who flees
pain and suffering in Europe to look vainly for refuge in the wilds of America, came to represent
the mal du siècle (world-weariness, literally “sickness of the century”), the essence of Romantic
sensibility; he is insecure, solitary, disorientated, and in flight, searching for a happiness that will
always evade him.
Behind all Chateaubriand’s works lies the sense of a break, caused by the French
Revolution, in a stable, ordered existence. His Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848–50; “Memoirs
from Beyond the Tomb”; Eng. trans. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand), the masterpiece he
worked on most of his adult life and intended for posthumous publication, uses the
autobiographical format to meditate on the history of France, the passing of time, and the vanity
of human desires. His lyrical and rhythmic prose left a deep impression on many Romantic
writers.
Mme de Staël and the debate on literature
Mme de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein) was truly
encyclopaedic in her interests. Her contribution to intellectual debate far exceeded any narrow
definition of literature. At first liberal and then, after her offer of support was rebuffed, fiercely
anti-Napoleon in politics, eclectic in philosophy, mixing rationalism and spiritualism, and
determinedly internationalist in her feeling for literature, she moved most easily in a world of
ideas, surrounding herself with the salon of intellectuals she founded at Coppet, Switzerland. Her
two novels, Delphine (1802; Delphine) and Corinne (1807; Corinne, or Italy), focus on the limits
society tries to impose on the independent woman and the woman of genius. The account of
Corinne’s personal drama is combined with an examination of national identities in
postrevolutionary Europe, offering original insights into how new alliances can be forged across
old, hostile boundaries and what part artistic form and women’s influence could play in making
new communities. Her two most influential works, De la littérature (1800; The Influence of
Literature upon Society) and De l’Allemagne (1810; Germany), expanded conceptions of
literature with the claim that different social forms needed different literary modes: in particular,
postrevolutionary society required a new literature. She explored the contrast, as she saw it,
between the literature of the south (rational, Classical) and the literature of the north (emotional,
Romantic), and she explored the potential interest for French culture of foreign writers such as
William Shakespeare, Ossian, and above all the German Romantics.
Many of these ideas emerged from discussions with August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose
work on the drama was widely translated, and from meetings with and readings of the Germans
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The Genevan economist and writer Jean-
Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi reinforced many of Mme de Staël’s points in his De la
littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813; Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe).
This cosmopolitan cultural relativism was infuriating to many of Staël’s French contemporaries
in the prevailing Neoclassical literary climate.
Romanticism
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain,
with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of
revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very
particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of
history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle
(literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for
his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or
whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was
sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any
simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of
1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness,
loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often
in the form of frustrated dynamism.
Foreign influences
When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France,
they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and
Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative
writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon,
was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European
cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence
of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a
model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of
Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy
and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their
literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these
countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and
revenge tales.
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one
of the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding
poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a
variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving
frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing
ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830,
there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics
and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of
l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a
reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the
intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.
Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Méditations poétiques
(1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and remaining
unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating through the musicality of
his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings unfulfilled. This soft-centred
elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and Byronic revolt. The Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses (1830; “Poetic and Religious Harmonies”; Eng. trans. in A Biographical
Sketch), with their religious emotion, reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened
by unease and disquiet. Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d’un ange (1838; “The
Fall of an Angel”) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine’s
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading role in the
provisional government.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In
his first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman
Catholic legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to
Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous
quality of Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there
are already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and
problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of
poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of
pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating
on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is
interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic
consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic,
prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.
Vigny
In contrast to Hugo’s scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more limited
and controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however, he proposed
the poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified, moralizing
philosopher, using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense expression of his
thought. Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble stoicism, his work focuses
on figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His
Les Destinées (1864; “The Fates”), composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies
the high spiritual aspiration that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and
concentration of expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.
Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his
Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; “Tales of Spain and Italy”). His exuberant sense of humour
led him to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them ironically. Later, a
trajectory from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of emptiness and futility, sustained only
intermittently by the linking of suffering with love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense
of self. The Nuits (“Nights”) poems (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit
d’août,” “La Nuit d’octobre,” 1835–37) express the purifying power of suffering in verse of
sustained sincerity, purged of all the early showiness.
Nerval
For a long while Gérard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature (notably
Goethe’s Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as his real
contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimères (The Chimeras), composed between about
1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual odyssey Aurélia (1853–54; Eng. trans.
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an
anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of
literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of
achievement of that side of the Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the
spiritual reintegration of the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the
prose poem and his use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays
from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the
period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging
audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism.
Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such
battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in
the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a
contemporary public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play
Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—
which he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could
transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited
from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a
sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic
local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young
Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a
dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a
similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the
mingling of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic
drama. The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic
melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.
Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most
famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many
analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by
Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of
poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic
estrangement.
Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of
his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued
to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—
almost charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather
in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying
disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one
indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with
clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological
study of a once pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted
youth and lost illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a
prose that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of
Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and
crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison
with Shakespeare.
The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the complex literary culture
of the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feeling—whether based on reason, sentiment,
or an exacerbated sensibility—and most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789 to
1815. Certainly, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The
insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly
underlined the regime’s centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This classicism, or, strictly
speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and literary forms
that had dominated “serious” literature—and drama in particular—in France for almost two
centuries. But Rousseau’s emphasis on subjectivity and sentiment still had its heirs, as did the
new forms of writing he had helped to evolve. Likewise, while the Gothic violence that had
emerged in early Revolutionary drama and novels was curbed, its dynamic remained. The seeds
of French Romanticism had been sown in national ground, long before writers began to turn to
other nations to kindle their inspiration.
The poetry of Chénier
André Chénier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in
volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets, who
saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical spirit,
especially that of Greece, Chénier exploited Classical myths for modern purposes. He began
work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, “Hermès,” a history of the universe and human
progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit but also anticipate the
episodic epic poems of the later Romantics. Chénier, though a moderate in revolutionary terms,
was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in the scathing fierceness of his lyrical
satires, the Ïambes, many of which were written from prison shortly before his execution. His
best-known poems, however, are elegies that sing of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and
lost happiness.
Revolutionary oratory and polemic
The intensity of political debate in Paris during the Revolution, whether in clubs, in the
National Assembly, or before tribunals, threw into prominence the arts of oratory. Speaking in
the name of reason, virtue, and liberty and using the Roman Republic or the city-states of Greece
as a frame of reference, Revolutionary leaders such as Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, and Louis de Saint-Just infused the
intellectual preoccupations of the Enlightenment with a sense of drama and passion. This
renewal of rhetoric is echoed in the enormously expanded political press, including Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Jacques-René Hébert’s Le Père Duchesne (“Old
Duchesne”), and Gracchus Babeuf’s Le Tribun du peuple (“The Defender of the People”). To
some extent the proclamations and communiqués of Napoleon prolonged this Revolutionary
eloquence.
Chateaubriand
The French Revolution made an émigré of François-Auguste-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, and his first major work, the Essai sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”; Eng. trans. An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and
Modern), is a complex and sometimes confused attempt to understand revolution in general, the
French Revolution in particular, and the individual’s relationship to these phenomena.
Chateaubriand took as his model the stance of the 18th-century philosophe, but his Génie du
christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) caught a new mood of return to religious faith
based on emotional appeals and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Christianity. The impact
of this work was enormous, not least in its reinstatement of nature, and natural landscape, as the
lodging place of spiritual repose and renewal. Within it were two short narratives, Atala (Eng.
trans. Atala, also translated in Atala, René), a tale of fatal passion and savage (Indian) nobility,
and René (Eng. trans. René). A young hero not dissimilar to Goethe’s Werther, René, who flees
pain and suffering in Europe to look vainly for refuge in the wilds of America, came to represent
the mal du siècle (world-weariness, literally “sickness of the century”), the essence of Romantic
sensibility; he is insecure, solitary, disorientated, and in flight, searching for a happiness that will
always evade him.
Behind all Chateaubriand’s works lies the sense of a break, caused by the French
Revolution, in a stable, ordered existence. His Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848–50; “Memoirs
from Beyond the Tomb”; Eng. trans. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand), the masterpiece he
worked on most of his adult life and intended for posthumous publication, uses the
autobiographical format to meditate on the history of France, the passing of time, and the vanity
of human desires. His lyrical and rhythmic prose left a deep impression on many Romantic
writers.
Mme de Staël and the debate on literature
Mme de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein) was truly
encyclopaedic in her interests. Her contribution to intellectual debate far exceeded any narrow
definition of literature. At first liberal and then, after her offer of support was rebuffed, fiercely
anti-Napoleon in politics, eclectic in philosophy, mixing rationalism and spiritualism, and
determinedly internationalist in her feeling for literature, she moved most easily in a world of
ideas, surrounding herself with the salon of intellectuals she founded at Coppet, Switzerland. Her
two novels, Delphine (1802; Delphine) and Corinne (1807; Corinne, or Italy), focus on the limits
society tries to impose on the independent woman and the woman of genius. The account of
Corinne’s personal drama is combined with an examination of national identities in
postrevolutionary Europe, offering original insights into how new alliances can be forged across
old, hostile boundaries and what part artistic form and women’s influence could play in making
new communities. Her two most influential works, De la littérature (1800; The Influence of
Literature upon Society) and De l’Allemagne (1810; Germany), expanded conceptions of
literature with the claim that different social forms needed different literary modes: in particular,
postrevolutionary society required a new literature. She explored the contrast, as she saw it,
between the literature of the south (rational, Classical) and the literature of the north (emotional,
Romantic), and she explored the potential interest for French culture of foreign writers such as
William Shakespeare, Ossian, and above all the German Romantics.
Many of these ideas emerged from discussions with August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose
work on the drama was widely translated, and from meetings with and readings of the Germans
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The Genevan economist and writer Jean-
Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi reinforced many of Mme de Staël’s points in his De la
littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813; Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe).
This cosmopolitan cultural relativism was infuriating to many of Staël’s French contemporaries
in the prevailing Neoclassical literary climate.
Romanticism
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain,
with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of
revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very
particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of
history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle
(literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for
his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or
whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was
sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any
simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of
1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness,
loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often
in the form of frustrated dynamism.
Foreign influences
When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France,
they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and
Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative
writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon,
was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European
cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence
of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a
model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of
Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy
and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their
literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these
countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and
revenge tales.
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one
of the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding
poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a
variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving
frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing
ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830,
there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics
and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of
l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a
reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the
intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.
Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Méditations poétiques
(1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and remaining
unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating through the musicality of
his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings unfulfilled. This soft-centred
elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and Byronic revolt. The Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses (1830; “Poetic and Religious Harmonies”; Eng. trans. in A Biographical
Sketch), with their religious emotion, reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened
by unease and disquiet. Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d’un ange (1838; “The
Fall of an Angel”) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine’s
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading role in the
provisional government.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In
his first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman
Catholic legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to
Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous
quality of Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there
are already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and
problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of
poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of
pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating
on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is
interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic
consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic,
prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.
Vigny
In contrast to Hugo’s scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more limited
and controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however, he proposed
the poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified, moralizing
philosopher, using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense expression of his
thought. Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble stoicism, his work focuses
on figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His
Les Destinées (1864; “The Fates”), composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies
the high spiritual aspiration that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and
concentration of expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.
Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his
Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; “Tales of Spain and Italy”). His exuberant sense of humour
led him to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them ironically. Later, a
trajectory from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of emptiness and futility, sustained only
intermittently by the linking of suffering with love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense
of self. The Nuits (“Nights”) poems (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit
d’août,” “La Nuit d’octobre,” 1835–37) express the purifying power of suffering in verse of
sustained sincerity, purged of all the early showiness.
Nerval
For a long while Gérard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature (notably
Goethe’s Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as his real
contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimères (The Chimeras), composed between about
1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual odyssey Aurélia (1853–54; Eng. trans.
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an
anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of
literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of
achievement of that side of the Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the
spiritual reintegration of the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the
prose poem and his use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays
from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the
period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging
audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism.
Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such
battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in
the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a
contemporary public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play
Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—
which he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could
transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited
from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a
sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic
local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young
Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a
dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a
similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the
mingling of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic
drama. The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic
melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.
Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most
famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many
analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by
Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of
poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic
estrangement.
Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of
his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued
to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—
almost charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather
in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying
disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one
indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with
clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological
study of a once pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted
youth and lost illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a
prose that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of
Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and
crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison
with Shakespeare.
The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the complex literary culture
of the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feeling—whether based on reason, sentiment,
or an exacerbated sensibility—and most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789 to
1815. Certainly, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The
insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly
underlined the regime’s centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This classicism, or, strictly
speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and literary forms
that had dominated “serious” literature—and drama in particular—in France for almost two
centuries. But Rousseau’s emphasis on subjectivity and sentiment still had its heirs, as did the
new forms of writing he had helped to evolve. Likewise, while the Gothic violence that had
emerged in early Revolutionary drama and novels was curbed, its dynamic remained. The seeds
of French Romanticism had been sown in national ground, long before writers began to turn to
other nations to kindle their inspiration.
The poetry of Chénier
André Chénier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in
volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets, who
saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical spirit,
especially that of Greece, Chénier exploited Classical myths for modern purposes. He began
work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, “Hermès,” a history of the universe and human
progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit but also anticipate the
episodic epic poems of the later Romantics. Chénier, though a moderate in revolutionary terms,
was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in the scathing fierceness of his lyrical
satires, the Ïambes, many of which were written from prison shortly before his execution. His
best-known poems, however, are elegies that sing of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and
lost happiness.
Revolutionary oratory and polemic
The intensity of political debate in Paris during the Revolution, whether in clubs, in the
National Assembly, or before tribunals, threw into prominence the arts of oratory. Speaking in
the name of reason, virtue, and liberty and using the Roman Republic or the city-states of Greece
as a frame of reference, Revolutionary leaders such as Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, and Louis de Saint-Just infused the
intellectual preoccupations of the Enlightenment with a sense of drama and passion. This
renewal of rhetoric is echoed in the enormously expanded political press, including Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Jacques-René Hébert’s Le Père Duchesne (“Old
Duchesne”), and Gracchus Babeuf’s Le Tribun du peuple (“The Defender of the People”). To
some extent the proclamations and communiqués of Napoleon prolonged this Revolutionary
eloquence.
Chateaubriand
The French Revolution made an émigré of François-Auguste-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, and his first major work, the Essai sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”; Eng. trans. An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and
Modern), is a complex and sometimes confused attempt to understand revolution in general, the
French Revolution in particular, and the individual’s relationship to these phenomena.
Chateaubriand took as his model the stance of the 18th-century philosophe, but his Génie du
christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) caught a new mood of return to religious faith
based on emotional appeals and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Christianity. The impact
of this work was enormous, not least in its reinstatement of nature, and natural landscape, as the
lodging place of spiritual repose and renewal. Within it were two short narratives, Atala (Eng.
trans. Atala, also translated in Atala, René), a tale of fatal passion and savage (Indian) nobility,
and René (Eng. trans. René). A young hero not dissimilar to Goethe’s Werther, René, who flees
pain and suffering in Europe to look vainly for refuge in the wilds of America, came to represent
the mal du siècle (world-weariness, literally “sickness of the century”), the essence of Romantic
sensibility; he is insecure, solitary, disorientated, and in flight, searching for a happiness that will
always evade him.
Behind all Chateaubriand’s works lies the sense of a break, caused by the French
Revolution, in a stable, ordered existence. His Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848–50; “Memoirs
from Beyond the Tomb”; Eng. trans. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand), the masterpiece he
worked on most of his adult life and intended for posthumous publication, uses the
autobiographical format to meditate on the history of France, the passing of time, and the vanity
of human desires. His lyrical and rhythmic prose left a deep impression on many Romantic
writers.
Mme de Staël and the debate on literature
Mme de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein) was truly
encyclopaedic in her interests. Her contribution to intellectual debate far exceeded any narrow
definition of literature. At first liberal and then, after her offer of support was rebuffed, fiercely
anti-Napoleon in politics, eclectic in philosophy, mixing rationalism and spiritualism, and
determinedly internationalist in her feeling for literature, she moved most easily in a world of
ideas, surrounding herself with the salon of intellectuals she founded at Coppet, Switzerland. Her
two novels, Delphine (1802; Delphine) and Corinne (1807; Corinne, or Italy), focus on the limits
society tries to impose on the independent woman and the woman of genius. The account of
Corinne’s personal drama is combined with an examination of national identities in
postrevolutionary Europe, offering original insights into how new alliances can be forged across
old, hostile boundaries and what part artistic form and women’s influence could play in making
new communities. Her two most influential works, De la littérature (1800; The Influence of
Literature upon Society) and De l’Allemagne (1810; Germany), expanded conceptions of
literature with the claim that different social forms needed different literary modes: in particular,
postrevolutionary society required a new literature. She explored the contrast, as she saw it,
between the literature of the south (rational, Classical) and the literature of the north (emotional,
Romantic), and she explored the potential interest for French culture of foreign writers such as
William Shakespeare, Ossian, and above all the German Romantics.
Many of these ideas emerged from discussions with August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose
work on the drama was widely translated, and from meetings with and readings of the Germans
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The Genevan economist and writer Jean-
Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi reinforced many of Mme de Staël’s points in his De la
littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813; Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe).
This cosmopolitan cultural relativism was infuriating to many of Staël’s French contemporaries
in the prevailing Neoclassical literary climate.
Romanticism
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain,
with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of
revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very
particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of
history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle
(literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for
his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or
whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was
sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any
simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of
1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness,
loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often
in the form of frustrated dynamism.
Foreign influences
When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France,
they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and
Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative
writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon,
was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European
cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence
of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a
model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of
Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy
and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their
literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these
countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and
revenge tales.
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one
of the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding
poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a
variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving
frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing
ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830,
there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics
and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of
l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a
reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the
intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.
Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Méditations poétiques
(1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and remaining
unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating through the musicality of
his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings unfulfilled. This soft-centred
elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and Byronic revolt. The Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses (1830; “Poetic and Religious Harmonies”; Eng. trans. in A Biographical
Sketch), with their religious emotion, reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened
by unease and disquiet. Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d’un ange (1838; “The
Fall of an Angel”) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine’s
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading role in the
provisional government.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In
his first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman
Catholic legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to
Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous
quality of Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there
are already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and
problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of
poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of
pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating
on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is
interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic
consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic,
prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.
Vigny
In contrast to Hugo’s scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more limited
and controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however, he proposed
the poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified, moralizing
philosopher, using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense expression of his
thought. Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble stoicism, his work focuses
on figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His
Les Destinées (1864; “The Fates”), composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies
the high spiritual aspiration that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and
concentration of expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.
Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his
Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; “Tales of Spain and Italy”). His exuberant sense of humour
led him to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them ironically. Later, a
trajectory from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of emptiness and futility, sustained only
intermittently by the linking of suffering with love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense
of self. The Nuits (“Nights”) poems (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit
d’août,” “La Nuit d’octobre,” 1835–37) express the purifying power of suffering in verse of
sustained sincerity, purged of all the early showiness.
Nerval
For a long while Gérard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature (notably
Goethe’s Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as his real
contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimères (The Chimeras), composed between about
1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual odyssey Aurélia (1853–54; Eng. trans.
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an
anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of
literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of
achievement of that side of the Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the
spiritual reintegration of the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the
prose poem and his use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays
from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the
period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging
audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism.
Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such
battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in
the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a
contemporary public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play
Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—
which he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could
transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited
from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a
sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic
local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young
Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a
dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a
similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the
mingling of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic
drama. The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic
melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.
Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most
famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many
analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by
Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of
poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic
estrangement.
Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of
his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued
to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—
almost charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather
in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying
disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one
indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with
clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological
study of a once pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted
youth and lost illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a
prose that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of
Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and
crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison
with Shakespeare.
The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the complex literary culture
of the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feeling—whether based on reason, sentiment,
or an exacerbated sensibility—and most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789 to
1815. Certainly, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The
insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly
underlined the regime’s centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This classicism, or, strictly
speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and literary forms
that had dominated “serious” literature—and drama in particular—in France for almost two
centuries. But Rousseau’s emphasis on subjectivity and sentiment still had its heirs, as did the
new forms of writing he had helped to evolve. Likewise, while the Gothic violence that had
emerged in early Revolutionary drama and novels was curbed, its dynamic remained. The seeds
of French Romanticism had been sown in national ground, long before writers began to turn to
other nations to kindle their inspiration.
The poetry of Chénier
André Chénier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in
volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets, who
saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical spirit,
especially that of Greece, Chénier exploited Classical myths for modern purposes. He began
work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, “Hermès,” a history of the universe and human
progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit but also anticipate the
episodic epic poems of the later Romantics. Chénier, though a moderate in revolutionary terms,
was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in the scathing fierceness of his lyrical
satires, the Ïambes, many of which were written from prison shortly before his execution. His
best-known poems, however, are elegies that sing of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and
lost happiness.
Revolutionary oratory and polemic
The intensity of political debate in Paris during the Revolution, whether in clubs, in the
National Assembly, or before tribunals, threw into prominence the arts of oratory. Speaking in
the name of reason, virtue, and liberty and using the Roman Republic or the city-states of Greece
as a frame of reference, Revolutionary leaders such as Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, and Louis de Saint-Just infused the
intellectual preoccupations of the Enlightenment with a sense of drama and passion. This
renewal of rhetoric is echoed in the enormously expanded political press, including Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Jacques-René Hébert’s Le Père Duchesne (“Old
Duchesne”), and Gracchus Babeuf’s Le Tribun du peuple (“The Defender of the People”). To
some extent the proclamations and communiqués of Napoleon prolonged this Revolutionary
eloquence.
Chateaubriand
The French Revolution made an émigré of François-Auguste-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, and his first major work, the Essai sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”; Eng. trans. An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and
Modern), is a complex and sometimes confused attempt to understand revolution in general, the
French Revolution in particular, and the individual’s relationship to these phenomena.
Chateaubriand took as his model the stance of the 18th-century philosophe, but his Génie du
christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) caught a new mood of return to religious faith
based on emotional appeals and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Christianity. The impact
of this work was enormous, not least in its reinstatement of nature, and natural landscape, as the
lodging place of spiritual repose and renewal. Within it were two short narratives, Atala (Eng.
trans. Atala, also translated in Atala, René), a tale of fatal passion and savage (Indian) nobility,
and René (Eng. trans. René). A young hero not dissimilar to Goethe’s Werther, René, who flees
pain and suffering in Europe to look vainly for refuge in the wilds of America, came to represent
the mal du siècle (world-weariness, literally “sickness of the century”), the essence of Romantic
sensibility; he is insecure, solitary, disorientated, and in flight, searching for a happiness that will
always evade him.
Behind all Chateaubriand’s works lies the sense of a break, caused by the French
Revolution, in a stable, ordered existence. His Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848–50; “Memoirs
from Beyond the Tomb”; Eng. trans. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand), the masterpiece he
worked on most of his adult life and intended for posthumous publication, uses the
autobiographical format to meditate on the history of France, the passing of time, and the vanity
of human desires. His lyrical and rhythmic prose left a deep impression on many Romantic
writers.
Mme de Staël and the debate on literature
Mme de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein) was truly
encyclopaedic in her interests. Her contribution to intellectual debate far exceeded any narrow
definition of literature. At first liberal and then, after her offer of support was rebuffed, fiercely
anti-Napoleon in politics, eclectic in philosophy, mixing rationalism and spiritualism, and
determinedly internationalist in her feeling for literature, she moved most easily in a world of
ideas, surrounding herself with the salon of intellectuals she founded at Coppet, Switzerland. Her
two novels, Delphine (1802; Delphine) and Corinne (1807; Corinne, or Italy), focus on the limits
society tries to impose on the independent woman and the woman of genius. The account of
Corinne’s personal drama is combined with an examination of national identities in
postrevolutionary Europe, offering original insights into how new alliances can be forged across
old, hostile boundaries and what part artistic form and women’s influence could play in making
new communities. Her two most influential works, De la littérature (1800; The Influence of
Literature upon Society) and De l’Allemagne (1810; Germany), expanded conceptions of
literature with the claim that different social forms needed different literary modes: in particular,
postrevolutionary society required a new literature. She explored the contrast, as she saw it,
between the literature of the south (rational, Classical) and the literature of the north (emotional,
Romantic), and she explored the potential interest for French culture of foreign writers such as
William Shakespeare, Ossian, and above all the German Romantics.
Many of these ideas emerged from discussions with August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose
work on the drama was widely translated, and from meetings with and readings of the Germans
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The Genevan economist and writer Jean-
Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi reinforced many of Mme de Staël’s points in his De la
littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813; Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe).
This cosmopolitan cultural relativism was infuriating to many of Staël’s French contemporaries
in the prevailing Neoclassical literary climate.
Romanticism
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain,
with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of
revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very
particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of
history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle
(literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for
his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or
whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was
sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any
simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of
1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness,
loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often
in the form of frustrated dynamism.
Foreign influences
When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France,
they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and
Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative
writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon,
was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European
cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence
of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a
model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of
Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy
and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their
literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these
countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and
revenge tales.
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one
of the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding
poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a
variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving
frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing
ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830,
there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics
and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of
l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a
reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the
intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.
Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Méditations poétiques
(1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and remaining
unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating through the musicality of
his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings unfulfilled. This soft-centred
elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and Byronic revolt. The Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses (1830; “Poetic and Religious Harmonies”; Eng. trans. in A Biographical
Sketch), with their religious emotion, reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened
by unease and disquiet. Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d’un ange (1838; “The
Fall of an Angel”) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine’s
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading role in the
provisional government.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In
his first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman
Catholic legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to
Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous
quality of Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there
are already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and
problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of
poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of
pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating
on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is
interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic
consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic,
prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.
Vigny
In contrast to Hugo’s scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more limited
and controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however, he proposed
the poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified, moralizing
philosopher, using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense expression of his
thought. Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble stoicism, his work focuses
on figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His
Les Destinées (1864; “The Fates”), composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies
the high spiritual aspiration that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and
concentration of expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.
Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his
Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; “Tales of Spain and Italy”). His exuberant sense of humour
led him to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them ironically. Later, a
trajectory from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of emptiness and futility, sustained only
intermittently by the linking of suffering with love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense
of self. The Nuits (“Nights”) poems (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit
d’août,” “La Nuit d’octobre,” 1835–37) express the purifying power of suffering in verse of
sustained sincerity, purged of all the early showiness.
Nerval
For a long while Gérard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature (notably
Goethe’s Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as his real
contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimères (The Chimeras), composed between about
1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual odyssey Aurélia (1853–54; Eng. trans.
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an
anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of
literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of
achievement of that side of the Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the
spiritual reintegration of the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the
prose poem and his use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays
from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the
period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging
audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism.
Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such
battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in
the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a
contemporary public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play
Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—
which he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could
transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited
from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a
sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic
local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young
Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a
dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a
similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the
mingling of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic
drama. The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic
melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.
Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most
famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many
analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by
Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of
poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic
estrangement.
Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of
his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued
to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—
almost charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather
in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying
disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one
indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with
clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological
study of a once pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted
youth and lost illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a
prose that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of
Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and
crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison
with Shakespeare.
The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the complex literary culture
of the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feeling—whether based on reason, sentiment,
or an exacerbated sensibility—and most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789 to
1815. Certainly, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The
insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly
underlined the regime’s centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This classicism, or, strictly
speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and literary forms
that had dominated “serious” literature—and drama in particular—in France for almost two
centuries. But Rousseau’s emphasis on subjectivity and sentiment still had its heirs, as did the
new forms of writing he had helped to evolve. Likewise, while the Gothic violence that had
emerged in early Revolutionary drama and novels was curbed, its dynamic remained. The seeds
of French Romanticism had been sown in national ground, long before writers began to turn to
other nations to kindle their inspiration.
The poetry of Chénier
André Chénier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in
volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets, who
saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical spirit,
especially that of Greece, Chénier exploited Classical myths for modern purposes. He began
work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, “Hermès,” a history of the universe and human
progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit but also anticipate the
episodic epic poems of the later Romantics. Chénier, though a moderate in revolutionary terms,
was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in the scathing fierceness of his lyrical
satires, the Ïambes, many of which were written from prison shortly before his execution. His
best-known poems, however, are elegies that sing of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and
lost happiness.
Revolutionary oratory and polemic
The intensity of political debate in Paris during the Revolution, whether in clubs, in the
National Assembly, or before tribunals, threw into prominence the arts of oratory. Speaking in
the name of reason, virtue, and liberty and using the Roman Republic or the city-states of Greece
as a frame of reference, Revolutionary leaders such as Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, and Louis de Saint-Just infused the
intellectual preoccupations of the Enlightenment with a sense of drama and passion. This
renewal of rhetoric is echoed in the enormously expanded political press, including Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Jacques-René Hébert’s Le Père Duchesne (“Old
Duchesne”), and Gracchus Babeuf’s Le Tribun du peuple (“The Defender of the People”). To
some extent the proclamations and communiqués of Napoleon prolonged this Revolutionary
eloquence.
Chateaubriand
The French Revolution made an émigré of François-Auguste-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, and his first major work, the Essai sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”; Eng. trans. An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and
Modern), is a complex and sometimes confused attempt to understand revolution in general, the
French Revolution in particular, and the individual’s relationship to these phenomena.
Chateaubriand took as his model the stance of the 18th-century philosophe, but his Génie du
christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) caught a new mood of return to religious faith
based on emotional appeals and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Christianity. The impact
of this work was enormous, not least in its reinstatement of nature, and natural landscape, as the
lodging place of spiritual repose and renewal. Within it were two short narratives, Atala (Eng.
trans. Atala, also translated in Atala, René), a tale of fatal passion and savage (Indian) nobility,
and René (Eng. trans. René). A young hero not dissimilar to Goethe’s Werther, René, who flees
pain and suffering in Europe to look vainly for refuge in the wilds of America, came to represent
the mal du siècle (world-weariness, literally “sickness of the century”), the essence of Romantic
sensibility; he is insecure, solitary, disorientated, and in flight, searching for a happiness that will
always evade him.
Behind all Chateaubriand’s works lies the sense of a break, caused by the French
Revolution, in a stable, ordered existence. His Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848–50; “Memoirs
from Beyond the Tomb”; Eng. trans. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand), the masterpiece he
worked on most of his adult life and intended for posthumous publication, uses the
autobiographical format to meditate on the history of France, the passing of time, and the vanity
of human desires. His lyrical and rhythmic prose left a deep impression on many Romantic
writers.
Mme de Staël and the debate on literature
Mme de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein) was truly
encyclopaedic in her interests. Her contribution to intellectual debate far exceeded any narrow
definition of literature. At first liberal and then, after her offer of support was rebuffed, fiercely
anti-Napoleon in politics, eclectic in philosophy, mixing rationalism and spiritualism, and
determinedly internationalist in her feeling for literature, she moved most easily in a world of
ideas, surrounding herself with the salon of intellectuals she founded at Coppet, Switzerland. Her
two novels, Delphine (1802; Delphine) and Corinne (1807; Corinne, or Italy), focus on the limits
society tries to impose on the independent woman and the woman of genius. The account of
Corinne’s personal drama is combined with an examination of national identities in
postrevolutionary Europe, offering original insights into how new alliances can be forged across
old, hostile boundaries and what part artistic form and women’s influence could play in making
new communities. Her two most influential works, De la littérature (1800; The Influence of
Literature upon Society) and De l’Allemagne (1810; Germany), expanded conceptions of
literature with the claim that different social forms needed different literary modes: in particular,
postrevolutionary society required a new literature. She explored the contrast, as she saw it,
between the literature of the south (rational, Classical) and the literature of the north (emotional,
Romantic), and she explored the potential interest for French culture of foreign writers such as
William Shakespeare, Ossian, and above all the German Romantics.
Many of these ideas emerged from discussions with August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose
work on the drama was widely translated, and from meetings with and readings of the Germans
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The Genevan economist and writer Jean-
Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi reinforced many of Mme de Staël’s points in his De la
littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813; Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe).
This cosmopolitan cultural relativism was infuriating to many of Staël’s French contemporaries
in the prevailing Neoclassical literary climate.
Romanticism
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain,
with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of
revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very
particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of
history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle
(literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for
his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or
whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was
sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any
simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of
1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness,
loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often
in the form of frustrated dynamism.
Foreign influences
When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France,
they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and
Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative
writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon,
was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European
cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence
of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a
model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of
Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy
and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their
literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these
countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and
revenge tales.
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one
of the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding
poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a
variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving
frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing
ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830,
there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics
and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of
l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a
reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the
intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.
Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Méditations poétiques
(1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and remaining
unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating through the musicality of
his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings unfulfilled. This soft-centred
elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and Byronic revolt. The Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses (1830; “Poetic and Religious Harmonies”; Eng. trans. in A Biographical
Sketch), with their religious emotion, reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened
by unease and disquiet. Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d’un ange (1838; “The
Fall of an Angel”) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine’s
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading role in the
provisional government.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In
his first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman
Catholic legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to
Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous
quality of Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there
are already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and
problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of
poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of
pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating
on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is
interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic
consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic,
prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.
Vigny
In contrast to Hugo’s scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more limited
and controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however, he proposed
the poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified, moralizing
philosopher, using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense expression of his
thought. Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble stoicism, his work focuses
on figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His
Les Destinées (1864; “The Fates”), composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies
the high spiritual aspiration that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and
concentration of expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.
Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his
Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; “Tales of Spain and Italy”). His exuberant sense of humour
led him to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them ironically. Later, a
trajectory from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of emptiness and futility, sustained only
intermittently by the linking of suffering with love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense
of self. The Nuits (“Nights”) poems (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit
d’août,” “La Nuit d’octobre,” 1835–37) express the purifying power of suffering in verse of
sustained sincerity, purged of all the early showiness.
Nerval
For a long while Gérard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature (notably
Goethe’s Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as his real
contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimères (The Chimeras), composed between about
1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual odyssey Aurélia (1853–54; Eng. trans.
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an
anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of
literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of
achievement of that side of the Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the
spiritual reintegration of the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the
prose poem and his use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays
from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the
period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging
audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism.
Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such
battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in
the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a
contemporary public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play
Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—
which he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could
transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited
from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a
sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic
local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young
Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a
dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a
similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the
mingling of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic
drama. The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic
melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.
Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most
famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many
analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by
Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of
poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic
estrangement.
Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of
his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued
to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—
almost charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather
in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying
disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one
indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with
clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological
study of a once pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted
youth and lost illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a
prose that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of
Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and
crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison
with Shakespeare.
The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the complex literary culture
of the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feeling—whether based on reason, sentiment,
or an exacerbated sensibility—and most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789 to
1815. Certainly, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The
insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly
underlined the regime’s centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This classicism, or, strictly
speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and literary forms
that had dominated “serious” literature—and drama in particular—in France for almost two
centuries. But Rousseau’s emphasis on subjectivity and sentiment still had its heirs, as did the
new forms of writing he had helped to evolve. Likewise, while the Gothic violence that had
emerged in early Revolutionary drama and novels was curbed, its dynamic remained. The seeds
of French Romanticism had been sown in national ground, long before writers began to turn to
other nations to kindle their inspiration.
The poetry of Chénier
André Chénier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in
volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets, who
saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical spirit,
especially that of Greece, Chénier exploited Classical myths for modern purposes. He began
work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, “Hermès,” a history of the universe and human
progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit but also anticipate the
episodic epic poems of the later Romantics. Chénier, though a moderate in revolutionary terms,
was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in the scathing fierceness of his lyrical
satires, the Ïambes, many of which were written from prison shortly before his execution. His
best-known poems, however, are elegies that sing of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and
lost happiness.
Revolutionary oratory and polemic
The intensity of political debate in Paris during the Revolution, whether in clubs, in the
National Assembly, or before tribunals, threw into prominence the arts of oratory. Speaking in
the name of reason, virtue, and liberty and using the Roman Republic or the city-states of Greece
as a frame of reference, Revolutionary leaders such as Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, and Louis de Saint-Just infused the
intellectual preoccupations of the Enlightenment with a sense of drama and passion. This
renewal of rhetoric is echoed in the enormously expanded political press, including Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Jacques-René Hébert’s Le Père Duchesne (“Old
Duchesne”), and Gracchus Babeuf’s Le Tribun du peuple (“The Defender of the People”). To
some extent the proclamations and communiqués of Napoleon prolonged this Revolutionary
eloquence.
Chateaubriand
The French Revolution made an émigré of François-Auguste-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, and his first major work, the Essai sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”; Eng. trans. An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and
Modern), is a complex and sometimes confused attempt to understand revolution in general, the
French Revolution in particular, and the individual’s relationship to these phenomena.
Chateaubriand took as his model the stance of the 18th-century philosophe, but his Génie du
christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) caught a new mood of return to religious faith
based on emotional appeals and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Christianity. The impact
of this work was enormous, not least in its reinstatement of nature, and natural landscape, as the
lodging place of spiritual repose and renewal. Within it were two short narratives, Atala (Eng.
trans. Atala, also translated in Atala, René), a tale of fatal passion and savage (Indian) nobility,
and René (Eng. trans. René). A young hero not dissimilar to Goethe’s Werther, René, who flees
pain and suffering in Europe to look vainly for refuge in the wilds of America, came to represent
the mal du siècle (world-weariness, literally “sickness of the century”), the essence of Romantic
sensibility; he is insecure, solitary, disorientated, and in flight, searching for a happiness that will
always evade him.
Behind all Chateaubriand’s works lies the sense of a break, caused by the French
Revolution, in a stable, ordered existence. His Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848–50; “Memoirs
from Beyond the Tomb”; Eng. trans. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand), the masterpiece he
worked on most of his adult life and intended for posthumous publication, uses the
autobiographical format to meditate on the history of France, the passing of time, and the vanity
of human desires. His lyrical and rhythmic prose left a deep impression on many Romantic
writers.
Mme de Staël and the debate on literature
Mme de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein) was truly
encyclopaedic in her interests. Her contribution to intellectual debate far exceeded any narrow
definition of literature. At first liberal and then, after her offer of support was rebuffed, fiercely
anti-Napoleon in politics, eclectic in philosophy, mixing rationalism and spiritualism, and
determinedly internationalist in her feeling for literature, she moved most easily in a world of
ideas, surrounding herself with the salon of intellectuals she founded at Coppet, Switzerland. Her
two novels, Delphine (1802; Delphine) and Corinne (1807; Corinne, or Italy), focus on the limits
society tries to impose on the independent woman and the woman of genius. The account of
Corinne’s personal drama is combined with an examination of national identities in
postrevolutionary Europe, offering original insights into how new alliances can be forged across
old, hostile boundaries and what part artistic form and women’s influence could play in making
new communities. Her two most influential works, De la littérature (1800; The Influence of
Literature upon Society) and De l’Allemagne (1810; Germany), expanded conceptions of
literature with the claim that different social forms needed different literary modes: in particular,
postrevolutionary society required a new literature. She explored the contrast, as she saw it,
between the literature of the south (rational, Classical) and the literature of the north (emotional,
Romantic), and she explored the potential interest for French culture of foreign writers such as
William Shakespeare, Ossian, and above all the German Romantics.
Many of these ideas emerged from discussions with August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose
work on the drama was widely translated, and from meetings with and readings of the Germans
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The Genevan economist and writer Jean-
Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi reinforced many of Mme de Staël’s points in his De la
littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813; Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe).
This cosmopolitan cultural relativism was infuriating to many of Staël’s French contemporaries
in the prevailing Neoclassical literary climate.
Romanticism
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain,
with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of
revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very
particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of
history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle
(literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for
his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or
whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was
sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any
simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of
1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness,
loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often
in the form of frustrated dynamism.
Foreign influences
When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France,
they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and
Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative
writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon,
was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European
cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence
of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a
model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of
Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy
and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their
literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these
countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and
revenge tales.
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one
of the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding
poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a
variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving
frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing
ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830,
there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics
and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of
l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a
reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the
intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.
Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Méditations poétiques
(1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and remaining
unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating through the musicality of
his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings unfulfilled. This soft-centred
elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and Byronic revolt. The Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses (1830; “Poetic and Religious Harmonies”; Eng. trans. in A Biographical
Sketch), with their religious emotion, reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened
by unease and disquiet. Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d’un ange (1838; “The
Fall of an Angel”) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine’s
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading role in the
provisional government.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In
his first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman
Catholic legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to
Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous
quality of Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there
are already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and
problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of
poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of
pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating
on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is
interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic
consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic,
prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.
Vigny
In contrast to Hugo’s scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more limited
and controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however, he proposed
the poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified, moralizing
philosopher, using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense expression of his
thought. Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble stoicism, his work focuses
on figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His
Les Destinées (1864; “The Fates”), composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies
the high spiritual aspiration that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and
concentration of expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.
Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his
Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; “Tales of Spain and Italy”). His exuberant sense of humour
led him to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them ironically. Later, a
trajectory from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of emptiness and futility, sustained only
intermittently by the linking of suffering with love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense
of self. The Nuits (“Nights”) poems (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit
d’août,” “La Nuit d’octobre,” 1835–37) express the purifying power of suffering in verse of
sustained sincerity, purged of all the early showiness.
Nerval
For a long while Gérard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature (notably
Goethe’s Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as his real
contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimères (The Chimeras), composed between about
1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual odyssey Aurélia (1853–54; Eng. trans.
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an
anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of
literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of
achievement of that side of the Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the
spiritual reintegration of the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the
prose poem and his use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays
from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the
period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging
audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism.
Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such
battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in
the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a
contemporary public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play
Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—
which he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could
transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited
from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a
sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic
local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young
Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a
dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a
similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the
mingling of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic
drama. The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic
melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.
Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most
famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many
analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by
Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of
poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic
estrangement.
Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of
his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued
to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—
almost charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather
in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying
disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one
indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with
clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological
study of a once pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted
youth and lost illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a
prose that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of
Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and
crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison
with Shakespeare.
The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the complex literary culture
of the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feeling—whether based on reason, sentiment,
or an exacerbated sensibility—and most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789 to
1815. Certainly, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The
insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly
underlined the regime’s centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This classicism, or, strictly
speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and literary forms
that had dominated “serious” literature—and drama in particular—in France for almost two
centuries. But Rousseau’s emphasis on subjectivity and sentiment still had its heirs, as did the
new forms of writing he had helped to evolve. Likewise, while the Gothic violence that had
emerged in early Revolutionary drama and novels was curbed, its dynamic remained. The seeds
of French Romanticism had been sown in national ground, long before writers began to turn to
other nations to kindle their inspiration.
The poetry of Chénier
André Chénier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in
volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets, who
saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical spirit,
especially that of Greece, Chénier exploited Classical myths for modern purposes. He began
work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, “Hermès,” a history of the universe and human
progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit but also anticipate the
episodic epic poems of the later Romantics. Chénier, though a moderate in revolutionary terms,
was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in the scathing fierceness of his lyrical
satires, the Ïambes, many of which were written from prison shortly before his execution. His
best-known poems, however, are elegies that sing of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and
lost happiness.
Revolutionary oratory and polemic
The intensity of political debate in Paris during the Revolution, whether in clubs, in the
National Assembly, or before tribunals, threw into prominence the arts of oratory. Speaking in
the name of reason, virtue, and liberty and using the Roman Republic or the city-states of Greece
as a frame of reference, Revolutionary leaders such as Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, and Louis de Saint-Just infused the
intellectual preoccupations of the Enlightenment with a sense of drama and passion. This
renewal of rhetoric is echoed in the enormously expanded political press, including Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Jacques-René Hébert’s Le Père Duchesne (“Old
Duchesne”), and Gracchus Babeuf’s Le Tribun du peuple (“The Defender of the People”). To
some extent the proclamations and communiqués of Napoleon prolonged this Revolutionary
eloquence.
Chateaubriand
The French Revolution made an émigré of François-Auguste-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, and his first major work, the Essai sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”; Eng. trans. An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and
Modern), is a complex and sometimes confused attempt to understand revolution in general, the
French Revolution in particular, and the individual’s relationship to these phenomena.
Chateaubriand took as his model the stance of the 18th-century philosophe, but his Génie du
christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) caught a new mood of return to religious faith
based on emotional appeals and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Christianity. The impact
of this work was enormous, not least in its reinstatement of nature, and natural landscape, as the
lodging place of spiritual repose and renewal. Within it were two short narratives, Atala (Eng.
trans. Atala, also translated in Atala, René), a tale of fatal passion and savage (Indian) nobility,
and René (Eng. trans. René). A young hero not dissimilar to Goethe’s Werther, René, who flees
pain and suffering in Europe to look vainly for refuge in the wilds of America, came to represent
the mal du siècle (world-weariness, literally “sickness of the century”), the essence of Romantic
sensibility; he is insecure, solitary, disorientated, and in flight, searching for a happiness that will
always evade him.
Behind all Chateaubriand’s works lies the sense of a break, caused by the French
Revolution, in a stable, ordered existence. His Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848–50; “Memoirs
from Beyond the Tomb”; Eng. trans. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand), the masterpiece he
worked on most of his adult life and intended for posthumous publication, uses the
autobiographical format to meditate on the history of France, the passing of time, and the vanity
of human desires. His lyrical and rhythmic prose left a deep impression on many Romantic
writers.
Mme de Staël and the debate on literature
Mme de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein) was truly
encyclopaedic in her interests. Her contribution to intellectual debate far exceeded any narrow
definition of literature. At first liberal and then, after her offer of support was rebuffed, fiercely
anti-Napoleon in politics, eclectic in philosophy, mixing rationalism and spiritualism, and
determinedly internationalist in her feeling for literature, she moved most easily in a world of
ideas, surrounding herself with the salon of intellectuals she founded at Coppet, Switzerland. Her
two novels, Delphine (1802; Delphine) and Corinne (1807; Corinne, or Italy), focus on the limits
society tries to impose on the independent woman and the woman of genius. The account of
Corinne’s personal drama is combined with an examination of national identities in
postrevolutionary Europe, offering original insights into how new alliances can be forged across
old, hostile boundaries and what part artistic form and women’s influence could play in making
new communities. Her two most influential works, De la littérature (1800; The Influence of
Literature upon Society) and De l’Allemagne (1810; Germany), expanded conceptions of
literature with the claim that different social forms needed different literary modes: in particular,
postrevolutionary society required a new literature. She explored the contrast, as she saw it,
between the literature of the south (rational, Classical) and the literature of the north (emotional,
Romantic), and she explored the potential interest for French culture of foreign writers such as
William Shakespeare, Ossian, and above all the German Romantics.
Many of these ideas emerged from discussions with August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose
work on the drama was widely translated, and from meetings with and readings of the Germans
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The Genevan economist and writer Jean-
Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi reinforced many of Mme de Staël’s points in his De la
littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813; Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe).
This cosmopolitan cultural relativism was infuriating to many of Staël’s French contemporaries
in the prevailing Neoclassical literary climate.
Romanticism
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain,
with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of
revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very
particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of
history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle
(literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for
his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or
whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was
sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any
simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of
1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness,
loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often
in the form of frustrated dynamism.
Foreign influences
When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France,
they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and
Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative
writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon,
was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European
cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence
of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a
model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of
Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy
and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their
literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these
countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and
revenge tales.
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one
of the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding
poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a
variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving
frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing
ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830,
there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics
and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of
l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a
reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the
intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.
Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Méditations poétiques
(1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and remaining
unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating through the musicality of
his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings unfulfilled. This soft-centred
elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and Byronic revolt. The Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses (1830; “Poetic and Religious Harmonies”; Eng. trans. in A Biographical
Sketch), with their religious emotion, reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened
by unease and disquiet. Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d’un ange (1838; “The
Fall of an Angel”) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine’s
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading role in the
provisional government.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In
his first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman
Catholic legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to
Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous
quality of Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there
are already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and
problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of
poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of
pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating
on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is
interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic
consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic,
prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.
Vigny
In contrast to Hugo’s scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more limited
and controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however, he proposed
the poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified, moralizing
philosopher, using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense expression of his
thought. Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble stoicism, his work focuses
on figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His
Les Destinées (1864; “The Fates”), composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies
the high spiritual aspiration that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and
concentration of expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.
Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his
Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; “Tales of Spain and Italy”). His exuberant sense of humour
led him to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them ironically. Later, a
trajectory from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of emptiness and futility, sustained only
intermittently by the linking of suffering with love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense
of self. The Nuits (“Nights”) poems (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit
d’août,” “La Nuit d’octobre,” 1835–37) express the purifying power of suffering in verse of
sustained sincerity, purged of all the early showiness.
Nerval
For a long while Gérard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature (notably
Goethe’s Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as his real
contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimères (The Chimeras), composed between about
1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual odyssey Aurélia (1853–54; Eng. trans.
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an
anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of
literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of
achievement of that side of the Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the
spiritual reintegration of the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the
prose poem and his use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays
from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the
period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging
audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism.
Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such
battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in
the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a
contemporary public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play
Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—
which he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could
transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited
from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a
sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic
local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young
Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a
dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a
similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the
mingling of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic
drama. The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic
melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.
Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most
famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many
analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by
Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of
poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic
estrangement.
Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of
his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued
to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—
almost charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather
in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying
disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one
indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with
clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological
study of a once pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted
youth and lost illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a
prose that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of
Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and
crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison
with Shakespeare.
The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the complex literary culture
of the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feeling—whether based on reason, sentiment,
or an exacerbated sensibility—and most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789 to
1815. Certainly, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The
insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly
underlined the regime’s centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This classicism, or, strictly
speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and literary forms
that had dominated “serious” literature—and drama in particular—in France for almost two
centuries. But Rousseau’s emphasis on subjectivity and sentiment still had its heirs, as did the
new forms of writing he had helped to evolve. Likewise, while the Gothic violence that had
emerged in early Revolutionary drama and novels was curbed, its dynamic remained. The seeds
of French Romanticism had been sown in national ground, long before writers began to turn to
other nations to kindle their inspiration.
The poetry of Chénier
André Chénier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in
volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets, who
saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical spirit,
especially that of Greece, Chénier exploited Classical myths for modern purposes. He began
work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, “Hermès,” a history of the universe and human
progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit but also anticipate the
episodic epic poems of the later Romantics. Chénier, though a moderate in revolutionary terms,
was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in the scathing fierceness of his lyrical
satires, the Ïambes, many of which were written from prison shortly before his execution. His
best-known poems, however, are elegies that sing of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and
lost happiness.
Revolutionary oratory and polemic
The intensity of political debate in Paris during the Revolution, whether in clubs, in the
National Assembly, or before tribunals, threw into prominence the arts of oratory. Speaking in
the name of reason, virtue, and liberty and using the Roman Republic or the city-states of Greece
as a frame of reference, Revolutionary leaders such as Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, and Louis de Saint-Just infused the
intellectual preoccupations of the Enlightenment with a sense of drama and passion. This
renewal of rhetoric is echoed in the enormously expanded political press, including Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Jacques-René Hébert’s Le Père Duchesne (“Old
Duchesne”), and Gracchus Babeuf’s Le Tribun du peuple (“The Defender of the People”). To
some extent the proclamations and communiqués of Napoleon prolonged this Revolutionary
eloquence.
Chateaubriand
The French Revolution made an émigré of François-Auguste-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, and his first major work, the Essai sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”; Eng. trans. An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and
Modern), is a complex and sometimes confused attempt to understand revolution in general, the
French Revolution in particular, and the individual’s relationship to these phenomena.
Chateaubriand took as his model the stance of the 18th-century philosophe, but his Génie du
christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) caught a new mood of return to religious faith
based on emotional appeals and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Christianity. The impact
of this work was enormous, not least in its reinstatement of nature, and natural landscape, as the
lodging place of spiritual repose and renewal. Within it were two short narratives, Atala (Eng.
trans. Atala, also translated in Atala, René), a tale of fatal passion and savage (Indian) nobility,
and René (Eng. trans. René). A young hero not dissimilar to Goethe’s Werther, René, who flees
pain and suffering in Europe to look vainly for refuge in the wilds of America, came to represent
the mal du siècle (world-weariness, literally “sickness of the century”), the essence of Romantic
sensibility; he is insecure, solitary, disorientated, and in flight, searching for a happiness that will
always evade him.
Behind all Chateaubriand’s works lies the sense of a break, caused by the French
Revolution, in a stable, ordered existence. His Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848–50; “Memoirs
from Beyond the Tomb”; Eng. trans. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand), the masterpiece he
worked on most of his adult life and intended for posthumous publication, uses the
autobiographical format to meditate on the history of France, the passing of time, and the vanity
of human desires. His lyrical and rhythmic prose left a deep impression on many Romantic
writers.
Mme de Staël and the debate on literature
Mme de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein) was truly
encyclopaedic in her interests. Her contribution to intellectual debate far exceeded any narrow
definition of literature. At first liberal and then, after her offer of support was rebuffed, fiercely
anti-Napoleon in politics, eclectic in philosophy, mixing rationalism and spiritualism, and
determinedly internationalist in her feeling for literature, she moved most easily in a world of
ideas, surrounding herself with the salon of intellectuals she founded at Coppet, Switzerland. Her
two novels, Delphine (1802; Delphine) and Corinne (1807; Corinne, or Italy), focus on the limits
society tries to impose on the independent woman and the woman of genius. The account of
Corinne’s personal drama is combined with an examination of national identities in
postrevolutionary Europe, offering original insights into how new alliances can be forged across
old, hostile boundaries and what part artistic form and women’s influence could play in making
new communities. Her two most influential works, De la littérature (1800; The Influence of
Literature upon Society) and De l’Allemagne (1810; Germany), expanded conceptions of
literature with the claim that different social forms needed different literary modes: in particular,
postrevolutionary society required a new literature. She explored the contrast, as she saw it,
between the literature of the south (rational, Classical) and the literature of the north (emotional,
Romantic), and she explored the potential interest for French culture of foreign writers such as
William Shakespeare, Ossian, and above all the German Romantics.
Many of these ideas emerged from discussions with August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose
work on the drama was widely translated, and from meetings with and readings of the Germans
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The Genevan economist and writer Jean-
Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi reinforced many of Mme de Staël’s points in his De la
littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813; Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe).
This cosmopolitan cultural relativism was infuriating to many of Staël’s French contemporaries
in the prevailing Neoclassical literary climate.
Romanticism
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain,
with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of
revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very
particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of
history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle
(literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for
his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or
whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was
sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any
simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of
1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness,
loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often
in the form of frustrated dynamism.
Foreign influences
When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France,
they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and
Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative
writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon,
was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European
cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence
of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a
model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of
Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy
and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their
literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these
countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and
revenge tales.
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one
of the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding
poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a
variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving
frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing
ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830,
there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics
and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of
l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a
reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the
intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.
Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Méditations poétiques
(1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and remaining
unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating through the musicality of
his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings unfulfilled. This soft-centred
elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and Byronic revolt. The Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses (1830; “Poetic and Religious Harmonies”; Eng. trans. in A Biographical
Sketch), with their religious emotion, reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened
by unease and disquiet. Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d’un ange (1838; “The
Fall of an Angel”) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine’s
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading role in the
provisional government.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In
his first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman
Catholic legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to
Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous
quality of Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there
are already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and
problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of
poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of
pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating
on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is
interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic
consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic,
prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.
Vigny
In contrast to Hugo’s scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more limited
and controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however, he proposed
the poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified, moralizing
philosopher, using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense expression of his
thought. Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble stoicism, his work focuses
on figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His
Les Destinées (1864; “The Fates”), composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies
the high spiritual aspiration that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and
concentration of expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.
Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his
Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; “Tales of Spain and Italy”). His exuberant sense of humour
led him to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them ironically. Later, a
trajectory from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of emptiness and futility, sustained only
intermittently by the linking of suffering with love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense
of self. The Nuits (“Nights”) poems (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit
d’août,” “La Nuit d’octobre,” 1835–37) express the purifying power of suffering in verse of
sustained sincerity, purged of all the early showiness.
Nerval
For a long while Gérard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature (notably
Goethe’s Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as his real
contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimères (The Chimeras), composed between about
1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual odyssey Aurélia (1853–54; Eng. trans.
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an
anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of
literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of
achievement of that side of the Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the
spiritual reintegration of the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the
prose poem and his use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays
from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the
period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging
audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism.
Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such
battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in
the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a
contemporary public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play
Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—
which he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could
transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited
from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a
sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic
local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young
Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a
dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a
similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the
mingling of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic
drama. The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic
melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.
Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most
famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many
analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by
Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of
poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic
estrangement.
Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of
his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued
to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—
almost charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather
in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying
disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one
indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with
clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological
study of a once pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted
youth and lost illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a
prose that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of
Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and
crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison
with Shakespeare.
The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the complex literary culture
of the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feeling—whether based on reason, sentiment,
or an exacerbated sensibility—and most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789 to
1815. Certainly, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The
insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly
underlined the regime’s centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This classicism, or, strictly
speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and literary forms
that had dominated “serious” literature—and drama in particular—in France for almost two
centuries. But Rousseau’s emphasis on subjectivity and sentiment still had its heirs, as did the
new forms of writing he had helped to evolve. Likewise, while the Gothic violence that had
emerged in early Revolutionary drama and novels was curbed, its dynamic remained. The seeds
of French Romanticism had been sown in national ground, long before writers began to turn to
other nations to kindle their inspiration.
The poetry of Chénier
André Chénier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in
volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets, who
saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical spirit,
especially that of Greece, Chénier exploited Classical myths for modern purposes. He began
work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, “Hermès,” a history of the universe and human
progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit but also anticipate the
episodic epic poems of the later Romantics. Chénier, though a moderate in revolutionary terms,
was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in the scathing fierceness of his lyrical
satires, the Ïambes, many of which were written from prison shortly before his execution. His
best-known poems, however, are elegies that sing of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and
lost happiness.
Revolutionary oratory and polemic
The intensity of political debate in Paris during the Revolution, whether in clubs, in the
National Assembly, or before tribunals, threw into prominence the arts of oratory. Speaking in
the name of reason, virtue, and liberty and using the Roman Republic or the city-states of Greece
as a frame of reference, Revolutionary leaders such as Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, and Louis de Saint-Just infused the
intellectual preoccupations of the Enlightenment with a sense of drama and passion. This
renewal of rhetoric is echoed in the enormously expanded political press, including Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Jacques-René Hébert’s Le Père Duchesne (“Old
Duchesne”), and Gracchus Babeuf’s Le Tribun du peuple (“The Defender of the People”). To
some extent the proclamations and communiqués of Napoleon prolonged this Revolutionary
eloquence.
Chateaubriand
The French Revolution made an émigré of François-Auguste-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, and his first major work, the Essai sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”; Eng. trans. An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and
Modern), is a complex and sometimes confused attempt to understand revolution in general, the
French Revolution in particular, and the individual’s relationship to these phenomena.
Chateaubriand took as his model the stance of the 18th-century philosophe, but his Génie du
christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) caught a new mood of return to religious faith
based on emotional appeals and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Christianity. The impact
of this work was enormous, not least in its reinstatement of nature, and natural landscape, as the
lodging place of spiritual repose and renewal. Within it were two short narratives, Atala (Eng.
trans. Atala, also translated in Atala, René), a tale of fatal passion and savage (Indian) nobility,
and René (Eng. trans. René). A young hero not dissimilar to Goethe’s Werther, René, who flees
pain and suffering in Europe to look vainly for refuge in the wilds of America, came to represent
the mal du siècle (world-weariness, literally “sickness of the century”), the essence of Romantic
sensibility; he is insecure, solitary, disorientated, and in flight, searching for a happiness that will
always evade him.
Behind all Chateaubriand’s works lies the sense of a break, caused by the French
Revolution, in a stable, ordered existence. His Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848–50; “Memoirs
from Beyond the Tomb”; Eng. trans. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand), the masterpiece he
worked on most of his adult life and intended for posthumous publication, uses the
autobiographical format to meditate on the history of France, the passing of time, and the vanity
of human desires. His lyrical and rhythmic prose left a deep impression on many Romantic
writers.
Mme de Staël and the debate on literature
Mme de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein) was truly
encyclopaedic in her interests. Her contribution to intellectual debate far exceeded any narrow
definition of literature. At first liberal and then, after her offer of support was rebuffed, fiercely
anti-Napoleon in politics, eclectic in philosophy, mixing rationalism and spiritualism, and
determinedly internationalist in her feeling for literature, she moved most easily in a world of
ideas, surrounding herself with the salon of intellectuals she founded at Coppet, Switzerland. Her
two novels, Delphine (1802; Delphine) and Corinne (1807; Corinne, or Italy), focus on the limits
society tries to impose on the independent woman and the woman of genius. The account of
Corinne’s personal drama is combined with an examination of national identities in
postrevolutionary Europe, offering original insights into how new alliances can be forged across
old, hostile boundaries and what part artistic form and women’s influence could play in making
new communities. Her two most influential works, De la littérature (1800; The Influence of
Literature upon Society) and De l’Allemagne (1810; Germany), expanded conceptions of
literature with the claim that different social forms needed different literary modes: in particular,
postrevolutionary society required a new literature. She explored the contrast, as she saw it,
between the literature of the south (rational, Classical) and the literature of the north (emotional,
Romantic), and she explored the potential interest for French culture of foreign writers such as
William Shakespeare, Ossian, and above all the German Romantics.
Many of these ideas emerged from discussions with August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose
work on the drama was widely translated, and from meetings with and readings of the Germans
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The Genevan economist and writer Jean-
Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi reinforced many of Mme de Staël’s points in his De la
littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813; Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe).
This cosmopolitan cultural relativism was infuriating to many of Staël’s French contemporaries
in the prevailing Neoclassical literary climate.
Romanticism
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain,
with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of
revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very
particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of
history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle
(literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for
his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or
whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was
sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any
simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of
1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness,
loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often
in the form of frustrated dynamism.
Foreign influences
When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France,
they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and
Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative
writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon,
was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European
cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence
of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a
model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of
Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy
and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their
literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these
countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and
revenge tales.
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one
of the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding
poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a
variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving
frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing
ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830,
there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics
and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of
l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a
reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the
intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.
Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Méditations poétiques
(1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and remaining
unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating through the musicality of
his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings unfulfilled. This soft-centred
elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and Byronic revolt. The Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses (1830; “Poetic and Religious Harmonies”; Eng. trans. in A Biographical
Sketch), with their religious emotion, reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened
by unease and disquiet. Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d’un ange (1838; “The
Fall of an Angel”) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine’s
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading role in the
provisional government.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In
his first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman
Catholic legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to
Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous
quality of Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there
are already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and
problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of
poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of
pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating
on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is
interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic
consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic,
prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.
Vigny
In contrast to Hugo’s scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more limited
and controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however, he proposed
the poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified, moralizing
philosopher, using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense expression of his
thought. Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble stoicism, his work focuses
on figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His
Les Destinées (1864; “The Fates”), composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies
the high spiritual aspiration that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and
concentration of expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.
Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his
Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; “Tales of Spain and Italy”). His exuberant sense of humour
led him to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them ironically. Later, a
trajectory from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of emptiness and futility, sustained only
intermittently by the linking of suffering with love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense
of self. The Nuits (“Nights”) poems (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit
d’août,” “La Nuit d’octobre,” 1835–37) express the purifying power of suffering in verse of
sustained sincerity, purged of all the early showiness.
Nerval
For a long while Gérard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature (notably
Goethe’s Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as his real
contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimères (The Chimeras), composed between about
1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual odyssey Aurélia (1853–54; Eng. trans.
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an
anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of
literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of
achievement of that side of the Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the
spiritual reintegration of the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the
prose poem and his use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays
from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the
period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging
audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism.
Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such
battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in
the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a
contemporary public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play
Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—
which he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could
transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited
from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a
sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic
local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young
Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a
dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a
similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the
mingling of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic
drama. The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic
melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.
Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most
famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many
analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by
Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of
poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic
estrangement.
Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of
his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued
to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—
almost charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather
in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying
disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one
indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with
clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological
study of a once pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted
youth and lost illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a
prose that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of
Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and
crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison
with Shakespeare.
The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the complex literary culture
of the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feeling—whether based on reason, sentiment,
or an exacerbated sensibility—and most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789 to
1815. Certainly, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The
insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly
underlined the regime’s centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This classicism, or, strictly
speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and literary forms
that had dominated “serious” literature—and drama in particular—in France for almost two
centuries. But Rousseau’s emphasis on subjectivity and sentiment still had its heirs, as did the
new forms of writing he had helped to evolve. Likewise, while the Gothic violence that had
emerged in early Revolutionary drama and novels was curbed, its dynamic remained. The seeds
of French Romanticism had been sown in national ground, long before writers began to turn to
other nations to kindle their inspiration.
The poetry of Chénier
André Chénier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in
volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets, who
saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical spirit,
especially that of Greece, Chénier exploited Classical myths for modern purposes. He began
work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, “Hermès,” a history of the universe and human
progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit but also anticipate the
episodic epic poems of the later Romantics. Chénier, though a moderate in revolutionary terms,
was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in the scathing fierceness of his lyrical
satires, the Ïambes, many of which were written from prison shortly before his execution. His
best-known poems, however, are elegies that sing of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and
lost happiness.
Revolutionary oratory and polemic
The intensity of political debate in Paris during the Revolution, whether in clubs, in the
National Assembly, or before tribunals, threw into prominence the arts of oratory. Speaking in
the name of reason, virtue, and liberty and using the Roman Republic or the city-states of Greece
as a frame of reference, Revolutionary leaders such as Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, and Louis de Saint-Just infused the
intellectual preoccupations of the Enlightenment with a sense of drama and passion. This
renewal of rhetoric is echoed in the enormously expanded political press, including Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Jacques-René Hébert’s Le Père Duchesne (“Old
Duchesne”), and Gracchus Babeuf’s Le Tribun du peuple (“The Defender of the People”). To
some extent the proclamations and communiqués of Napoleon prolonged this Revolutionary
eloquence.
Chateaubriand
The French Revolution made an émigré of François-Auguste-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, and his first major work, the Essai sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”; Eng. trans. An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and
Modern), is a complex and sometimes confused attempt to understand revolution in general, the
French Revolution in particular, and the individual’s relationship to these phenomena.
Chateaubriand took as his model the stance of the 18th-century philosophe, but his Génie du
christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) caught a new mood of return to religious faith
based on emotional appeals and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Christianity. The impact
of this work was enormous, not least in its reinstatement of nature, and natural landscape, as the
lodging place of spiritual repose and renewal. Within it were two short narratives, Atala (Eng.
trans. Atala, also translated in Atala, René), a tale of fatal passion and savage (Indian) nobility,
and René (Eng. trans. René). A young hero not dissimilar to Goethe’s Werther, René, who flees
pain and suffering in Europe to look vainly for refuge in the wilds of America, came to represent
the mal du siècle (world-weariness, literally “sickness of the century”), the essence of Romantic
sensibility; he is insecure, solitary, disorientated, and in flight, searching for a happiness that will
always evade him.
Behind all Chateaubriand’s works lies the sense of a break, caused by the French
Revolution, in a stable, ordered existence. His Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848–50; “Memoirs
from Beyond the Tomb”; Eng. trans. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand), the masterpiece he
worked on most of his adult life and intended for posthumous publication, uses the
autobiographical format to meditate on the history of France, the passing of time, and the vanity
of human desires. His lyrical and rhythmic prose left a deep impression on many Romantic
writers.
Mme de Staël and the debate on literature
Mme de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein) was truly
encyclopaedic in her interests. Her contribution to intellectual debate far exceeded any narrow
definition of literature. At first liberal and then, after her offer of support was rebuffed, fiercely
anti-Napoleon in politics, eclectic in philosophy, mixing rationalism and spiritualism, and
determinedly internationalist in her feeling for literature, she moved most easily in a world of
ideas, surrounding herself with the salon of intellectuals she founded at Coppet, Switzerland. Her
two novels, Delphine (1802; Delphine) and Corinne (1807; Corinne, or Italy), focus on the limits
society tries to impose on the independent woman and the woman of genius. The account of
Corinne’s personal drama is combined with an examination of national identities in
postrevolutionary Europe, offering original insights into how new alliances can be forged across
old, hostile boundaries and what part artistic form and women’s influence could play in making
new communities. Her two most influential works, De la littérature (1800; The Influence of
Literature upon Society) and De l’Allemagne (1810; Germany), expanded conceptions of
literature with the claim that different social forms needed different literary modes: in particular,
postrevolutionary society required a new literature. She explored the contrast, as she saw it,
between the literature of the south (rational, Classical) and the literature of the north (emotional,
Romantic), and she explored the potential interest for French culture of foreign writers such as
William Shakespeare, Ossian, and above all the German Romantics.
Many of these ideas emerged from discussions with August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose
work on the drama was widely translated, and from meetings with and readings of the Germans
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The Genevan economist and writer Jean-
Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi reinforced many of Mme de Staël’s points in his De la
littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813; Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe).
This cosmopolitan cultural relativism was infuriating to many of Staël’s French contemporaries
in the prevailing Neoclassical literary climate.
Romanticism
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain,
with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of
revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very
particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of
history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle
(literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for
his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or
whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was
sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any
simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of
1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness,
loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often
in the form of frustrated dynamism.
Foreign influences
When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France,
they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and
Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative
writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon,
was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European
cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence
of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a
model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of
Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy
and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their
literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these
countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and
revenge tales.
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one
of the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding
poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a
variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving
frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing
ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830,
there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics
and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of
l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a
reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the
intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.
Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Méditations poétiques
(1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and remaining
unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating through the musicality of
his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings unfulfilled. This soft-centred
elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and Byronic revolt. The Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses (1830; “Poetic and Religious Harmonies”; Eng. trans. in A Biographical
Sketch), with their religious emotion, reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened
by unease and disquiet. Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d’un ange (1838; “The
Fall of an Angel”) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine’s
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading role in the
provisional government.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In
his first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman
Catholic legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to
Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous
quality of Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there
are already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and
problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of
poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of
pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating
on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is
interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic
consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic,
prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.
Vigny
In contrast to Hugo’s scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more limited
and controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however, he proposed
the poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified, moralizing
philosopher, using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense expression of his
thought. Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble stoicism, his work focuses
on figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His
Les Destinées (1864; “The Fates”), composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies
the high spiritual aspiration that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and
concentration of expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.
Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his
Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; “Tales of Spain and Italy”). His exuberant sense of humour
led him to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them ironically. Later, a
trajectory from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of emptiness and futility, sustained only
intermittently by the linking of suffering with love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense
of self. The Nuits (“Nights”) poems (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit
d’août,” “La Nuit d’octobre,” 1835–37) express the purifying power of suffering in verse of
sustained sincerity, purged of all the early showiness.
Nerval
For a long while Gérard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature (notably
Goethe’s Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as his real
contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimères (The Chimeras), composed between about
1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual odyssey Aurélia (1853–54; Eng. trans.
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an
anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of
literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of
achievement of that side of the Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the
spiritual reintegration of the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the
prose poem and his use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays
from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the
period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging
audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism.
Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such
battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in
the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a
contemporary public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play
Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—
which he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could
transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited
from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a
sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic
local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young
Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a
dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a
similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the
mingling of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic
drama. The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic
melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.
Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most
famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many
analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by
Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of
poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic
estrangement.
Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of
his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued
to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—
almost charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather
in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying
disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one
indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with
clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological
study of a once pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted
youth and lost illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a
prose that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of
Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and
crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison
with Shakespeare.
The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the complex literary culture
of the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feeling—whether based on reason, sentiment,
or an exacerbated sensibility—and most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789 to
1815. Certainly, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The
insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly
underlined the regime’s centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This classicism, or, strictly
speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and literary forms
that had dominated “serious” literature—and drama in particular—in France for almost two
centuries. But Rousseau’s emphasis on subjectivity and sentiment still had its heirs, as did the
new forms of writing he had helped to evolve. Likewise, while the Gothic violence that had
emerged in early Revolutionary drama and novels was curbed, its dynamic remained. The seeds
of French Romanticism had been sown in national ground, long before writers began to turn to
other nations to kindle their inspiration.
The poetry of Chénier
André Chénier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in
volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets, who
saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical spirit,
especially that of Greece, Chénier exploited Classical myths for modern purposes. He began
work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, “Hermès,” a history of the universe and human
progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit but also anticipate the
episodic epic poems of the later Romantics. Chénier, though a moderate in revolutionary terms,
was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in the scathing fierceness of his lyrical
satires, the Ïambes, many of which were written from prison shortly before his execution. His
best-known poems, however, are elegies that sing of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and
lost happiness.
Revolutionary oratory and polemic
The intensity of political debate in Paris during the Revolution, whether in clubs, in the
National Assembly, or before tribunals, threw into prominence the arts of oratory. Speaking in
the name of reason, virtue, and liberty and using the Roman Republic or the city-states of Greece
as a frame of reference, Revolutionary leaders such as Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, and Louis de Saint-Just infused the
intellectual preoccupations of the Enlightenment with a sense of drama and passion. This
renewal of rhetoric is echoed in the enormously expanded political press, including Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Jacques-René Hébert’s Le Père Duchesne (“Old
Duchesne”), and Gracchus Babeuf’s Le Tribun du peuple (“The Defender of the People”). To
some extent the proclamations and communiqués of Napoleon prolonged this Revolutionary
eloquence.
Chateaubriand
The French Revolution made an émigré of François-Auguste-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, and his first major work, the Essai sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”; Eng. trans. An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and
Modern), is a complex and sometimes confused attempt to understand revolution in general, the
French Revolution in particular, and the individual’s relationship to these phenomena.
Chateaubriand took as his model the stance of the 18th-century philosophe, but his Génie du
christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) caught a new mood of return to religious faith
based on emotional appeals and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Christianity. The impact
of this work was enormous, not least in its reinstatement of nature, and natural landscape, as the
lodging place of spiritual repose and renewal. Within it were two short narratives, Atala (Eng.
trans. Atala, also translated in Atala, René), a tale of fatal passion and savage (Indian) nobility,
and René (Eng. trans. René). A young hero not dissimilar to Goethe’s Werther, René, who flees
pain and suffering in Europe to look vainly for refuge in the wilds of America, came to represent
the mal du siècle (world-weariness, literally “sickness of the century”), the essence of Romantic
sensibility; he is insecure, solitary, disorientated, and in flight, searching for a happiness that will
always evade him.
Behind all Chateaubriand’s works lies the sense of a break, caused by the French
Revolution, in a stable, ordered existence. His Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848–50; “Memoirs
from Beyond the Tomb”; Eng. trans. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand), the masterpiece he
worked on most of his adult life and intended for posthumous publication, uses the
autobiographical format to meditate on the history of France, the passing of time, and the vanity
of human desires. His lyrical and rhythmic prose left a deep impression on many Romantic
writers.
Mme de Staël and the debate on literature
Mme de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein) was truly
encyclopaedic in her interests. Her contribution to intellectual debate far exceeded any narrow
definition of literature. At first liberal and then, after her offer of support was rebuffed, fiercely
anti-Napoleon in politics, eclectic in philosophy, mixing rationalism and spiritualism, and
determinedly internationalist in her feeling for literature, she moved most easily in a world of
ideas, surrounding herself with the salon of intellectuals she founded at Coppet, Switzerland. Her
two novels, Delphine (1802; Delphine) and Corinne (1807; Corinne, or Italy), focus on the limits
society tries to impose on the independent woman and the woman of genius. The account of
Corinne’s personal drama is combined with an examination of national identities in
postrevolutionary Europe, offering original insights into how new alliances can be forged across
old, hostile boundaries and what part artistic form and women’s influence could play in making
new communities. Her two most influential works, De la littérature (1800; The Influence of
Literature upon Society) and De l’Allemagne (1810; Germany), expanded conceptions of
literature with the claim that different social forms needed different literary modes: in particular,
postrevolutionary society required a new literature. She explored the contrast, as she saw it,
between the literature of the south (rational, Classical) and the literature of the north (emotional,
Romantic), and she explored the potential interest for French culture of foreign writers such as
William Shakespeare, Ossian, and above all the German Romantics.
Many of these ideas emerged from discussions with August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose
work on the drama was widely translated, and from meetings with and readings of the Germans
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The Genevan economist and writer Jean-
Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi reinforced many of Mme de Staël’s points in his De la
littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813; Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe).
This cosmopolitan cultural relativism was infuriating to many of Staël’s French contemporaries
in the prevailing Neoclassical literary climate.
Romanticism
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain,
with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of
revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very
particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of
history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle
(literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for
his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or
whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was
sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any
simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of
1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness,
loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often
in the form of frustrated dynamism.
Foreign influences
When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France,
they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and
Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative
writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon,
was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European
cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence
of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a
model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of
Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy
and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their
literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these
countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and
revenge tales.
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one
of the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding
poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a
variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving
frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing
ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830,
there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics
and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of
l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a
reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the
intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.
Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Méditations poétiques
(1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and remaining
unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating through the musicality of
his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings unfulfilled. This soft-centred
elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and Byronic revolt. The Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses (1830; “Poetic and Religious Harmonies”; Eng. trans. in A Biographical
Sketch), with their religious emotion, reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened
by unease and disquiet. Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d’un ange (1838; “The
Fall of an Angel”) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine’s
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading role in the
provisional government.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In
his first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman
Catholic legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to
Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous
quality of Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there
are already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and
problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of
poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of
pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating
on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is
interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic
consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic,
prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.
Vigny
In contrast to Hugo’s scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more limited
and controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however, he proposed
the poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified, moralizing
philosopher, using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense expression of his
thought. Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble stoicism, his work focuses
on figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His
Les Destinées (1864; “The Fates”), composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies
the high spiritual aspiration that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and
concentration of expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.
Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his
Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; “Tales of Spain and Italy”). His exuberant sense of humour
led him to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them ironically. Later, a
trajectory from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of emptiness and futility, sustained only
intermittently by the linking of suffering with love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense
of self. The Nuits (“Nights”) poems (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit
d’août,” “La Nuit d’octobre,” 1835–37) express the purifying power of suffering in verse of
sustained sincerity, purged of all the early showiness.
Nerval
For a long while Gérard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature (notably
Goethe’s Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as his real
contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimères (The Chimeras), composed between about
1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual odyssey Aurélia (1853–54; Eng. trans.
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an
anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of
literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of
achievement of that side of the Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the
spiritual reintegration of the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the
prose poem and his use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays
from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the
period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging
audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism.
Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such
battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in
the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a
contemporary public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play
Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—
which he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could
transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited
from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a
sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic
local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young
Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a
dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a
similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the
mingling of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic
drama. The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic
melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.
Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most
famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many
analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by
Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of
poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic
estrangement.
Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of
his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued
to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—
almost charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather
in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying
disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one
indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with
clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological
study of a once pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted
youth and lost illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a
prose that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of
Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and
crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison
with Shakespeare.
The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the complex literary culture
of the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feeling—whether based on reason, sentiment,
or an exacerbated sensibility—and most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789 to
1815. Certainly, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The
insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly
underlined the regime’s centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This classicism, or, strictly
speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and literary forms
that had dominated “serious” literature—and drama in particular—in France for almost two
centuries. But Rousseau’s emphasis on subjectivity and sentiment still had its heirs, as did the
new forms of writing he had helped to evolve. Likewise, while the Gothic violence that had
emerged in early Revolutionary drama and novels was curbed, its dynamic remained. The seeds
of French Romanticism had been sown in national ground, long before writers began to turn to
other nations to kindle their inspiration.
The poetry of Chénier
André Chénier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in
volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets, who
saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical spirit,
especially that of Greece, Chénier exploited Classical myths for modern purposes. He began
work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, “Hermès,” a history of the universe and human
progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit but also anticipate the
episodic epic poems of the later Romantics. Chénier, though a moderate in revolutionary terms,
was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in the scathing fierceness of his lyrical
satires, the Ïambes, many of which were written from prison shortly before his execution. His
best-known poems, however, are elegies that sing of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and
lost happiness.
Revolutionary oratory and polemic
The intensity of political debate in Paris during the Revolution, whether in clubs, in the
National Assembly, or before tribunals, threw into prominence the arts of oratory. Speaking in
the name of reason, virtue, and liberty and using the Roman Republic or the city-states of Greece
as a frame of reference, Revolutionary leaders such as Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, and Louis de Saint-Just infused the
intellectual preoccupations of the Enlightenment with a sense of drama and passion. This
renewal of rhetoric is echoed in the enormously expanded political press, including Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Jacques-René Hébert’s Le Père Duchesne (“Old
Duchesne”), and Gracchus Babeuf’s Le Tribun du peuple (“The Defender of the People”). To
some extent the proclamations and communiqués of Napoleon prolonged this Revolutionary
eloquence.
Chateaubriand
The French Revolution made an émigré of François-Auguste-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, and his first major work, the Essai sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”; Eng. trans. An Historical, Political and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and
Modern), is a complex and sometimes confused attempt to understand revolution in general, the
French Revolution in particular, and the individual’s relationship to these phenomena.
Chateaubriand took as his model the stance of the 18th-century philosophe, but his Génie du
christianisme (1802; The Genius of Christianity) caught a new mood of return to religious faith
based on emotional appeals and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Christianity. The impact
of this work was enormous, not least in its reinstatement of nature, and natural landscape, as the
lodging place of spiritual repose and renewal. Within it were two short narratives, Atala (Eng.
trans. Atala, also translated in Atala, René), a tale of fatal passion and savage (Indian) nobility,
and René (Eng. trans. René). A young hero not dissimilar to Goethe’s Werther, René, who flees
pain and suffering in Europe to look vainly for refuge in the wilds of America, came to represent
the mal du siècle (world-weariness, literally “sickness of the century”), the essence of Romantic
sensibility; he is insecure, solitary, disorientated, and in flight, searching for a happiness that will
always evade him.
Behind all Chateaubriand’s works lies the sense of a break, caused by the French
Revolution, in a stable, ordered existence. His Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1848–50; “Memoirs
from Beyond the Tomb”; Eng. trans. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand), the masterpiece he
worked on most of his adult life and intended for posthumous publication, uses the
autobiographical format to meditate on the history of France, the passing of time, and the vanity
of human desires. His lyrical and rhythmic prose left a deep impression on many Romantic
writers.
Mme de Staël and the debate on literature
Mme de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein) was truly
encyclopaedic in her interests. Her contribution to intellectual debate far exceeded any narrow
definition of literature. At first liberal and then, after her offer of support was rebuffed, fiercely
anti-Napoleon in politics, eclectic in philosophy, mixing rationalism and spiritualism, and
determinedly internationalist in her feeling for literature, she moved most easily in a world of
ideas, surrounding herself with the salon of intellectuals she founded at Coppet, Switzerland. Her
two novels, Delphine (1802; Delphine) and Corinne (1807; Corinne, or Italy), focus on the limits
society tries to impose on the independent woman and the woman of genius. The account of
Corinne’s personal drama is combined with an examination of national identities in
postrevolutionary Europe, offering original insights into how new alliances can be forged across
old, hostile boundaries and what part artistic form and women’s influence could play in making
new communities. Her two most influential works, De la littérature (1800; The Influence of
Literature upon Society) and De l’Allemagne (1810; Germany), expanded conceptions of
literature with the claim that different social forms needed different literary modes: in particular,
postrevolutionary society required a new literature. She explored the contrast, as she saw it,
between the literature of the south (rational, Classical) and the literature of the north (emotional,
Romantic), and she explored the potential interest for French culture of foreign writers such as
William Shakespeare, Ossian, and above all the German Romantics.
Many of these ideas emerged from discussions with August Wilhelm von Schlegel, whose
work on the drama was widely translated, and from meetings with and readings of the Germans
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The Genevan economist and writer Jean-
Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi reinforced many of Mme de Staël’s points in his De la
littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813; Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe).
This cosmopolitan cultural relativism was infuriating to many of Staël’s French contemporaries
in the prevailing Neoclassical literary climate.
Romanticism
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain,
with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of
revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very
particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of
history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle
(literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for
his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or
whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was
sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any
simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of
1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness,
loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often
in the form of frustrated dynamism.
Foreign influences
When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France,
they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and
Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative
writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon,
was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European
cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence
of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a
model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of
Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy
and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their
literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these
countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and
revenge tales.
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one
of the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding
poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a
variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving
frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing
ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830,
there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics
and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of
l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a
reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the
intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.
Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Méditations poétiques
(1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and remaining
unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating through the musicality of
his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings unfulfilled. This soft-centred
elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and Byronic revolt. The Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses (1830; “Poetic and Religious Harmonies”; Eng. trans. in A Biographical
Sketch), with their religious emotion, reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened
by unease and disquiet. Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d’un ange (1838; “The
Fall of an Angel”) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine’s
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading role in the
provisional government.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In
his first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman
Catholic legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to
Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous
quality of Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there
are already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and
problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of
poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of
pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating
on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is
interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic
consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic,
prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.
Vigny
In contrast to Hugo’s scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more limited
and controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however, he proposed
the poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified, moralizing
philosopher, using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense expression of his
thought. Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble stoicism, his work focuses
on figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His
Les Destinées (1864; “The Fates”), composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies
the high spiritual aspiration that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and
concentration of expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.
Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his
Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; “Tales of Spain and Italy”). His exuberant sense of humour
led him to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them ironically. Later, a
trajectory from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of emptiness and futility, sustained only
intermittently by the linking of suffering with love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense
of self. The Nuits (“Nights”) poems (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit
d’août,” “La Nuit d’octobre,” 1835–37) express the purifying power of suffering in verse of
sustained sincerity, purged of all the early showiness.
Nerval
For a long while Gérard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature (notably
Goethe’s Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as his real
contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimères (The Chimeras), composed between about
1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual odyssey Aurélia (1853–54; Eng. trans.
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an
anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of
literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of
achievement of that side of the Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the
spiritual reintegration of the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the
prose poem and his use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays
from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the
period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging
audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism.
Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such
battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in
the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a
contemporary public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play
Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—
which he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could
transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited
from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a
sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic
local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young
Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a
dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a
similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the
mingling of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic
drama. The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic
melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.
Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most
famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many
analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by
Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of
poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic
estrangement.
Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of
his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued
to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—
almost charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather
in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying
disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one
indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with
clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological
study of a once pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted
youth and lost illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a
prose that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of
Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and
crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison
with Shakespeare.
