FRENCH LITERATURE – 19Th Century Buckner B Trawick, Ph.D

HUMANITIES INSTITUTE FRENCH LITERATURE – 19th Century Buckner B Trawick, Ph.D. PART I : Early 19th Century Literature -The Romantic Age1800-1842 OVERVIEW Historical Background.* Many exciting political events which helped determine national thought and literature took place in France in the first half of the nineteenth century. As has been mentioned, Napoleon Bonaparte was made consul in 1799 and emperor in 1804. It soon became clear that he was not merely continuing a revolution which had once aimed at freedom from tyranny and oppression, but that he was waging an aggres-sive war of conquest. His fortunes continued to rise till his unsuccessful invasion of Russia in 1812. He met disaster again at the Battle of Leipzig (1813), was exiled to Elba (1814), but escaped (March, 1815)—only to lose his final battle at Waterloo (June, 1815). He was exiled again - this time to the island of St. Helena, where he died in 1821. The Bourbons were restored to the throne in the person of Louis XVIII, who ruled from 1815 till 1824. He was succeeded by Charles X, whose despotic methods led to another revolution (July, 1830). France was proclaimed a constitutional monarchy, andLouis Philippe was called to the throne. Another revolution (1848) overthrew this monarchy, and the Second Republic was proclaimed.Louis Napoleon, a nephew of Napoleon I, served as president from 1848 till 1851. Then by a coup d‟etat he establish himself as dictator, declared France an empire again, and was crowned EmperorNapoleon III in December, 1851. The political unrest is, of course, reflected in the temper of the times.Both the failure of the French Revolution to establish and maintaina just and democratic government and the defeat of Napoleon I were inevitably followed byperiods of disillusionmentamong many groups. The liberals and democrats werekept well in check by Bonaparte, andthe reactionaries and monarchisttriumphed after his fall. The general trend duringthe half- century however, was toward liberalism, as shown in the overthrow of Charles X and of Louis Philippe. There were conservatives and liberals in religion, too. The cunservatives revolted against the deism and rationalism of the eighteenth century and reverted to Catholicism and mysticism. There were others who, impressed by the strides made in the natural sciences, turned away from orthodox religious beliefs and emotionalism and embraced materialism, mechanism, and perhaps atheism. Belief in theinnate goodness of man survived both the Revolution and Bonaparte; but now, through some waning of individualism, it was transmuted into humanitarianism. One eminent thinker, AGUSTE COMTE (1798-1857) combined humanitarianism with a firm trust in scientific methods to form the new “science”of sociology. Holding that only the knowledge ga¡ned by observation and experimentationwas positive or real (positivism), he attempted to develop a science as wellas a religion from hisobservations of human behavior. He rejected beliefin all absolutes, and he held that the only way to improve conditions on earth was to strive increasingly to apply scientific methods to the study of human problems. Other thinkers suggested various political, economic, and social schemes forbettering man‟s lot. Among the most noteworthy was CHARLES FOURIER (1772-1837), “an ultraRous- seauist,”1 who proposed breaking society up into small agricultural communities, where the passions and wills ofmen would be free.Some of hisideas were put into practice in theBrook Farmexperiment in America. Another theoristwas Pierre-Joseph Proudhon(1809-1865), also a Rousseauist, who advocated the abolition of private property and eventually—as soon as society was sufficiently benevolent—of government itself. A third reformer was Louis Blanc (1811-1882), who wanted to establish national workshops inorder to improvelabor conditions. Such was the social, philosophic, and political milieu in which French litterateurs found themselves between 1800 and 1842. General Viewof the Literature. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic warsretarded the romantic movement of which Rousseauand Saint-Pierrehad been the harbingers. Napoleon Idiscouraged freedom of thepress and tried to absorb the most talented men intohis political ormilitary machinery. Consequently, little literature of the first rank was written between 1800and 1815.There were some political oratory and political jour-nalism, but these hardly deserve to be called literature. Romanticism began to blossom as soon as Napoleon fell, and it reached its height be-tween 1827and 1842. Bythe middle of the century realistic elements were making a strong bid for supremacy. The meaning of romanticism is at the same time too complex andtoo familiar to justify more than the briefest treatmenthere. The following may be listed as its main charac-teristics: revolt against authority of all kinds, including all literary traditions and forms; faith in man, individualism, and personal liberty; love for nature; interest in the long ago, the far away, and the supernatural; giving of free reign to the emotions and the imagi-nation; melancholy; cosmopolitanism; egoism; humanitarianism; and escapism. The principal literary forms in vogue during the romantic period were lyric poetry, drama, the novel, the short tale, history, and literary criticism. * Although the romantic age may be saidto have endedabout 1842, it is more convenient to discuss the history of the first half of the century as a unit. 1 C. H. C. Wright, A History of French Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1925), p. 647. POETRY Since the mortal blasts of Malherbe (p. 63) lyricism had been dead in France. The romantic revival of emotionalism and subjectivism brought it back to life. The PoeticMeditations (1820) of Lamartine was the first book of lyric poetry since the days of Chénier. ALPHONSE LOUIS-MARIE DE LAMARTINE(1790-1869), Lamartine was born at Macon in Burgundy of an old aristocratic family. After a happy childhood, he went to school at the Jesuit seminary in Belley. Then he spent four years of leisure and reading at Milly. In 1811 while traveling in Italy, he became infatuated with a little cigarette-maker of Naples, whom he later idealized in Graziella.Returning to France, he served first as a member of the royal guard of Louis XVIII and later as an attaché to the diplomatic corps at Naples. In 1816 he fell in love with Madame Julie Charles, who died the following year; she inspired many of his poems. The publication of The Poetic Meditationsin 1820 made him famous immediately. In 1829 he was elected a member of the Academy. After the fall of Charles X, he gave up his diplomatic career and sought a seat in the Assembly. At first unsuccessful, he was eventually elected (1833) and from then till 1848 played an increasingly important role in politics. He opposed the bourgeois government of Louis Philippe. Directly after the revolution of 1848 he was the virtual dictator of France — for about three months. Then the fickle and radical mob abandoned him for the glamorous Louis Napoleon, and Lamartine retired from politics forever. Always extravagant and generous, he now fell into financial difficulties and spent the last years of his life writing continually, principally hackwork for periodicals. Works. POETRY. The chief literary influences on Lamartine were the Bible, Rousseau, Saint-Pierre, Chateaubriand, Petrarch, Tasso, Milton, Ossian, and Young. Whereas Chateau- briand wrote about religion, nature, and himself, Lamartine wrote about religion, nature, and woman; and, like Chateaubriand, he often associated two or perhaps all three of the topics in one work. His religion is vaguer and less orthodox than that of Chateaubriand, but it is also deeper and more idealistic; sometimes it inclines toward pantheism. Lamar-tine‟s imagination is audial rather than visual; his descriptions are usually lacking in color — done principally in blacks and whites and grays. He prefers to describe floating or soaring things — clouds, winds, and waves; “it is the essential quality of his genius to dematerialize everything that he touches.”1 Much of his love poetry is idealistic and Platonic and, like that of Petrarch, tends to identify the physical with the spiritual; it often has a note of melancholy. The technical characteristics of his poems are fluidity, diffuseness, facility, spontaneity, and “a suave harmony, continuing the tradition of Racine and of the eighteenth-century elegists.”2 The mostimportant volumes of his poetryare as follows: The Poetic Meditations(Les Méditations poétiques, 1820), New Meditations (Nouvelles méditations, 1823), Poetic andReligious Harmonies (Harmonies poetiques et religieuses, 1830), Jocelyn (1836), The Fallof an Angel (La Chute d‟un ange, 1838), andPoetic Recollections (Recueillements poétiques,1839). Some of his best individual lyrics are “The Lake” (“Le Lac”), which com- bines melancholy, love, and appreciation for nature; “The Crucifix” (“Le Crucifix”), in which he associates his love for Elvire (Julie Charles) with his religious beliefs; and “Song of Love” (“Chant d‟amour”), a poem to his wife. Jocelyn is a long narrative poem which tells of the pure love of a priest for a young girl and of his renunciation. The Fall of an Angel is a long (11,000 lines) epic about an angel who, through love for a human woman, becomes human himself; it is not a success. PROSE. Lamartine wrote several prose works. Raphael (1849) and Graziella (1852) are semiautobiographical novels. The first is partially based on his love for Madame Charles; the other, on his affair with the Neapolitan cigarette-maker. Confidences (Les Con-fidences, 1849) and New Confidences (Les Nouvelles confidences, 1851) are autobi-ography proper. The History of the Girondists (L‟Histoire des Girondins, 1847) is an inspirational but untrustworthy account of one portion of the French Revolution; the book helped to foment the revolution of 1848. Estimate. Critical opinions of Lamartine have varied. He has been accused of diffuseness, flabbiness, vagueness, bombast, and insubstantiality; but he has been praised for intense emotion, spontaneity, tenderness, simplicity, melody, and harmony.

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