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French literature
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From 1789 to the mid-19th century
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André de Chénier
Mirabeau
Jean-Paul Marat
Maximilien Robespierre
Louis de Saint-Just
Jacques-René Hébert
Gracchus Babeuf
Chateaubriand
Mme de Stael
"Corinne,
Or Italy"
Charles-Augustin de Sainte-Beuve
Marceline Desbordes-Valmore
Petrus
Borel
Henri de Saint-Simon
Pierre-Jean de Béranger
Alphonse de Lamartine
Victor Hugo
"The Hunchback of Notre Dame"
VOLUME I,
VOLUME II
Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny
Alfred de Musset
Gérard de Nerval
Benjamin Constant
Alexandre Dumas
"The
Three Musketeers"
Stendhal
George Sand
Charles Nodier
Prosper Mérimée
Honoré
de Balzac
"Father Goriot"
Eugène Sue
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From 1789 to the mid-19th century
Revolution and empire
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.
André de Chénier
born
Oct. 30, 1762, Istanbul
died July 25, 1794, Paris
poet and political journalist, generally
considered the greatest French poet of
the 18th century. His work was scarcely
published until 25 years after his
death. When the first collected edition
of Chénier’s poetry appeared in 1819, it
had an immediate success and was
acclaimed not only by the poets of the
Romantic movement but also by the
anti-Romantic liberal press. Not only
was Chénier’s influence felt on poetic
trends throughout the 19th century but
the legend of his political struggle and
heroic death—celebrated in
Chateaubriand’s work Le Génie du
christianisme (1802), Sainte-Beuve’s
Joseph Delorme (1829), Vigny’s Stello
(1832), and Umberto Giordano’s opera
Andrea Chénier (1896)—also made him a
European symbol of the poet-hero.
His
mother was Greek, and he always had a
deep affection for Classical literature,
in particular for elegiac poetry. He was
educated in the progressive Collège de
Navarre and, after an unsuccessful
attempt at a military career in 1782–83,
devoted himself for five years to study.
In 1787 he reluctantly accepted a post
in the French embassy in London. He was
obsessed at that time by epic themes,
notably a project for a poem on the New
World, but he was psychologically
inhibited from completing these works.
His years in London were unhappy: he
suffered from frustrated ambition and
from self-doubt.
The
Revolutionary upheavals in France in
1789 offered an opportunity to escape
from this frustration. He returned to
Paris and began to take an active part
in political journalism, attacking the
extremes both of monarchist reaction and
of Revolutionary terror. Chénier was not
a political innocent and realized the
dangers of his position. At times he
exposed himself unnecessarily, from the
sense of moral integrity that is a
fundamental theme of his work and
perhaps also from an obscure hunger for
self-destruction. In March 1794 he was
arrested, imprisoned at Saint-Lazare,
and, four months later, guillotined, a
few days before the fall of the
Revolutionary leader Maximilien
Robespierre, an event that would have
saved him.
Chénier’s achievement was to have
demonstrated how the qualities of the
Greek lyrics could revitalize French
poetry. In his works of the
Revolutionary period, including poems
that he smuggled out of prison in a
laundry basket, he makes a passionate
defense of ideals of liberty and
justice: the Iambes, the last of which
dates from very shortly before his
execution, are a moving testimonial to
the human spirit in the face of
persecution.
Charles-Louis Müller: "The Call
for the Last Victims of the Terror, 7-9
Thermidor, Year"
(The figure seated at the centre is
Chenier.)
Ode
to Marie-Anne-Charlotte Corday
Le noir serpent, sorti de sa caverne
impure,
A donc vu rompre enfin sous ta main
ferme et sûre
le venimeux tissu de ses jours abhorrés!
Aux entrailles du tigre, à ses dents
homicides,
Tu vins demander et les membres livides
Et le sang des humains qu'il avait
dévorés!
La
vertu seule est libre. Honneur de notre
histoire,
Notre immortel opprobre y vit avec ta
gloire.
Seule tu fus un homme, et vengea les
humains.
Et nous, eunuques vils, troupeau lâche
et sans âme,
Nous savons répéter quelques plaintes de
femme,
Mais le fer pèserait à nos débiles
mains.
. . . . .
Un scélérat de moins rampe dans cette
fange.
La Vertu t'applaudit. De sa mâle louange
Entends, bell héroïne, entends l'auguste
voix.
O Vertu, le poignard, seul espoir de la
terre,
Est ton arme sacrée, alors que le
tonnerre
Laisse régner le crime, et te vend à ses
lois.
(The
black serpent, leaving his filthy cave,
Has finally suffered by your hand so
sure and brave
The end of its venomous existence so
despised!
From the tiger's guts, from his
homicidal teeth
You came and drew what he'd devoured
from beneath:
The blood and livid members of his
victims sacrificed.)
(Virtue
alone is free. Honor of our history,
Our immortal shame we live beside your
glory.
Only you were a man, your knife did
vengeance wreak;
And we, vile eunuchs, cowardly and
soul-less cattle.
We can at best complain like women
prattle,
But to wield a sword our hands would be
too weak
. . . . .
In that mud crawls one scoundrel less.
Hear, lovely heroine, hear Virtue bless,
Hear the august voice of its virile
praise.
Oh virtue, the dagger that hope will
raise,
Is your sacred arm, when Heaven holds
its thunder
And lets crime rule, while laws are cut
asunder.)
Andre Marie de Chenier
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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.
Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de
Mirabeau
born
March 9, 1749, Bignon, near Nemours,
France
died April 2, 1791, Paris
French politician and orator, one of the
greatest figures in the National
Assembly that governed France during the
early phases of the French Revolution. A
moderate and an advocate of
constitutional monarchy, he died before
the Revolution reached its radical
climax.
Troubled youth
Mirabeau was the elder son of the noted
economist Victor Riqueti, marquis de
Mirabeau, by his unhappy marriage to
Marie-Geneviève de Vassan. Disfigured by
smallpox at age three, the precocious
Honoré-Gabriel suffered even in early
childhood the disfavour of his
formidable father. At age 15 he was sent
as a pupil to the strict Abbé Choquard
in Paris, and at 18 he went as a
volunteer to serve in a cavalry regiment
at Saintes, where his father hoped that
military discipline would curb him. His
misbehaviour, however, led to his
imprisonment on the Île de Ré, under a
lettre de cachet, a written order
permitting imprisonment without trial.
Released to serve in Corsica with the
rank of sublieutenant in the army, he
distinguished himself there in 1769.
Reconciled with his father, he married a
rich Provençal heiress, Émilie de
Marignane, in 1772, but his heavy
spending and further misconduct led his
father to have him imprisoned under
another lettre de cachet in order to put
him out of reach of his creditors. He
was detained first at the Château d’If
(1774), then at the Fort de Joux, near
Pontarlier. Having obtained permission
to visit the town of Pontarlier, he
there met his “Sophie”—who, in fact, was
the marquise de Monnier, Marie-Thérèse-Richard
de Ruffey, the young wife of a very old
man. He eventually escaped to
Switzerland, where Sophie joined him;
the couple then made their way to
Holland, where Mirabeau was arrested in
1777.
The
tribunal at Pontarlier had meanwhile
sentenced him to death for seduction and
abduction, but Mirabeau escaped
execution by submitting to further
imprisonment under a lettre de cachet.
In the château of Vincennes he composed
the Lettres à Sophie, some erotic works,
and his essay Des lettres de cachet et
des prisons d’état (“Of Lettres de
Cachet and of State Prisons”). Released
in December 1780, he finally had to
surrender himself to arrest at
Pontarlier in order to have the death
sentence revoked, but by August 1782 he
was entirely free. He now became
involved in a lawsuit against his wife,
who wanted a judicial separation.
Pleading on his own behalf, he gained
the sympathy of the public but lost his
case (1783). Rejected by his wife and by
his father, he had to renounce the
aristocratic society into which he had
been born.
For the
next five years Mirabeau lived the life
of an adventurer. He was employed
sometimes as a hired pamphleteer,
sometimes as a secret agent. He came
into contact with Louis XVI’s ministers
Charles-Alexandre de Calonne; Charles
Gravier, comte de Vergennes; and
Armand-Marc, comte de
Montmorin-Saint-Hérem. He also made an
enemy of the Swiss banker Jacques
Necker, at that time director of the
finances, and engaged the playwright
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais in
controversy.
His
activities necessitated much traveling.
In London he was introduced into the
best Whig society by Gilbert Elliot
(later 1st earl of Minto), who had been
his fellow pupil under the Abbé Choquard;
he had to take refuge in Liège when his
Dénonciation de l’agiotage (against
stockjobbing) annoyed Calonne; and he
undertook a secret mission to Berlin in
1786. With the active assistance of a
Brunswick friend, Jakob Mauvillon, he
wrote De la monarchie prussienne sous
Frédéric le Grand (1788; “The Prussian
Monarchy Under Frederick the Great”),
which he dedicated to his father; but
Histoire secrète de la cour de Berlin
(“Secret History of the Court of
Berlin”), in which he made unscrupulous
use of material derived from his mission
in Germany, created a scandal in 1789.
Election to the Estates-General
Within France, affairs were moving
toward a crisis. The country, bankrupted
by its 18th-century wars, was burdened
with an archaic system of taxation and
social privilege. The Estates-General,
an assembly of the three estates of the
realm—the clergy, the nobility, and the
commons—was summoned to meet in Paris in
May 1789 in an attempt to implement the
necessary reforms. It was that meeting
that set in motion the great French
Revolution of 1789.
When
the Estates-General was summoned,
Mirabeau hoped to be elected as a deputy
for the nobility of Provence. For this
he needed his father’s support. Pleased
by the book dedicated to him, the
marquis had summoned Mirabeau to
Argenteuil in the autumn of 1788 but had
not given him any real help. Mirabeau
presented himself in the chamber of the
nobility in the estates of Provence in
January 1789 and uttered violent
diatribes against the privileged classes
but was not elected deputy, as he held
no fief. Turning reluctantly to the
Third Estate, he was elected to
represent both Marseille and
Aix-en-Provence, and he chose to
represent the latter.
Mirabeau came to the Estates-General
without any precise constitutional
doctrine. An avowed enemy of despotism
(he had written Essai sur le despotisme
[“Essay on Despotism”] before he was
25), he was, nevertheless, a firm
supporter of the monarchy and of the
executive power. Without expressly
adhering to the English system, he
wanted representative government. A
nobleman rejected by his class, he
opposed the idea of an aristocratic
second chamber. Like most of his
contemporaries, he had no political
experience, but his intelligence and his
knowledge of men made him supremely
capable of acquiring such experience
rapidly. Lack of money, however, exposed
him to pressure and to temptation.
From
May to October 1789 Mirabeau played a
decisive part in the battle between the
Third Estate and the privileged orders.
His aim was to become the spokesman of
the nation to the king and at the same
time to moderate the expression of the
nation’s wishes. Thus, on June 15 and 16
he was careful not to suggest the name
National Assembly, which was the
rallying cry of the Third Estate in its
Revolutionary debate of June 17, when it
set itself up as representative of the
whole nation. Yet, at the ending of the
“royal session” of June 23, when Henri
Évrard, marquis de Dreux-Brézé, in the
king’s name ordered the assembled
estates to return each to its separate
chamber, Mirabeau’s answer did much to
confirm the deputies in their resolution
to disobey and establish the National
Assembly, and, in the feverish
atmosphere of the early days of July,
his speeches inspired the Assembly to
demand the dispersal of the troops
concentrated around Paris.
After
the fall of the Bastille (July 14), he
urged the Assembly to demand the
dismissal of the ministers who were to
blame for the disorders. His popularity
in Paris was then considerable. On the
other hand, he disapproved of the
Assembly’s precipitate action in
abolishing feudalism (on the night of
August 4) and of the abstract
Declaration of Rights, and, while he was
openly against a second chamber, he yet
wanted the king to have an absolute
veto. In October, when the Parisians
marched on Versailles and took Louis XVI
back to Paris, Mirabeau’s attitude was
ambiguous and gave rise to the suspicion
that he might be plotting against the
king. To clear himself and to keep open
the door to the court’s favour, he
addressed a memorandum to the king,
advising him to leave Paris for Rouen,
to secure the support of a small army,
and to appeal to the provinces.
Mirabeau’s prime concern, however, was
to win “the battle of the ministry.”
Ostensibly a supporter of Necker,
Mirabeau, in fact, did his utmost to
destroy him: his brilliant speech on the
bankruptcy of the nation was a
masterstroke against this minister.
Furthermore, he tried skillfully to
induce the Assembly to grant to the king
the option of choosing members of it to
be his ministers, but the Assembly’s
decree of November 7, 1789, which
precluded all deputies from the ministry
for the duration of the session,
frustrated his hopes of ministerial
office for himself.
Intrigue with the court
From November 1789, notwithstanding his
oratorical triumphs of January–April
1790 in the cause of the Revolution,
Mirabeau was a prey to despondency and
aimlessness until his friend Auguste,
prince d’Arenberg, comte de La Marck—with
the approval of Florimund, Graf (count)
Mercy d’Argenteau, Austrian ambassador
to Paris and confidant of Queen
Marie-Antoinette—approached him with the
proposal from Louis XVI and the queen
that he should become their secret
counselor. Mirabeau accepted with
delight: “I shall make it my chief
business to see that the executive power
has its place in the constitution”
(letter of May 10). Part of the promised
remuneration was to be the paying off of
his debts.
In May
1790, when the Assembly was debating the
king’s right to make war and peace,
Mirabeau successfully opposed the
left-wing orator Antoine Barnave, whom
he challenged with the words: “Tell us
that there should be no king, do not
tell us that there should only be a
powerless, superfluous king.” He impeded
the progress of the Jacobins but risked
his own popularity, and a pamphlet
accusing him of treason was circulated (Trahison
découverte du comte de Mirabeau [“The
Uncovered Treason of the Comte de
Mirabeau”]).
From
June to October he had to work to
recapture his prestige. This was the
more necessary because the king and the
queen, despite their secret interview of
July 3 with Mirabeau at Saint-Cloud,
took little notice of his advice and
continued to be influenced by his rival
for court favour, the marquis de
Lafayette, who had scorned Mirabeau’s
offer of alliance. In October 1790 the
Assembly further disappointed Mirabeau
by refusing, after more discussion, to
revoke the decree of November 1789 on
the noneligibility of its members for
the ministry.
While
the court was displeased by some of
Mirabeau’s outbursts and by his
“incurable mania of running after
popularity,” Mirabeau, for his part, was
enraged to see a new ministry formed
under the influence of his rivals
Lafayette and Alexandre, comte de Lameth.
By the end of November 1790 his
relations with the court were severely
strained. He restored them by submitting
to the king’s adviser Montmorin a “Plan”
concocted to bring pressure to bear by
various means on the Assembly, on Paris,
and on the provinces so as to coordinate
“the means of reconciling public opinion
with the sovereign’s authority.”
The
plan was perfect in theory but very
difficult to put into practice. From
January 1791 it was clear that Mirabeau
had no intention of doing anything that
might compromise his own popularity,
though he was willing enough to sabotage
the Assembly by getting it to adopt
ill-considered measures of religious
persecution, and he was eagerly and
adroitly working to discredit Lameth’s
faction at court. His popularity rose to
its zenith, and the eyes of all of
Europe were on him.
As
spokesman of the diplomatic committee,
on January 28, 1791, he made a speech
that bore the unmistakable stamp of
statesmanship. Anxious to avoid anything
that might compromise France’s relations
with neighbouring countries,
particularly with England, he yet would
not repudiate any of the Revolution’s
political victories or allow any
necessary military precautions to be
overlooked. On the following day he at
last became president of the Assembly
for a fortnight. In this office, from
which he had been so long excluded, his
control of the debates was masterly.
Mirabeau’s problem was to know how and
for how long his Machiavellian game
could be continued before his intrigue
with the court would be exposed. The
people of Paris were restless, worried
by rumours. Mirabeau’s position was made
difficult by his intervention on behalf
of the king’s aunts (who had fled from
Paris), by his hostility to the law
against the émigrés, and by his harsh
words against the Lameths and their
satellites in the Assembly (“Silence to
the factious! Silence to the 33!”). On
February 28 he was sorely pressed to
justify himself to the Jacobins after a
pitiless attack by Alexandre, comte de
Lameth. The newspapers of the left
redoubled their accusations of treason
against him, and in March he experienced
some notable reverses in the Assembly.
Death
may have saved him from political
defeat. Gravely ill since his presidency
of the Assembly, he worsened his
condition by excessive indulgence. He
took to his bed on March 27, 1791, and
died a week later. The people’s grief
for him was boundless; he was given a
magnificent funeral, and it was for him
that the new church of Sainte-Geneviève
was converted into the Panthéon, for the
burial of great men. In the insurrection
of August 10, 1792, however, papers
proving Mirabeau’s relations with the
court were found in an iron chest in the
Tuileries Palace, and on September 21,
1794, his remains were dislodged from
the Panthéon by order of the National
Convention.
Assessment
As a statesman, Mirabeau failed in his
main objective, that of reconciling the
monarchy with the Revolution and a
strong executive with national liberty.
He was too much of a monarchist for the
Revolution, too revolutionary for the
monarchy. As an orator, he was
unsurpassed. Even though his eloquence
was fed by material gathered from every
quarter and by a “workshop” of
collaborators, it was Mirabeau who found
the striking images and expressions that
give to his speeches their brilliant
individuality. Generally bad at
extemporizing, Mirabeau could be moved
by anger or by injured pride to an
impassioned tone that would carry the
Assembly with him.
Jean-Jacques Chevallier
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Jean-Paul Marat
born ,
May 24, 1743, Boudry, near Neuchâtel,
Switzerland
died July 13, 1793, Paris, France
French politician, physician, and
journalist, a leader of the radical
Montagnard faction during the French
Revolution. He was assassinated in his
bath by Charlotte Corday, a young
Girondin conservative.
Early
scientific work
Marat, after obscure years in France and
other European countries, became a
well-known doctor in London in the 1770s
and published a number of books on
scientific and philosophical subjects.
His Essay on the Human Soul (1771) had
little success, but A Philosophical
Essay on Man (1773) was translated into
French and published in Amsterdam
(1775–76). His early political works
included The Chains of Slavery (1774),
an attack on despotism addressed to
British voters, in which he first
expounded the notion of an
“aristocratic,” or “court,” plot; it
would become the principal theme of a
number of his articles.
Returning to the Continent in 1777,
Marat was appointed physician to the
personal guards of the comte d’Artois
(later Charles X), youngest brother of
Louis XVI of France. At this time he
seemed mainly interested in making a
reputation for himself as a successful
scientist. He wrote articles and
experimented with fire, electricity, and
light. His paper on electricity was
honoured by the Royal Academy of Rouen
in 1783. At the same time, he built up a
practice among upper-middle-class and
aristocratic patients. In 1783 he
resigned from his medical post, probably
intending to concentrate on his
scientific career.
In 1780
he published his Plan de législation
criminelle (“Plan for Criminal
Legislation”), which showed that he had
already assimilated the ideas of such
critics of the ancien régime as
Montesquieu and Jean-Jacques Rousseau
and was corresponding with the American
Revolutionary leader Benjamin Franklin.
More serious, perhaps, was Marat’s
failure to be elected to the Academy of
Sciences. Some historians, notably the
American Louis Gottschalk, have
concluded that he came to suffer from a
“martyr complex,” imagining himself
persecuted by powerful enemies. Thinking
that his work refuted the ideas of Sir
Isaac Newton, he joined the opponents of
the established social and scientific
order.
In the
first weeks of 1789—the year that saw
the beginning of the French
Revolution—Marat published his pamphlet
Offrande à la patrie (“Offering to Our
Country”), in which he indicated that he
still believed that the monarchy was
capable of solving France’s problems. In
a supplement published a few months
later, though, he remarked that the king
was chiefly concerned with his own
financial problems and that he neglected
the needs of the people; at the same
time, Marat attacked those who proposed
the British system of government as a
model for France.
Attacks on the aristocracy
Beginning in September 1789, as editor
of the newspaper L’Ami du Peuple (“The
Friend of the People”), Marat became an
influential voice in favour of the most
radical and democratic measures,
particularly in October, when the royal
family was forcibly brought from
Versailles to Paris by a mob. He
particularly advocated preventive
measures against aristocrats, whom he
claimed were plotting to destroy the
Revolution. Early in 1790 he was forced
to flee to England after publishing
attacks on Jacques Necker, the king’s
finance minister; three months later he
was back, his fame now sufficient to
give him some protection against
reprisal. He did not relent but directed
his criticism against such moderate
Revolutionary leaders as the marquis de
Lafayette, the comte de Mirabeau, and
Jean-Sylvain Bailly, mayor of Paris (a
member of the Academy of Sciences); he
continued to warn against the émigrés,
royalist exiles who were organizing
counterrevolutionary activities and
urging the other European monarchs to
intervene in France and restore the full
power of Louis XVI.
In July
1790 he declared to his readers:
Five or
six hundred heads cut off would have
assured your repose, freedom, and
happiness. A false humanity has held
your arms and suspended your blows;
because of this millions of your
brothers will lose their lives.
The
National Assembly sentenced him to a
month in prison, but he went into hiding
and continued his campaign. When bloody
riots broke out at Nancy in eastern
France, he saw them as the first sign of
the counterrevolution.
Activities in the National Convention
In 1790 and 1791 Marat gradually came to
the view that the monarchy should be
abolished; after Louis XVI’s attempt to
flee in June 1791, he declared the king
"unworthy to remount the throne" and
violently denounced the National
Assembly for refusing to depose the
king. As a delegate to the National
Convention (beginning in September
1792), he advocated such reforms as a
graduated income tax, state-sponsored
vocational training for workers, and
shorter terms of military service.
Though he had often advocated the
execution of counterrevolutionaries,
Marat seems to have had no direct
connection with the wholesale massacres
of suspects that occurred in the same
month. He had opposed France’s
declaration of war against
antirevolutionary Austria in April, but,
once the war had begun and the country
was in danger of invasion, he advocated
a temporary dictatorship to deal with
the emergency.
Actively supported by the Parisian
people both in the chamber and in street
demonstrations, Marat quickly became one
of the most prominent members of the
Convention. Attacks by the conservative
Girondin faction early in 1793 made him
a symbol of the Montagnards, or radical
faction, although the Montagnard leaders
kept him out of any position of real
influence. In April the Girondins had
him arraigned before a Revolutionary
tribunal. His acquittal of the political
charges brought against him (April 24)
was the climax of his career and the
beginning of the fall of the Girondins
from power.
Jacques-Louis
David.
The
Death of Marat
Assassination
On July 13, Charlotte Corday, a
young Girondin supporter from Normandy,
was admitted to Marat’s room on the
pretext that she wished to claim his
protection, and she stabbed him to death
in his bath (he took frequent medicinal
baths to relieve a skin infection).
Marat’s dramatic murder at the very
moment of the Montagnards’ triumph over
their opponents caused him to be
considered a martyr to the people’s
cause. His name was given to 21 French
towns and later, as a gesture
symbolizing the continuity between the
French and Russian revolutions, to one
of the first battleships in the Soviet
navy.
The Death of Marat, by
French artist and member of the
Jacobin Club Jacques-Louis David,
was painted just days after the murder.
Called the “Pietà of the Revolution” (in
reference to Michelangelo’s sculpture)
and widely considered David’s
masterpiece, the painting is frequently
reproduced for its historical and
artistic value.
Jean Vidalenc
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Maximilien Robespierre
born
May 6, 1758, Arras, France
died July 28, 1794, Paris
radical Jacobin leader and one of the
principal figures in the French
Revolution. In the latter months of 1793
he came to dominate the Committee of
Public Safety, the principal organ of
the Revolutionary government during the
Reign of Terror, but in 1794 he was
overthrown and executed in the
Thermidorian Reaction.
Early
life
Robespierre was the son of a lawyer in
Arras. After his mother’s death, his
father left home, and Maximilien, along
with his brother and sisters, was raised
by his maternal grandparents. From 1765
he attended the college of the
Oratorians at Arras, and in 1769 he was
awarded a scholarship to the famous
college of Louis-le-Grand in Paris,
where he distinguished himself in
philosophy and law. He received a law
degree in 1781 and became a lawyer at
Arras, where he set up house with his
sister Charlotte. He soon made a name
for himself and was appointed a judge at
the Salle Épiscopale, a court with
jurisdiction over the provostship of the
diocese. His private practice provided
him with a comfortable income.
He was
admitted to the Arras Academy in 1783
and soon became its chancellor and later
its president. Contrary to the long-held
belief that Robespierre led an isolated
life, he often visited local notables
and mingled with the young people of the
district. He entered academic
competitions, and his Mémoire sur les
peines infamantes (“Report on Degrading
Punishments”) won first prize at the
Academy of Metz. By 1788 Robespierre was
already well known for his altruism. As
a lawyer representing poor people, he
had alarmed the privileged classes by
his protests in his Mémoire pour le
Sieur Dupond (Report for Lord Dupond)
against royal absolutism and arbitrary
justice.
When
the summoning of the Estates-General (a
national assembly that had not been
called since 1614) was announced, he
issued an appeal entitled À la nation
artésienne sur la nécessité de réformer
les Etats d’Artois (“To the People of
Artois on the Necessity of Reforming the
Estates of Artois”). In March 1789 the
citizens of Arras chose him as one of
their representatives, and the Third
Estate (the commons) of the bailiwick
elected him fifth of the eight deputies
from Artois. Thus he began his political
career at the age of 30.
Leadership of the Jacobins
Robespierre preserved his frugal way of
life, his careful dress and grooming,
and his simple manners both at
Versailles and later in Paris. He
quickly attracted attention in an
assembly that included some
distinguished names. He probably made
his maiden speech on May 18, 1789, and
he was to speak more than 500 times
during the life of the National
Assembly. He succeeded in making himself
heard despite the weak carrying power of
his voice and the opposition he aroused,
and his motions were usually applauded.
Proofs of his growing popularity were
the ferocious attacks made by the
royalist press on this “Demosthenes,”
“who believes everything he says,” this
“monkey of Mirabeau’s” (the comte de
Mirabeau, a politician who wanted to
create a constitutional assembly).
Robespierre was kept out of the
committees and from the presidency of
the National Assembly; only once, in
June 1790, was he elected secretary of
the National Assembly. In April he had
presided over the Jacobins, a political
club promoting the ideas of the French
Revolution. In October he was appointed
a judge of the Versailles tribunal.
Robespierre nevertheless decided to
devote himself fully to his work in the
National Assembly, where the
constitution was being drawn up.
Grounded in ancient history and the
works of the French philosophers of the
Enlightenment, he welcomed the
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of
the Citizen, which formed the preamble
of the French constitution of September
3, 1791, and he insisted that all laws
should conform to it. He fought for
universal suffrage, for unrestricted
admission to the national guard, to
public offices, and to the commissioned
ranks of the army, and for the right to
petition. He opposed the royal veto, the
abuses of ministerial power, and
religious and racial discrimination. He
defended actors, Jews, and black slaves
and supported the reunion of Avignon,
formerly a papal possession, with France
in September 1791. In May he had
successfully proposed that all new
deputies be elected to the next
legislature so that, as a new body, it
would better express the people’s will.
His
passionate fight for liberty won him
more enemies, who called him a dangerous
individual—and worse. After the flight
of Louis XVI (June 20–21, 1791), for
which Robespierre vainly demanded his
trial, the slanders against the
Revolutionary deputy became twice as
violent. He hastened the vote on the
constitution so as to attract “as many
of the democratic party as possible,”
inviting in his Adresse aux Français
(July 1791; Address to the French) the
patriots to join forces. Martial law was
proclaimed, and at the Champ-de-Mars the
national guard—under the command of the
marquis de Lafayette, a moderate who
wanted to save the monarchy—opened fire
on a group demanding the abdication of
the king. Robespierre, his life
threatened, went to live with the family
of the cabinetmaker Maurice Duplay. He
managed to keep the Jacobin Club alive
after all of its moderate members had
joined a rival club. When the National
Assembly dissolved itself, the people of
Paris organized a triumphal procession
for Robespierre.
Although he had excluded himself and his
colleagues from the new Legislative
Assembly, Robespierre continued to be
politically active, giving up the
lucrative post of public prosecutor of
Paris, to which he had been elected in
June 1791. Henceforth, he spoke only at
the Jacobin Club, where he was to be
heard about 100 times, until August
1792. There he opposed the European war
that Jacques-Pierre Brissot was
advocating as a means of spreading the
aims of the Revolution.
He
denounced the secret intrigues of the
court and of the royalists, their
collusion with Austria, the
unpreparedness of the army, and the
possible treason of aristocratic
officers whose dismissal he demanded in
February 1792. He also defended
patriotic soldiers, such as those of the
Châteauvieux regiment, who had been
imprisoned after their mutiny at Nancy.
When Brissot’s supporters stirred up
opinion against him, Robespierre founded
a newspaper, Le Défenseur de la
Constitution (“Defense of the
Constitution”), which strengthened his
hand. He attacked Lafayette, who had
become the commander of the French army
and whom he suspected of wanting to set
up a military dictatorship, but failed
to obtain his dismissal and arrest.
The
reverses suffered by the French army
after France had declared war on Austria
and Prussia had been foreseen by
Robespierre, and, when invasion
threatened, the people rallied to him.
Although he had defined the aims of
insurrection, he hesitated to advocate
it: “Fight the common enemy,” he told
the provincial volunteers, “only with
the sword of law.” When the insurrection
nevertheless broke out on August 10,
1792, Robespierre took no part in the
attack on the Tuileries Palace. But that
same afternoon his section (an
administrative subdivision of Paris),
Les Piques, nominated him to the
insurrectional Commune. As a member of
the electoral assembly of Paris, he
heard about the September Massacres of
imprisoned nobles and clergy by Parisian
crowds. He exonerated the mob, and on
September 5 the people of Paris elected
him to head the delegation to the
National Convention.
Work in the National Convention
The Girondins—who favoured political but
not social democracy and who controlled
the government and the civil
service—accused Robespierre of
dictatorship from the first sessions of
the National Convention. At the king’s
trial, which began in December 1792,
Robespierre spoke 11 times and called
for death. His speech on December 3
rallied the hesitant. His new journal,
Les Lettres à ses commettants (“Letters
to His Constituents”), kept the
provinces informed.
The
king’s execution did not, however,
resolve the struggle between the
Girondins and the Montagnards, the
deputies of the extreme left. At the
same time, the scarcity of food and the
rising prices created a revolutionary
mood. The treason of General Charles
Dumouriez, who went over to the
Austrians, precipitated the crisis. A
kind of “popular front” was formed
between the Parisian sansculottes, the
poor, ultraleft republicans, and the
Montagnards. On May 26, 1793,
Robespierre called on the people “to
rise in insurrection.” Five days later
he supported a decree of the National
Convention indicting the Girondin
leaders and Dumouriez’s accomplices. On
June 2 the decree was passed against 29
of them.
The Committee of Public Safety and the
Reign of Terror
After the fall of the Girondins, the
Montagnards were left to deal with the
country’s desperate position. Threatened
from within by the movement for
federalism and by the civil war in the
Vendée in the northwest and threatened
at the frontiers by the anti-French
coalition, the Revolution mobilized its
resources for victory. In his diary,
Robespierre noted that what was needed
was “une volonté une” (“one single
will”), and this dictatorial power was
to characterize the Revolutionary
government. Its essential organs had
been created, and he set himself to make
them work.
On July
27, 1793, Robespierre took his place on
the Committee of Public Safety, which
had first been set up in April. While
some of his colleagues were away on
missions and others were preoccupied
with special assignments, he strove to
prevent division among the
revolutionaries by relying on the
Jacobin societies and the vigilance
committees. Henceforward his actions
were to be inseparable from those of the
government as a whole. As president of
the Jacobin Club and then of the
National Convention, he denounced the
schemes of the Parisian radicals known
as the Enragés, who were using the food
shortage to stir up the Paris sections.
Robespierre answered the demonstrators
on September 5 by promising maximum
prices for all foodstuffs and a
Revolutionary militia for use in the
interior against counterrevolutionaries
and grain hoarders.
In
order to bring about a mass
conscription, economic dictatorship, and
total war, he asked to intensify the
Reign of Terror. But he objected to
pointless executions, protecting those
deputies who had protested the arrest of
the Girondins and of the king’s sister.
He was sickened by the massacres
condoned by the représentants en mission
(members of the National Convention sent
to break the opposition in the
provinces) and demanded their recall for
“dishonouring the Revolution.”
Robespierre devoted his report of 5
Nivôse, year II (December 25, 1793 [the
French republican calendar had been
introduced in September 1793, with its
beginning, or year I, set one year
prior]), to justifying the collective
dictatorship of the National Convention,
administrative centralization, and the
purging of local authorities. He
protested against the various factions
that threatened the government. The
Hébertists, the Cordeliers, and the
popular militants all called for
more-radical measures and encouraged
de-Christianization and the prosecution
of food hoarders. Their excesses
frightened the peasants, who could not
have been pleased by the decrees of 8
and 13 Ventôse, year II (February 26 and
March 3, 1794), which provided for the
distribution among the poor of the
property of suspects.
Reappearing at the Jacobin Club after a
month’s illness, Robespierre denounced
the radical revolutionist Jacques-René
Hébert and his adherents, who together
with some foreign agents were executed
in March. Those who wanted, like Georges
Danton, to halt the Reign of Terror and
the war attacked the policies of the
Committee of Public Safety with
increasing violence. Robespierre,
although still hesitant, led the
National Convention against these
so-called Indulgents. The Dantonist
leaders and the deputies who were
compromised in the liquidation of the
French East India Company were
guillotined on 16 Germinal (April 5).
A deist
in the style of Rousseau, Robespierre
disapproved of the anti-Christian
movement and the “masquerades” of the
cult of reason. In a report to the
National Convention in May, he affirmed
the existence of God and the immortality
of the soul and strove to rally the
revolutionaries around a civic religion
and the cult of the Supreme Being. That
he remained extremely popular is shown
by the public ovations he received after
Henri Admirat’s unsuccessful attempt on
his life on 3 Prairial (May 22). The
National Convention elected him
president, on 16 Prairial (June 4), by a
vote of 216 out of 220. In this capacity
he led the festival of the Supreme Being
(“Etre suprême") in the Tuileries
Gardens on 20 Prairial (June 8), which
was to provide his enemies with another
weapon against him.
Declining influence and authority
After the law of 22 Prairial (June 10)
reorganizing the Revolutionary Tribunal,
which had been formed in March 1793 to
condemn all enemies of the regime,
opposition to Robespierre grew; it was
led by those représentants en mission
whom he had threatened. His influence
was challenged in the Committee of
Public Safety itself, and the Committee
of General Security, which felt slighted
by the General Police Bureau directed by
Robespierre, Georges Couthon, and Louis
de Saint-Just, became even more hostile.
In the cafés he was accused of being a
moderate. And Joseph Cambon, the
minister of finance, detested him.
Unremitting work and frequent speeches
in the Legislative Assembly and at the
Jacobin Club (a total of some 450 since
the beginning of the session) had
undermined Robespierre’s health, and he
became irritable and distant. Embittered
by the slanders and by the accusations
of dictatorship being spread both by the
royalists and by his colleagues, the
Montagnards, he stayed away from the
National Convention and then, after 10
Messidor (June 28), from the Committee
of Public Safety, confining his
denunciations of counterrevolutionary
intrigues to the Jacobin Club. At the
same time, he began to lose the support
of the people, whose hardships continued
despite the recent French victories.
From his partial retirement Robespierre
followed the unleashing of the Great
Terror in the summer of 1794 and the
progress of opposition.
Attempting to regain his hold on public
opinion, Robespierre reappeared at the
Committee of Public Safety on 5
Thermidor (July 23) and then, on 8
Thermidor (July 26), at the National
Convention, to which he turned as his
judge. His last speech was at first
received with applause, then with
disquiet, and finally the parliamentary
majority turned against him. Despite his
successful reception that evening at the
Jacobin Club, Robespierre’s adversaries
succeeded the next day in preventing him
from speaking before the Convention,
which indicted him together with his
brother, Augustin, and three of his
associates. Robespierre was taken to the
Luxembourg prison, but the warden
refused to jail him.
Later
he went to the Hôtel de Ville (City
Hall), where he could, doubtless, still
have continued the struggle, for armed
contingents from some of the sections of
the city had been summoned by the Paris
Commune and were awaiting his orders.
But Robespierre refused to lead an
insurrection, and eventually his loyal
contingents began to disperse. Declared
an outlaw by the National Convention,
Robespierre severely wounded himself by
a pistol shot in the jaw at the Hôtel de
Ville, throwing his friends into
confusion. The soldiers of the National
Convention attacked the Hôtel de Ville
and easily seized Robespierre and his
followers. In the evening of 10
Thermidor (July 28), the first 22 of
those condemned, including Robespierre,
were guillotined before a cheering mob
on the Place de la Révolution (now the
Place de la Concorde). In all, 108
people died for adherence to
Robespierre’s cause.
The execution of Robespierre
Assessment
Robespierre’s enemies credited him with
dictatorial power, both in the Jacobin
Club and in the Committee of Public
Safety, a power that he did not have.
Counterrevolutionaries and the rich
condemned his egalitarian ideas, while
popular militants accused him of lacking
boldness. After his death, his memory
was relentlessly attacked, and a great
many of his papers were destroyed.
History portrayed him as either a
bloodthirsty creature or a timid
bourgeois.
But,
following the appearance of
working-class movements in the 19th
century, both in France and abroad,
homage was paid to this “persecuted
patriot,” and his most famous speeches
were reprinted. His social ideal
consisted in reducing extreme
inequalities of wealth, in increasing
the number of small property owners, and
in ensuring work and education for all.
He was a man of his times, of the
Enlightenment, a patriot, a man with a
sense of duty and of sacrifice, whose
influence remains considerable.
Marc Bouloiseau
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Louis de Saint-Just
born
August 25, 1767, Decize, France
died July 28, 1794, Paris
controversial ideologue of the French
Revolution, one of the most zealous
advocates of the Reign of Terror
(1793–94), who was arrested and
guillotined in the Thermidorian
Reaction.
Early years
Louis-Antoine-Léon de Saint-Just was
born in central France, the son of a
cavalry captain. His mother, the
daughter of a wealthy local notary and a
woman of egalitarian notions, wished to
reduce the nobility to the level of the
middle class. The family eventually
moved to Blérancourt, a rural town in
Picardy, the native province of Louis’s
father, who died there in 1777.
After
attending the college of the Oratorians
in nearby Soissons, he returned to
Blérancourt, a small town offering few
distractions. In 1785 Saint-Just became
attached to the daughter of one of the
town’s notaries. Her forced marriage to
the son of the other notary in July 1786
marked the beginning of a crisis for
Saint-Just. Hurt and angry, he fled to
Paris one night in September, taking
with him a few family valuables. Lodging
near the Palais Royal, then the centre
of a brilliant and dissolute society, he
soon ran out of money.
His
adventure came to a sudden end when his
mother, advised of the situation, had
him put into a reformatory. He remained
there from October 1786 to April 1787.
Sobered by his experience, he decided,
like so many young men of the middle
class, to establish himself and enter
upon a career. He became a clerk to the
public prosecutor of Soissons, studied
at Reims, and took his law degree in
April 1788.
France
at that time was shaken by the effects
of a poor harvest and a hard winter,
which coincided with pre-Revolutionary
tremors. In 1789 Saint-Just anonymously
published his first book, an epic poem,
Organt. It was ignored by the public. A
long satirical and licentious poem
strewn with political allusions, it was
reminiscent of Voltaire’s “La Pucelle
d’Orléans” (“The Maid of Orleans” ), but
it lacked the force and spirit needed
for public acclaim. Perhaps Saint-Just
was trying to set his own mind free
rather than to achieve fame. Organt
sometimes suggests the misadventures of
Saint-Just, with his violent enthusiasms
and resentments, but the eroticism is
heavy, and few of the themes of his
later work appear. Saint-Just’s friends
scarcely mentioned it, and his enemies
derided it. The book was seized by the
authorities in June 1789, and, although
it had been issued anonymously,
Saint-Just was prudent enough to hide at
a friend’s home in Paris.
In the
midst of the Revolutionary upheaval,
Saint-Just, eager to participate, found
himself ignored. Neither a Parisian nor
a popular orator nor a leader of men, he
was also not inclined to approve of
slaughter. He did not speak of the
storming of the Bastille, which he had
witnessed, until a year later, when his
attitude seemed reminiscent of that of
the British politician Edmund Burke, who
opposed the French Revolution.
Saint-Just returned to his hometown at
the end of July. The provinces, like
Paris, were in full revolt. Militia or
national guard units were spontaneously
forming everywhere, and Saint-Just
became commander of the second unit
organized in Blérancourt.
But
first he had to overcome the handicap of
his youth and the opposition of local
cliques. As a militia commander, he went
to Paris for the Fête de la Fédération
on July 14, 1790. He did not linger
there and later spoke of it in tones of
disillusionment.
Saint-Just realized that he could play
the role to which he aspired in the
Revolution only by election to a key
post as an administrator or, preferably,
as a deputy. He had, however, not
reached the legally required age of 25.
For most men the political clubs
provided the necessary stepping-stone
but not for Saint-Just, who was never a
club man, doubtless because he was too
overbearing. Instead, he became the
municipal corporation counsel of
Blérancourt, championed communal welfare
and free trade, and set himself up as a
spokesman for the voters. At the same
time, however, he resumed his friendship
with the woman whom he had been unable
to marry and, in defiance of gossip, met
her publicly.
He
succeeded in establishing his reputation
beyond Blérancourt in the district,
where he was considered an energetic and
able candidate for the next National
Assembly. To further his candidacy, he
wrote letters to politicians shamelessly
flattering their self-esteem and even
managed to receive the congratulations
of the National Assembly after publicly
burning a counterrevolutionary pamphlet.
Publication of Esprit de la révolution
Though he was driven by ambition, his
ambition was to serve the cause of the
poor and the peasants, and, if he turned
toward Maximilien de Robespierre, the
most pitiless of the revolutionaries, it
was from conviction. Saint-Just now
proposed directing the Revolution beyond
benevolent and patriotic activity toward
the making of a new society. In 1791 he
finally published Esprit de la
révolution et de la constitution de
France (The Spirit of the Revolution and
the Constitution of France). The
exposition was bold, vigorous, and
lofty. The brief, forceful, and
elliptical formulations characterized
the author. According to him, the
constitution framed by the Assembly was
acceptable as a first step, but the
French were not yet free. Nor were they
sovereign, but sovereignty of the people
was acceptable only if the people were
just and rational. “Law should yield
nothing to opinion and everything to
ethics,” Saint-Just maintained. He
confided to his publisher that the
boldness of his exposition attracted
readers and rightly added that his work,
because it was based on less extensive
reading than he might have wished, had
the originality of a solitary thinker.
At that
time Saint-Just believed himself to be
on the eve of a political career, and
his elimination from the Assembly as a
result of his age provoked a serious
crisis. “I am a slave of my
adolescence!” he cried revealingly.
He then
continued his reflections on the great
task of building a society based on
nature in which men would live together
rather than merely side by side. Taking
his region as a model, he observed the
village communal traditions. This
sojourn in the provinces directed his
thinking while straining his energies.
The National Convention
His election to the National Convention
in September 1792, shortly after he
became 25, finally gave him a task cut
to his measure. His first speech, in
November 1792, was devoted to arguing
that it would be just to put the deposed
king, Louis XVI, to death without a
trial. "Those who attach any importance
to the just punishment of a king will
never found a Republic," he insisted.
His brilliant oratory and his implacable
logic immediately established him as one
of the most militant of the Montagnards.
When
the Girondins were ousted from the
Convention on May 30, 1793, Saint-Just
was elected to the Committee of Public
Safety. In the fall of that year, he was
sent on mission to oversee the army in
the critical sector of Alsace. He proved
himself a man of decisive action,
relentless in demanding results from the
generals but sympathetic to the
complaints of ordinary soldiers. He
repressed local opponents of the
Revolution but did not indulge in the
mass executions ordered by some of the
other deputies on mission.
Upon
his return to the Convention, in year II
of the French republican calendar
(1793–94), Saint-Just was elected
president. He persuaded the Convention
to pass the radical Ventôse Decrees,
under which confiscated lands were
supposed to be distributed to needy
patriots. These were the most
revolutionary acts of the French
Revolution, because they expropriated
from one class for the benefit of
another. He also joined with Robespierre
in supporting the execution of the
Hébertists and Dantonists.
During
the same period, Saint-Just drafted
Fragments sur les institutions
républicaines, proposals far more
radical than the constitutions he had
helped to frame; this work laid the
theoretical groundwork for a communal
and egalitarian society. Sent on mission
to the army in Belgium, he contributed
to the victory of Fleurus on 8 Messidor,
year II (June 26, 1794), which gave
France the upper hand against the
Austrians. These months were the high
point of his career.
But his
rise to power had wrought a remarkable
change in Saint-Just’s public
personality. He became a cold, almost
inhuman fanatic, as bloodthirsty as even
his “god” Robespierre, a man of many
human weaknesses, was not. “The vessel
of the Revolution can arrive in port
only on a sea reddened with torrents of
blood,” Saint-Just once declared to the
Convention. He, rather than Robespierre,
showed himself to be the forerunner of
the totalitarian rulers of the 20th
century when he said on another
occasion,
We must
not only punish traitors, but all people
who are not enthusiastic. There are only
two kinds of citizens: the good and the
bad. The Republic owes to the good its
protection. To the bad it owes only
death.
Dreaded, almost totally isolated, and
detested, he was arrested on 9 Thermidor
(July 27). Like Robespierre, he did not
try to incite the Parisian sansculottes
to rise against the Convention in his
defense and was guillotined the next
day.
Assessment
Saint-Just has, by turns, been lauded as
the archangel of the Revolution or
abhorred as the terrorist par
excellence. Recent scholarly research
has made it possible to draw the line
between man and myth. Undoubtedly the
Revolution changed the unruly,
self-indulgent youth into a principled
and decisive, though ruthless, leader.
To friends he was also kind, helping
them in securing positions. Yet it is
doubtful whether he had friends in the
true sense, for those whom he helped
attached themselves to him without
becoming his equals.
Many of
his contemporaries acknowledged his
ability but considered him a monster of
pride and cruelty. Others, particularly
in later generations, have viewed him as
an incorruptible patriot who paid with
his life for his allegiance to
democracy. Some have seen in him the
prototype of the rebel. These
contradictions arise in part from
Saint-Just’s complex character and in
part from an imperfect knowledge of his
childhood and adolescence.
Women
admired his attractive appearance, and
he could be very engaging when he
wished. Nonetheless, he had to make
notes on the conduct required “to be
fortunate with women.” He measured out
doses of eagerness and indifference,
affection and restraint, so as to make a
love affair last. Yet he could be
genuinely affectionate and display real
family feeling. This other Saint-Just
appears in the famous portraits of Jean-Baptiste
Greuze, Jacques-Louis David, and other
painters.
Marcel Reinhard
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Jacques-René
Hébert
pseudonym Père (“Father”) Duchesne
born
November 15, 1757, Alençon, France
died March 24, 1794, Paris
political journalist during the French
Revolution who became the chief
spokesman for the Parisian sansculottes
(extreme radical revolutionaries). He
and his followers, who were called
Hébertists, pressured the Jacobin regime
of 1793–94 into instituting the most
radical measures of the Revolutionary
period.
Born
into a bourgeois family, Hébert settled
in Paris in 1780. For the next 10 years
he lived in poverty. He greeted the
outbreak of the Revolution (1789) with
enthusiasm; and in 1790 he launched his
career as a journalist by writing a
series of ribald, sacrilegious political
satires, adopting the pen name le père
Duchesne (a popular comic figure). His
newspaper Le Père Duchesne first
appeared in November 1790 and soon
became one of the most successful
newspapers of the French Revolution.
Although Hébert at first focused his
editorial wrath on the aristocracy and
clergy, he launched a virulent campaign
against King Louis XVI in the spring of
1792.
Hébert
became an influential member of the
Cordeliers Club, and as a representative
to the Revolutionary Commune he helped
plan the popular insurrection that
overthrew the monarchy on August 10,
1792. In the ensuing autumn the
Hébertists had Notre-Dame Cathedral
turned into a Temple of Reason and had
some 2,000 other churches converted to
the worship of Reason. In December
Hébert was elected assistant
procurator-general of the Commune, which
had become the governing body of Paris.
By that time Hébert had also joined the
Jacobin Club. The Jacobin deputies waged
a fierce campaign against the moderate
Girondin faction in the National
Convention, which convened in September
1792. In this struggle Hébert made his
newspaper a mouthpiece of the
sansculottes: he demanded the death
sentence for the king, the elimination
of the Girondins, and the establishment
of a Revolutionary government. Hébert
was a leader of the sansculotte crowds
that forced the Convention to expel the
leading Girondist deputies on June 2,
1793.
Hébert’s supporters organized the
massive demonstrations of Parisian
workers (September 4–5) that forced the
Convention to inaugurate a
state-controlled economy and institute
the Reign of Terror. He strongly
supported the anti-Christian campaign of
the autumn of 1793, which sought to
destroy Roman Catholic institutions in
France.
When
the Committee of Public Safety, the
Convention’s executive body, had
consolidated its power by early 1794,
however, it came to regard Hébert and
his extreme left-wing followers as
dangerous. The Jacobins’ right wing,
under Georges Danton, attacked the
extremism of the Hébertists, and the
Committee’s chief spokesman, Maximilien
Robespierre, joined battle with both
factions. While a food shortage was
stimulating popular discontent, Hébert
on March 4, 1794, persuaded the
Cordeliers Club to call for a popular
uprising. The sansculottes did not
respond, however, and on March 14 the
Committee of Public Safety had Hébert
arrested. He and 17 of his followers
were guillotined 10 days later. His
execution cost the government the
support of the sansculottes and
contributed to the collapse of the
Jacobin dictatorship in July 1794.
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François-Noël Babeuf
byname
Gracchus Babeuf
born
November 23, 1760, Saint-Quentin, France
died May 27, 1797, Vendôme
early
political journalist and agitator in
Revolutionary France whose tactical
strategies provided a model for
left-wing movements of the 19th century
and who was called Gracchus for the
resemblance of his proposed agrarian
reforms to those of the 2nd-century-bc
Roman statesman of that name.
The son of a tax farmer, Babeuf worked
in the 1780s as a feudal law expert,
maintaining records of dues owed and
paid by the peasants to the local
seigneuries. His increasing distaste for
the injustices of this system led him to
begin an active career as a political
journalist (1788–92). In 1789 he wrote a
pamphlet advocating tax reform and went
to Paris in hopes of becoming a
journalist. He returned to his native
Picardy, where he was arrested and
briefly imprisoned in 1790.
Following his release he founded a
journal, Le Correspondant picard. He
advocated a program of radical agrarian
reforms, including the abolition of
feudal dues and the redistribution of
land. During this period he served as an
administrator in the Montdidier district
of the Somme, but in February 1793 he
returned to Paris, where, during the
Reign of Terror, Maximilien
Robespierre’s radical-democratic regime,
he was again arrested and imprisoned.
After his release following
Robespierre’s fall in July 1794, he
founded a new journal, Le Journal de la
liberté de la presse (shortly thereafter
renamed Le Tribun du peuple), in which
he at first defended the Thermidorians
and attacked the Jacobins. When he began
to attack the Thermidorians, he was
arrested (February 12, 1795) and
imprisoned at Arras.
During
this brief imprisonment, Babeuf
continued to formulate his egalitarian
doctrines, advocating an equal
distribution of land and income, and
after his release he began a career as a
professional revolutionary. He quickly
rose to a position of leadership in the
Society of the Pantheon, which sought
political and economic equality in
defiance of the new French Constitution
of 1795. After the society was dissolved
in 1796, he founded a “secret directory
of public safety” to plan an
insurrection.
On May
8, 1796, a general meeting of Babouvist,
Jacobin, and military insurrectionary
committees took place in order to plan
the raising of a force of 17,000 men to
overthrow the Directory and to institute
a return to the Constitution of 1793,
which the committee members considered
the document most legitimately
sanctioned by popular deliberation. On
May 10, however, the conspirators were
arrested after an informant revealed
their plans to the government. The trial
took place between February 20 and May
26, 1797. All conspirators were
acquitted except Babeuf and his
companion, Augustin Darthé, both of whom
were guillotined.
Babeuf
was revered as a hero by 19th- and
20th-century revolutionaries because of
his advocacy of communism and his
conviction that a small elite could
overthrow an undesirable government by
conspiratorial means.
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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.
François-Auguste-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
born
Sept. 4, 1768, Saint-Malo, France
died July 4, 1848, Paris
French author and diplomat, one of his
country’s first Romantic writers. He was
the preeminent literary figure in France
in the early 19th century and had a
profound influence on the youth of his
day.
The
youngest child of an eccentric and
impecunious noble, Chateaubriand spent
his school holidays largely with his
sister at the family estate at Combourg,
with its half-derelict medieval castle
set in ancient oak woods and wild
heaths. After leaving school, he
eventually became a cavalry officer.
At the
beginning of the French Revolution, he
refused to join the Royalists and sailed
in April 1791 for the United States, a
stay memorable chiefly for his travels
with fur traders and for his firsthand
acquaintance with Indians in the region
around Niagara Falls. After learning of
Louis XVI’s flight in June 1791,
Chateaubriand felt that he owed
obligations to the monarchy and returned
to France. Penniless, he married an
heiress of 17 and took her to Paris,
which he found too expensive; he then
left her and joined the Royalist Army.
Wounded at the siege of Thionville, he
was discharged.
He went
to England in May 1793. Often destitute,
he supported himself by translating and
teaching. In London he began his Essai
sur les révolutions (1797; “Essay on
Revolutions”), an emotional survey of
world history in which he drew parallels
between ancient and modern revolutions
in the context of France’s own recent
upheavals.
In 1800
Chateaubriand returned to Paris, where
he worked as a freelance journalist and
continued to write his books. A fragment
of an unfinished epic appeared as Atala
(1801); immediately successful, it
combined the simplicity of a classical
idyll with the more troubled beauties of
Romanticism. Set in primitive American
surroundings, the novel tells the story
of a Christian girl who has taken a vow
to remain a virgin but who falls in love
with a Natchez Indian. Torn between love
and religion, she poisons herself to
keep from breaking her vow. The lush
Louisiana setting and passionate tale
are captured in a rich, harmonious prose
style that yields many beautiful
descriptive passages.
Shortly
after the death of his mother in 1798,
Chateaubriand reconciled his conflict
between religion and rationalism and
returned to traditional Christianity.
His apologetic treatise extolling
Christianity, Le Génie du christianisme
(1802; “The Genius of Christianity”),
won favour both with the Royalists and
with Napoleon Bonaparte, who was just
then concluding a concordat with the
papacy and restoring Roman Catholicism
as the state religion in France. In this
work, Chateaubriand tried to
rehabilitate Christianity from the
attacks made on it during the
Enlightenment by stressing its capacity
to nurture and stimulate European
culture, architecture, art, and
literature over the centuries.
Chateaubriand’s theology was weak and
his apologetics illogical, but his
assertion of Christianity’s moral
superiority on the basis of its poetic
and artistic appeal proved an
inexhaustible sourcebook for Romantic
writers. The renewed appreciation of
Gothic architecture sparked by the book
is the most prominent example of this.
Napoleon rewarded Chateaubriand for his
treatise by appointing him first
secretary to the embassy at Rome in
1803. But in 1804, when Napoleon stunned
France with the unfair trial and hasty
execution of the Duke d’Enghien on a
flimsy pretext of conspiracy,
Chateaubriand resigned his post in
protest. The most important of the books
he published during the following years
is the novel René (first published
separately in 1805), which tells the
story of a sister who enters a convent
rather than surrender to her passion for
her brother. In this thinly veiled
autobiographical work Chateaubriand
began the Romantic vogue for
world-weary, melancholy heroes suffering
from vague, unsatisfied yearnings in
what came to be known as the mal du
siècle (“the malady of the age”). On the
basis of Les Martyrs (1809), a prose
epic about early Christian martyrs in
Rome, and Itinéraire de Paris à
Jérusalem (1811), an account of his
recent travels throughout the
Mediterranean, Chateaubriand was elected
to the French Academy in 1811.
With
the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy
in 1814, Chateaubriand’s hopes of a
political career revived. In 1815 he was
made a viscount and a member of the
House of Peers. His extravagant
lifestyle eventually caused him
financial difficulties, however, and he
found his only pleasure in his liaison
with Mme Récamier, who illumined the
rest of his life. He began Mémoires
d’outre-tombe (1849–50), his memoir from
“beyond the tomb,” written for
posthumous publication and perhaps his
most lasting monument. This memoir,
which Chateaubriand began writing as
early as 1810, is as much a history of
his thoughts and sensations as it is a
conventional narrative of his life from
childhood into old age. The vivid
picture it draws of contemporary French
history, of the spirit of the Romantic
epoch, and of Chateaubriand’s own
travels is complemented by many
self-revealing passages in which the
author recounts his unstinting
appreciation of women, his sensitivity
to nature, and his lifelong tendency
toward melancholy. Chateaubriand’s
memoirs have proved to be his most
enduring work.
After
six months as ambassador to Berlin in
1821, Chateaubriand became ambassador to
London in 1822. He represented France at
the Congress of Verona in 1822 and
served as minister of foreign affairs
under the ultra-Royalist premier Joseph,
Count de Villèle, until 1824. In this
capacity he brought France into the war
with Spain in 1823 to restore that
country’s Bourbon king Ferdinand VII.
The campaign was a success, but its high
cost diminished the prestige
Chateaubriand won by it. He passed the
rest of his life privately, except for a
year as ambassador to Rome (1828–29).
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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.
Mme de Staël
"Corinne,
Or Italy"
in full
Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, Baronne
(baroness) de Staël-Holstein, byname
Madame de Staël
born
April 22, 1766, Paris, Fr.
died July 14, 1817, Paris
French-Swiss woman of letters, political
propagandist, and conversationalist, who
epitomized the European culture of her
time, bridging the history of ideas from
Neoclassicism to Romanticism. She also
gained fame by maintaining a salon for
leading intellectuals. Her writings
include novels, plays, moral and
political essays, literary criticism,
history, autobiographical memoirs, and
even a number of poems. Her most
important literary contribution was as a
theorist of Romanticism.
Early life and family.
She was born Anne-Louise-Germaine
Necker, the daughter of Swiss parents,
in Paris. Her father was Jacques Necker,
the Genevan banker who became finance
minister to King Louis XVI; her mother,
Suzanne Curchod, the daughter of a
French-Swiss pastor, assisted her
husband’s career by establishing a
brilliant literary and political salon
in Paris.
The
young Germaine Necker early gained a
reputation for lively wit, if not for
beauty. While still a child, she was to
be seen in her mother’s salon, listening
to, and even taking part in, the
conversation with that lively
intellectual curiosity that was to
remain her most attractive quality. When
she was 16, her marriage began to be
considered. William Pitt the Younger was
regarded as a possible husband, but she
disliked the idea of living in England.
She was married in 1786 to the Swedish
ambassador in Paris, Baron Erik de Staël-Holstein.
It was a marriage of convenience and
ended in 1797 in formal separation.
There were, however, three children:
Auguste (b. 1790), who edited his
mother’s complete works; Albert (b.
1792); and Albertine (b. 1796), who was
allegedly fathered by Benjamin Constant.
Political views.
Before she was 21, Germaine de Staël
had written a romantic drama, Sophie, ou
les sentiments secrets (1786), and a
tragedy inspired by Nicholas Rowe, Jane
Gray (1790). But it was her Lettres sur
les ouvrages et le caractère de J.-J.
Rousseau (1788; Letters on the Works and
the Character of J.-J. Rousseau) that
made her known. There is in her thought
an unusual and irreconcilable mixture of
Rousseau’s enthusiasm and Montesquieu’s
rationalism. Under the influence of her
father, an admirer of Montesquieu, she
adopted political views based on the
English parliamentary monarchy.
Favouring the French Revolution, she
acquired a reputation for Jacobinism.
Under the Convention, the elected body
that abolished the monarchy, the
moderate Girondin faction corresponded
best to her ideas.
Protected by her husband’s diplomatic
status, she was in no danger in Paris
until 1793, when she retreated to Coppet,
Switz., the family residence near
Geneva. It was here that she gained fame
by establishing a meeting place for some
of the leading intellectuals of western
Europe. Since 1789 she had been the
mistress of Louis de Narbonne, one of
Louis XVI’s last ministers. He took
refuge in England in 1792, where she
joined him in 1793. She stayed at
Juniper Hall, near Mickleham in Surrey,
a mansion that had been rented since
1792 by French émigrés. There she met
Fanny Burney (later Mme d’Arblay), but
their friendship was cut short because
Mme de Staël’s politics and morals were
considered undesirable by good society
in England.
She
returned to France, via Coppet, at the
end of the Terror in 1794. A brilliant
period of her career then began. Her
salon flourished, and she published
several political and literary essays,
notably De l’influence des passions sur
le bonheur des individus et des nations
(1796; A Treatise on the Influence of
the Passions upon the Happiness of
Individuals and of Nations), which
became one of the important documents of
European Romanticism. She began to study
the new ideas that were being developed
particularly in Germany. She read the
elderly Swiss critic Karl Viktor von
Bonstetten; the German philologist
Wilhelm von Humboldt; and, above all,
the brothers August Wilhelm and
Friedrich von Schlegel, who were among
the most influential German
Romanticists.
But it
was her new lover, Benjamin Constant,
the author and politician, who
influenced her most directly in favour
of German culture. Her fluctuating
liaison with Constant started in 1794
and lasted 14 years, although after 1806
her affections found little response.
Literary theories.
At about the beginning of 1800 the
literary and political character of Mme
de Staël’s thought became defined. Her
literary importance emerged in De la
littérature considérée dans ses rapports
avec les institutions sociales (1800; A
Treatise of Ancient and Modern
Literature and The Influence of
Literature upon Society). This complex
work, though not perfect, is rich in new
ideas and new perspectives—new, at least
to France. The fundamental theory, which
was to be restated and developed in the
positivism of Hippolyte Taine, is that a
work must express the moral and
historical reality, the zeitgeist, of
the nation in which it is conceived. She
also maintained that the Nordic and
classical ideals were basically opposed
and supported the Nordic, although her
personal taste remained strongly
classical. Her two novels, Delphine
(1802) and Corinne (1807), to some
extent illustrate her literary theories,
the former being strongly sociological
in outlook, while the latter shows the
clash between Nordic and southern
mentalities.
Banishment from Paris.
She was also an important political
figure and was regarded by contemporary
Europe as the personal enemy of
Napoleon. With Constant and his friends
she formed the nucleus of a liberal
resistance that so embarrassed Napoleon
that in 1803 he had her banished to a
distance of 40 miles (64 km) from Paris.
Thenceforward Coppet was her
headquarters, and in 1804 she began what
she called, in a work published
posthumously in 1821, her Dix Années
d’exil (Ten Years’ Exile). From December
1803 to April 1804 she made a journey
through Germany, culminating in a visit
to Weimar, already established as the
shrine of J.W. von Goethe and Friedrich
von Schiller. In Berlin she met August
Wilhelm von Schlegel, who was to become,
after 1804, her frequent companion and
counselor. Her guide in Germany,
however, was a young Englishman, Henry
Crabb Robinson, who was studying at
Jena. The journey was interrupted in
1804 by news of the death of her father,
whom she had always greatly admired. His
death affected her deeply, but in 1805
she set out for Italy, accompanied by
Schlegel and Simonde de Sismondi, the
Genevan economist who was her guide on
the journey. Returning in June 1805, she
spent the next seven years of her exile
from Paris for the most part at Coppet.
While
Corinne can be considered the result of
her Italian journey, the fruits of her
visit to Germany are contained in her
most important work, De l’Allemagne
(1810; Germany). This is a serious study
of German manners, literature and art,
philosophy and morals, and religion in
which she made known to her
contemporaries the Germany of the Sturm
und Drang movement (1770–1780). Its only
fault is the distorted picture it gives,
ignoring, for example, the violently
nationalistic aspect of German
Romanticism. Napoleon took it for an
anti-French work, and the French edition
of 1810 (10,000 copies) was seized and
destroyed. It was finally published in
England in 1813.
Meanwhile Mme de Staël, persecuted by
the police, fled from Napoleon’s Europe.
Having married, in 1811, a young Swiss
officer, “John” Rocca, in May 1812 she
went to Austria and, after visiting
Russia, Finland, and Sweden, arrived, in
June 1813, in England. She was received
with enthusiasm, although reproached by
such liberals as Lord Byron for being
more anti-Napoleonic than liberal and by
the Tories for being too liberal. Her
guide in England was Sir James
Mackintosh, the Scottish publicist. She
collected documents for, but never
wrote, a De l’Angleterre: (the material
for it can be found in the
Considérations sur la Révolution
française [1818; Considerations on the
Principal Events of the French
Revolution], which represents a return
to Necker’s ideas and holds up the
English political system as a model for
France).
On the
Bourbon Restoration in 1814, Mme de
Staël returned to Paris but was deeply
disillusioned: the fall of Napoleon had
been followed by foreign occupation and
had in no way reestablished liberty in
France. During the Hundred Days she
escaped to Coppet and in September 1815
set out again for Italy. In 1816 she
returned to spend the summer at Coppet,
where she was joined by Byron, in flight
from England after his unhappy
matrimonial experience. A strong
friendship developed between the two
writers.
Mme de
Staël’s health was declining. After
Byron’s departure she went to Paris for
the winter. Though poorly received by
the returned émigrés and suspected by
the government, she held her salon
throughout the winter and part of the
spring, but after April 1817 she was an
invalid. She died in Paris in July of
that year.
Assessment
Germaine de Staël’s purely literary
importance is far exceeded by her
importance in the history of ideas. Her
novels and plays are now largely
forgotten, but the value of her critical
and historical work is undeniable.
Though careless of detail, she had a
clear vision of wider issues and of the
achievements of civilization. Her
involvement in, and understanding of,
the events and tendencies of her time
gave her an unusual position: it may be
said that she helped the dawning 19th
century to take stock of itself.
Robert Escarpit
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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.
Colin Smethurst
Jennifer Birkett
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 de 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
Charles-Augustin de Sainte-Beuve
born
Dec. 23, 1804, Boulogne, France
died Oct. 13, 1869, Paris
French literary historian and critic,
noted for applying historical frames of
reference to contemporary writing. His
studies of French literature from the
Renaissance to the 19th century made him
one of the most respected and most
powerful literary critics in
19th-century France.
Early
life and Romantic period.
Sainte-Beuve was the posthumous only
child of a tax collector. After a
sheltered childhood, he completed his
classical education in Paris and began
to study medicine, which he abandoned
after a year. A talented but in no way
brilliant youth, he continued his
general education at his own pace,
attending the University of Paris and
extension institutions, and in 1825 was
drawn into journalism by his former
teacher, Paul Dubois, editor of a new
liberal periodical, Le Globe. In its
pages he wrote his first essays on the
poetry of Victor Hugo and soon became a
member of his literary circle of
Romantic writers and poets. In his first
book, Tableau historique et critique de
la poésie française et du théâtre
français au XVIe siècle (1828;
“Historical and Critical Description of
French Poetry and Theatre in the
Sixteenth Century”), he discovered,
perhaps naturally, a Renaissance
ancestry for Hugo and others of his new
friends. A brief visit to England in
1828 strengthened his taste for the
poetry of William Wordsworth and Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, both of whom were then
little known in continental Europe. His
visit to England may also account for
the appearance of elements of the style
of William Cowper and George Crabbe in
volumes of his own poetry, Vie, poésies
et pensées de Joseph Delorme (1829; “The
Life, Poetry, and Thought of Joseph
Delorme”) and Les Consolations (1830),
which on their publication attracted
some attention—not least because of
their deliberate flatness and apparent
uncouthness, much in contrast to the
grander manner of Hugo and the poet
Alfred de Vigny.
He had
meanwhile developed a taste for social
speculation and a concern for problems
of religious experience. His social
concerns first crystallized in a passing
attachment to the group of reformers
assembled around the doctrines of Count
Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon. According
to Saint-Simon’s disciples, the feudal
and military systems were to be replaced
by one controlled by industrial
managers, and scientists rather than the
church were to become the spiritual
directors of society. When this group in
1830 took over management of Le Globe,
Sainte-Beuve was entrusted with drafting
two manifestos, or “professions of
faith”; and, although he was soon to be
repelled by the sentimental excesses and
intemperance of its leaders, he retained
for 30 years a lingering sympathy for
its vision of a technocratic society
founded on the brotherhood of man.
Almost simultaneously, Sainte-Beuve came
under the spell of a religious reformer
and polemist, Félicité Robert de
Lamennais, to whom for a time he looked
for religious guidance. Lamennais was
then the spiritual adviser of the wife
of Victor Hugo, Adèle, with whom
Sainte-Beuve in 1831 struck up a lasting
but seemingly platonic relationship of
great intensity. Many of the details of
this shadowy affair are more or less
accurately related in the critic’s
privately printed volume of lyrics,
Livre d’amour (1904), which was,
however, not published in the lifetime
of either of them.
Early critical and historical writings.
Besides Le Globe, Sainte-Beuve from 1831
contributed articles to another new
periodical, the Revue des deux Mondes.
The success of his articles in the two
reviews prompted him to collect them as
Critiques et portraits littéraires, 5
vol. (1832–39). In these “portraits” of
contemporaries, he developed a kind of
critique, novel and much applauded at
the time, of studying a well-known
living writer in the round and entering
into considerable biographical research
to understand the mental attitudes of
his subject.
In the
early 1830s Sainte-Beuve was hampered by
his dislike for the newly established
regime of King Louis-Philippe, which had
aroused his anger mainly by its brutal
handling of the riots of 1832. He
accordingly refused several educational
posts that would have relieved his
poverty, fearing that they might
compromise his freedom of judgment.
Sainte-Beuve’s friendship with Victor
Hugo, which had already begun to cool in
1830, was almost extinguished by the
anonymous publication of Sainte-Beuve’s
autobiographical novel Volupté in 1834.
In this book the hero Amaury’s hopeless
love for the saintly and unapproachable
Madame de Couaën reflects its author’s
passion for Adèle Hugo. Volupté is an
intensely introspective and troubling
study of Amaury’s frustration, guilt,
religious striving, and final
renunciation of the flesh and the devil.
While
continuing to produce intellectual
“portraits” of his literary
contemporaries, as further collected in
Portraits contemporains (1846),
Sainte-Beuve became a member of the
circle presided over by Mme Récamier,
the famous hostess, and the writer and
politician François-René de
Chateaubriand. Sainte-Beuve greeted the
appearance of Chateaubriand’s memoirs
with enthusiasm, though a decade and a
half later he was to write an extensive
and far more detached study of that
writer and his literary circle, entitled
Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire
sous l’empire (1861).
A
softening of Sainte-Beuve’s attitude
toward Louis-Philippe’s regime coincided
in 1836 with an invitation from François
Guizot, then minister of education, to
accept a one-year appointment as
secretary of a government commission
studying the nation’s literary heritage.
Guizot’s suggestion at that time that
Sainte-Beuve demonstrate his eminence as
a scholar by producing a major work led
to Port-Royal, his single most famous
piece of writing. In 1837 Sainte-Beuve
accepted a year’s visiting professorship
at the University of Lausanne to lecture
on Port-Royal, the convent famous in the
17th century for advancing a highly
controversial view of the doctrine of
grace, loosely called Jansenism. For his
lectures he produced Histoire de
Port-Royal, 3 vol. (1840–48), which he
revised over the next two decades. This
monumental assemblage of scholarship,
insights, and historical acumen—unique
of its kind—covers the religious and
literary history of France over half of
the 17th century, as glimpsed through
the internal records of Jansenism.
On
completing his year in Lausanne,
Sainte-Beuve returned to Paris, and in
1840 he was appointed to a post in the
French Institute’s Mazarine Library, a
position he held until 1848. He
continued regular essay writing, and the
first two volumes of Port-Royal had also
been published when he was elected to
the French Academy in 1844. By then he
had already broken his earlier close
links with the Romantics and was highly
critical of what now appeared to him as
the undisciplined excesses of that
movement.
After
the overthrow in 1848 of Louis-Philippe,
Sainte-Beuve was not impressed by what
he saw of revolutionary democracy.
Unfairly accused in the republican press
of accepting secret government funds for
the repair of a chimney in his
apartment, he resigned his library
appointment in a fit of pique and
settled for a year at the University of
Liège (Belgium) as visiting professor.
There he wrote his definitive—but
unfinished—study of Chateaubriand and
the birth of literary Romanticism and
carried out research on medieval French
literature.
The Causeries du lundi period.
After Sainte-Beuve returned to Paris in
1849, he was asked by Louis Véron,
editor of the newspaper Le
Constitutionnel, to write a weekly
article or essay on current literary
topics, to appear every Monday. This was
the start of the famous collection of
studies that Sainte-Beuve named
Causeries du lundi (“Monday Chats”),
after their day of publication. These
critical and biographical essays
appeared in Le Constitutionnel from
October 1849 to November 1852 and from
September 1861 to January 1867; in Le
Moniteur from December 1852 to August
1861 and from September 1867 to November
1868; and in Le Temps in 1869. Their
success was such that Sainte-Beuve began
collecting them as Causeries du lundi, 3
vol. (1851); the definitive 3rd edition
formed 15 volumes (1857–62). A new
series, consisting of the articles of
1861–69, was published in 13 volumes as
Nouveaux lundis (1863–70). In his
articles Sainte-Beuve wrote about both
past and present French authors, with
some attention paid to those of other
European nations as well.
Sainte-Beuve welcomed the rise of
Napoleon III’s more dictatorial and
orderly regime in the early 1850s. In
due course, his sympathy was rewarded by
appointment to the chair of Latin at the
Collège de France, a well-paid but
largely nominal post. His first lectures
there were interrupted by the
demonstrations of radical students
critical of his support of Napoleon III,
however, and he resigned his duties and
salary, retaining only the title. The
intended lectures were published as
Étude sur Virgile (1857), a full-length
study of Virgil. In 1858 Sainte-Beuve
received a temporary teaching
appointment in literature at the École
Normale Supérieure, where he drew upon
his 1848 researches to deliver a course
on medieval French literature; but
otherwise his whole later career was
based on freelance essay writing.
Under
the Second Empire, many of
Sainte-Beuve’s earlier acquaintances,
now dead or in retirement, were replaced
by other writers: Gustave Flaubert,
Ernest Renan, the Goncourt brothers,
Prosper Mérimée, Ivan Turgenev, Matthew
Arnold, and a large number of scholars,
historians, and academicians. He
frequented the salon of Napoleon III’s
cousin, the princess Mathilde, somewhat
of a literary centre itself, though less
formal in style than had been the salon
of Mme Récamier until 1848.
Nevertheless, the crushing task of
researching, writing, correcting, and
proofreading a 3,000-word essay for
publication every Monday largely
prevented Sainte-Beuve from exploring in
the same leisurely way as in his youth
the many new trends being developed by
young writers. There is no doubt that
his literary tastes, though
unprecedentedly wide, ceased to develop
much after about 1850.
In 1865
he was made a senator by imperial
decree. His addresses to the Senate were
unpopular with his colleagues because of
his liberal views, but two were
important: that in support of public
libraries and liberty of thought (1867)
and that on liberty of education (1868).
In December 1868 Le Moniteur, which had
been independent, was reorganized and
became a government organ. An article
Sainte-Beuve wished to publish in the
paper caused difficulties, and for the
first time he was asked to correct and
cut a sentence. He withdrew the article
and offered it to Le Temps, for which he
remained a contributor until his death
in 1869 after unsuccessful bladder stone
operations.
Assessment.
It was with Sainte-Beuve that French
literary criticism first became fully
independent and freed itself from
personal prejudice and partisan
passions. That he was able to
revolutionize critical methods was
partly a result of the rise of the
newspaper and the critical review, which
gave prestige and wide circulation to
criticism and guaranteed its
independence.
Sainte-Beuve’s critical works, published
over a period of about 45 years,
constitute a unique collection of
literary portraits. He ranged widely,
covering every genre of literature and
reinstating writers whose works had been
forgotten, neglected, or misunderstood.
To use his own phrase, Sainte-Beuve was
primarily a creator of likenesses of
great men (imagier des grands hommes).
He wished, as he said, to understand
fully those about whom he wrote, to live
alongside them, and to allow them to
explain themselves to present-day
readers. To this end, he conceived the
practice of providing in his essays
extensive data on an author’s character,
his family background, physical
appearance, education, religion, love
affairs and friendships, and so on.
Though now a standard method of
historical criticism, this practice led
to allegations that Sainte-Beuve was
providing merely biographical
explanations of literary phenomena.
The
field of criticism has widened since
Sainte-Beuve’s day, and as a result he
has come to be reproached for his
omissions and injustices toward some of
his great French contemporaries. As one
who prepared the way for modern poetry,
he is disappointing when writing on
Charles Baudelaire, and he was unfair to
Gustave Flaubert, Stendhal, and
especially to Honoré de Balzac. But from
his earliest review articles on Hugo,
Sainte-Beuve was never afraid to
introduce specific reservations into his
most enthusiastic eulogies, and it was
this uncompromising independence that
earned him the reputation of being an
unreliable, or even perfidious, critic
of friends.
Sainte-Beuve was able to achieve his
enormous output, which constitutes an
encyclopaedia of thought, only by
relentless labour and an unequaled
tenacity of purpose, linked with
unusually subtle intellectual power. A
portion of his scholarly research has,
with time, become old-fashioned, but
within limits the precision of his
documentation is almost always
impeccable, even over details on which
it has been challenged by literary
opponents. This precision was due to a
lifetime’s habit of extreme care in
documentation and to a fanatical respect
for historical accuracy.
To
older critical traditions whose judgment
rested on rigid standards of taste,
Sainte-Beuve added a much more flexible
and historical approach, entailing the
sympathetic reconstruction of values not
necessarily shared by himself and his
readers. Although he was not without
limitations as a critic of literature,
his success in his vocation was probably
unequaled in his time. A fitting summary
of his life and work was given by Barbey
d’Aurevilly in his words “Sainte-Beuve,
abeille des livres . . . faisant miel de
tout pour le compte de la littérature”
(“Sainte-Beuve, like a bee among books .
. . distilling honey from everything of
literary value”).
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Marceline Desbordes-Valmore
born
June 30, 1786, Douai, Fr.
died July 23, 1859, Paris
French poet and woman of letters of the
Romantic period.
Her
family was ruined by the French
Revolution and moved to the French
colony of Guadeloupe. She returned to
Paris upon her mother’s death,
supporting herself by acting at the
Opéra-Comique and the Odéon. She married
a second-rate actor, Prosper Lanchantin,
called Valmore.
When
illness threatened her stage voice,
Desbordes-Valmore turned to writing. Her
poetry—Pauvres Fleurs (1839; “Poor
Flowers”), Les Pleurs (1833; “The
Tears”), and Bouquets et prières (1843;
“Bouquets and Prayers”)—is poignant and
elegiac and concerns religion, sadness,
death, and the author’s love for her
daughters and her native Douai. Her
prose work L’Atelier d’un peintre (1833;
“A Painter’s Studio”) is
autobiographical. The poet Charles
Baudelaire esteemed her writing, and
Paul Verlaine admitted his debt to her,
giving her a place in his revised
edition of Les Poètes maudits (1888;
“The Damned [or Maligned] Poets”).
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Petrus Borel
born
June 29, 1809, Lyon, Fr.
died July 1859, Mostaganem, Alg.
French poet, novelist, and critic active
in the Romantic movement.
The
12th of an ironmonger’s 14 children,
Borel was trained as an architect but
turned to literature and became one of
the most eccentric young writers of the
1830s, assuming the name of
“Lycanthrope” (“Wolf-Man”). He became a
leader of the group of daring writers
known as Les Bousingos, among whom were
Gérard de Nerval and Théophile Gautier.
With the revival of interest in
classical style, he fell into poverty.
However, he was able to obtain a post in
the colonization of Algeria. Because of
his proud and touchy nature, he was
dismissed in 1855 and spent the rest of
his life, ragged and unkempt, in a
Gothic mansion in Mostaganem. His works,
redolent of horror and melodrama,
include Rhapsodies (1832), the short
stories in Champavert, contes immoraux
(1833; “Champavert, Immoral Stories”),
and Madame Putiphar (1839), with a verse
prologue that foreshadows the poet
Charles Baudelaire’s spiritual style.
Borel’s intensity, as an individual and
a writer, would later inspire the
Surrealists.
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Henri de Saint-Simon
in full
Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, Comte (count)
de Saint-Simon
born
Oct. 17, 1760, Paris, Fr.
died May 19, 1825, Paris
French social theorist and one of the
chief founders of Christian socialism.
In his major work, Nouveau Christianisme
(1825), he proclaimed a brotherhood of
man that must accompany the scientific
organization of industry and society.
Life.
Saint-Simon was born of an impoverished
aristocratic family. His grandfather’s
cousin had been the Duke de Saint-Simon,
famous for his memoirs of the court of
Louis XIV. Henri was fond of claiming
descent from Charlemagne. After an
irregular education by private tutors,
he entered military service at 17. He
was in the regiments sent by France to
aid the American colonies in their war
of independence against England and
served as a captain of artillery at
Yorktown in 1781.
During
the French Revolution he remained in
France, where he bought up newly
nationalized land with funds advanced by
a friend. He was imprisoned in the
Palais de Luxembourg during the Reign of
Terror and emerged to find himself
enormously rich because of the
depreciation of the Revolutionary
currency. He proceeded to live a life of
splendour and license, entertaining
prominent people from all walks of life
at his glittering salons. Within several
years he had brought himself close to
bankruptcy. He turned to the study of
science, attending courses at the École
Polytechnique and entertaining
distinguished scientists.
In his
first published work, Lettres d’un
habitant de Genève à ses contemporains
(1803; “Letters of an Inhabitant of
Geneva to His Contemporaries”),
Saint-Simon proposed that scientists
take the place of priests in the social
order. He argued that the property
owners who held political power could
hope to maintain themselves against the
propertyless only by subsidizing the
advance of knowledge.
By 1808
Saint-Simon was impoverished, and the
last 17 years of his life were lived
mainly on the generosity of friends.
Among his many later publications were
De la réorganisation de la société
européenne (1814; “On the Reorganization
of European Society”) and L’industrie
(1816–18, in collaboration with Auguste
Comte; “Industry”). In 1823, in a fit of
despondency, Saint-Simon attempted to
kill himself with a pistol but succeeded
only in putting out one eye.
Throughout his life Saint-Simon devoted
himself to a long series of projects and
publications through which he sought to
win support for his social ideas. As a
thinker, Saint-Simon was deficient in
system, clearness, and coherence, but
his influence on modern thought,
especially in the social sciences, is
undeniable. Apart from the details of
his socialist teachings, his main ideas
are simple and represented a reaction
against the bloodletting of the French
Revolution and the militarism of
Napoleon. Saint-Simon correctly foresaw
the industrialization of the world, and
he believed that science and technology
would solve most of humanity’s problems.
Accordingly, in opposition to feudalism
and militarism, he advocated an
arrangement whereby businessmen and
other industrial leaders would control
society. The spiritual direction of
society would be in the hands of
scientists and engineers, who would thus
take the place occupied by the Roman
Catholic church in the European Middle
Ages. What Saint-Simon desired, in other
words, was an industrialized state
directed by modern science, and one in
which society would be organized for
productive labour by the most capable
men. The aim of society would be to
produce things useful to life.
Saint-Simon also proposed that the
states of Europe form an association to
suppress war. These ideas had a profound
influence on the philosopher Auguste
Comte, who worked with Saint-Simon until
the two men quarreled.
Although the contrast between the
labouring and the propertied classes in
society is not emphasized by
Saint-Simon, the cause of the poor is
discussed, and in his best-known work,
Nouveau Christianisme (1825; “The New
Christianity”), it takes the form of a
religion. It was this development of
Saint-Simon’s teaching that occasioned
his final rupture with Comte. Before the
publication of Nouveau Christianisme,
Saint-Simon had not concerned himself
with theology, but in this work,
beginning with a belief in God, he tries
to resolve Christianity into its
essential elements, and he finally
propounds this precept: that religion
“should guide the community toward the
great aim of improving as quickly as
possible the conditions of the poorest
class.” This became the watchword of the
entire school of Saint-Simon.
His movement and its influence.
Saint-Simon died in 1825, and, in the
subsequent years, his disciples carried
his message to the world and made him
famous. By 1826 a movement supporting
his ideas had begun to grow, and by the
end of 1828 the Saint-Simonians were
holding meetings in Paris and in many
provincial towns. In July 1830
revolution brought new opportunities to
the Saint-Simonians in France. They
issued a proclamation demanding the
ownership of goods in common, the
abolition of the right of inheritance,
and the enfranchisement of women. The
sect included some of the ablest and
most promising young men of France. In
the following years, however, the
leaders of the movement quarreled among
themselves, and as a result the movement
fragmented and broke up, its leaders
turning to practical affairs.
Despite
this, the ideas of the Saint-Simonians
had a pervasive influence on the
intellectual life of 19th-century
Europe. Thomas Carlyle in England was
among those influenced by the ideas of
Saint-Simon or his followers. Friedrich
Engels found in Saint-Simon “the breadth
of view of a genius,” containing in
embryo most of the ideas of the later
socialists. Saint-Simon’s proposals of
social and economic planning were indeed
ahead of his time, and succeeding
Marxists, socialists, and capitalist
reformers alike were indebted to his
ideas in one way or another. Felix
Markham has said that Saint-Simon’s
ideas have a peculiar relevance to the
20th century, when socialist ideologies
took the place of traditional religion
in many countries.
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Pierre-Jean de Béranger
born
Aug. 19, 1780, Paris, France
died July 16, 1857, Paris
French poet and writer of popular songs,
celebrated for his liberal and
humanitarian views during a period when
French society as a whole was undergoing
rapid and sometimes violent change.
Béranger was active in his father’s
business enterprises until they failed.
He then found work as a clerk at the
University of Paris (1809). He led a
marginal existence, sleeping in a garret
and doing literary hackwork in his spare
time. After the downfall of Napoleon, he
composed songs and poems highly critical
of the government set up under the
restored Bourbon monarchy. They brought
him immediate fame through their
expression of popular feeling, but they
led to dismissal from his post (1821)
and three months’ imprisonment (an
experience he compared favourably to
life in his garret).
Béranger’s lyrical, tender songs
glorifying the just-passed Napoleonic
era and his satires ridiculing the
monarchy and reactionary clergy were
written in a clear, simple, attractive
style. Both song and satire soon made
him as well known among ordinary country
people as in the liberal literary
circles of Paris. He thus became an
influential and respected figure in his
own lifetime. He was able to live on the
proceeds of his works and refused all
official honours, even membership of the
French Academy. After the Revolution of
1848 he was elected a member of the new
democratic parliament.
In his
private character he was noted for his
amiability and generosity, as ready to
receive help from his many friends in
Paris literary society as he was to give
it when able. His best-known poems are
“Le Roi d’Yvetot” (written c. 1813; “The
King of Yvetot”), “Le Dieu des pauvres
gens” (“The God of the Poor People”),
“Le Sacre de Charles le Simple” (“The
Coronation of Charles the Simple”), “La
Grand-Mère” (“The Grandmother”), and “Le
Vieux Sergent” (“The Old Sergeant”).
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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.
Alphonse de Lamartine
Lamartine, by Henri Decaisne
born Oct. 21, 1790, Mâcon, Fr.
died Feb. 28, 1869, Paris
French poet and statesman whose lyrics
in Méditations poétiques (1820)
established him as one of the key
figures in the Romantic movement in
French literature.
Alphonse’s father, an aristocrat, was
imprisoned during the culminating phase
of the French Revolution known as the
Reign of Terror but was fortunate enough
to escape the guillotine. Alphonse was
educated at the college at Belley, which
was maintained by the Jesuits though
they were suppressed in France at this
time.
Lamartine had wanted to enter the
army or the diplomatic corps, but
because France was ruled by Napoleon,
whom his faithful royalist parents
regarded as the usurper, they would not
allow him to serve. Thus he remained
idle until the Bourbon monarchy was
restored in 1814, when he served in
Louis XVIII’s bodyguard. The following
year, however, Napoleon returned from
exile and attempted to rebuild his
empire during the Hundred Days.
Lamartine emigrated to Switzerland.
After Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo and
the Second Bourbon Restoration, he
abandoned the military profession.
Attracted to literature, he wrote
some tragedies in verse and a few
elegies. By this time his health was not
good, and he left for the spa of
Aix-les-Bains, where, in October of
1816, on the shore of Lake Bourget, he
met the brilliant but desperately ill
Julie Charles. Early in 1812 Lamartine
had fallen deeply in love with a young
working girl named Antoniella. In 1815
he had learned of her death, and later
he was to recast her as Graziella in his
prose “anecdote” of that name. He now
became passionately attached to Charles,
who, because of her vast connections in
Paris, was able to help him find a
position. After her death in December
1817, Lamartine, who had already
dedicated many strophes to her (notably
“Le Lac”), devoted new verses to her
memory (particularly “Le Crucifix”).
In 1820 Lamartine married Maria Ann
Birch, a young Englishwoman connected by
marriage to the Churchills. The same
year he published his first collection
of poetry, Méditations poétiques, and
finally joined the diplomatic corps, as
secretary to the French embassy at
Naples. Méditations was immensely
successful because of its new romantic
tone and sincerity of feeling. It
brought to French poetry a new music;
the themes were at the same time
intimate and religious. If the
vocabulary remained that of the somewhat
faded rhetoric of the preceding century,
the resonance of the sentences, the
power of the rhythm, and the passion for
life sharply contrasted with the
often-withered poetry of the 18th
century. The book was so successful that
Lamartine attempted to extend it two
years later with his Nouvelles
méditations poétiques and his Mort de
Socrates, in which his preoccupation
with metaphysics first became evident.
Le Dernier Chant du pèlerinage d’Harold,
published in 1825, revealed the charm
that the English poet Lord Byron exerted
over him. Lamartine was elected to the
French Academy in 1829, and the
following year he published the two
volumes of Harmonies poétiques et
religieuses, a sort of alleluia, filled
with deist—and even occasionally
Christian (“L’Hymne au
Christ”)—enthusiasm.
Lamartine in front of the Hôtel de
Ville de Paris, on the 25 February 1848,
by Félix Philippoteaux
That same year (1830), when
Louis-Philippe acceded to the throne as
constitutional monarch after the July
Revolution, Lamartine abandoned his
diplomatic career to enter politics. He
refused to commit himself to the July
Monarchy, however, and, preserving his
independence, he set out to draw
attention to social problems. After two
unsuccessful attempts he was elected
deputy in 1833. Yet he still wanted to
write a poem, Les Visions, that he had
been thinking about since 1821 and that
he had conceived of as an “epic of the
soul.” The symbolic theme was that of a
fallen angel cast out of heaven for
having chosen the love of a woman and
condemned to successive reincarnations
until the day on which he realized that
he “preferred God.” Lamartine wrote the
last fragment of this immense adventure
first, and it appeared in 1836 as
Jocelyn. It is the story of a young man
who intended to take up the religious
life but, instead, when cast out of the
seminary by the Revolution, falls in
love with a young girl; recalled to the
order by his dying bishop, he renounces
his love and becomes a “man of God,” a
parish priest, consecrating his life to
the service of his fellow men. In 1838
Lamartine published the first fragment
of this vast metaphysical poem under the
appropriate title La Chute d’un ange
(“The Fall of an Angel”). In 1832–33 he
travelled to Lebanon, Syria, and the
Holy Land. He had by then definitively
lost the Catholic faith he had tried to
recover in 1820; a further blow was the
death in Beirut, on Dec. 7, 1832, of his
only remaining child, Julia. A son born
in Rome in 1821 had not survived
infancy.
After a collection published in 1839
under the title Recueillements poétiques
(“Poetic Meditations”), Lamartine
interrupted his literary endeavours to
become more active as a politician. He
was convinced that the social question,
which he himself called “the question of
the proletariat,” was the principal
issue of his time; he deplored the
inhumanity of the worker’s plight; he
denounced the trusts and their dominant
influence on governmental politics,
directing against them two discourses,
one in 1838, another in 1846; he held
that a working-class revolution was
inevitable and did not hesitate to
hasten the hour, promising the
authorities, in July 1847, a “revolution
of scorn.” In the same year he published
his Histoire des Girondins, a history of
the right, or moderate, Girondin Party
during and after the French Revolution,
which earned him immense popularity with
the left-wing parties.
After the revolution of Feb. 24,
1848, the Second Republic was proclaimed
in Paris, and Lamartine became, in
effect, head of the provisional
government. The propertied classes, who
were at first startled, pretended to
accept the new circumstances, but they
were unable to tolerate the fact that
the working class possessed arms with
which to defend themselves. In April
1848 Lamartine was elected to the
National Assembly by 10 départements.
The bourgeoisie, represented by the
right-wing parties, thought they had
elected in Lamartine a clever
manipulator who could placate the
proletariat, while military forces
capable of establishing order, such as
they conceived of it, were being
reconstituted. The bourgeoisie was
enraged to discover, however, that
Lamartine was, indeed, as he had
proclaimed himself to be, the spokesman
of the working class. On June 24, 1848,
he was thrown out of office and the
revolt crushed.
A broken man, Lamartine entered the
“twilight” of his life. He was 60 years
old in 1850, and his debts were
enormous, not because he had been
personally extravagant but because of
the allowances he gave his sisters to
compensate for the total property
inheritance he had received as the only
male in the Lamartine family. For 20
years he struggled desperately, though
in vain, against bankruptcy, publishing
book after book: Raphaël, a transposed
account of his love for Julie Charles;
Les Confidences and Nouvelles
Confidences, wherein he intermingled
real and imaginary elements (Graziella
is a fragment of it); novels: Geneviève
(1851), Antoniella, Mémoires politiques
(1863), the last work being of great
historical interest; a periodical titled
Cours familiers de littérature
(1856–1868/69), in which he published
such poems as “La Vigne et la maison”
and “Le Désert”; some historical works
that remained unequaled, including
Histoire des Constituants (1854),
Histoire de la Restauration (1851–52),
Histoire de la Russie, Histoire de la
Turquie. He died nearly forgotten by his
contemporaries.
Henri Guillemin
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Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo
"The Hunchback of Notre Dame"
VOLUME I,
VOLUME II
French writer
in full Victor-Marie Hugo
born Feb. 26, 1802, Besançon, Fr.
died May 22, 1885, Paris
Main
poet, novelist, and dramatist who was the most important of the French
Romantic writers. Though regarded in France as one of that country’s
greatest poets, he is better known abroad for such novels as Notre-Dame
de Paris (1831) and Les Misérables (1862).
Early years (1802–30)
Victor was the third son of Joseph-Léopold-Sigisbert Hugo, a major and,
later, general in Napoleon’s army. His childhood was coloured by his
father’s constant traveling with the imperial army and by the
disagreements that soon alienated his parents from one another. His
mother’s royalism and his father’s loyalty to successive governments—the
Convention, the Empire, the Restoration—reflected their deeper
incompatibility. It was a chaotic time for Victor, continually uprooted
from Paris to set out for Elba or Naples or Madrid, yet always returning
to Paris with his mother, whose royalist opinions he initially adopted.
The fall of the empire gave him, from 1815 to 1818, a time of
uninterrupted study at the Pension Cordier and the Lycée Louis-le-Grand,
after which he graduated from the law faculty at Paris, where his
studies seem to have been purposeless and irregular. Memories of his
life as a poor student later inspired the figure of Marius in his novel
Les Misérables.
From 1816, at least, Hugo had conceived ambitions other than the law.
He was already filling notebooks with verses, translations—particularly
from Virgil—two tragedies, a play, and elegies. Encouraged by his
mother, Hugo founded a review, the Conservateur Littéraire (1819–21), in
which his own articles on the poets Alphonse de Lamartine and André de
Chénier stand out. His mother died in 1821, and a year later Victor
married a childhood friend, Adèle Foucher, with whom he had five
children. In that same year he published his first book of poems, Odes
et poésies diverses, whose royalist sentiments earned him a pension from
Louis XVIII. Behind Hugo’s concern for classical form and his political
inspiration, it is possible to recognize in these poems a personal voice
and his own particular vein of fantasy.
In 1823 he published his first novel, Han d’Islande, which in 1825
appeared in an English translation as Hans of Iceland. The journalist
Charles Nodier was enthusiastic about it and drew Hugo into the group of
friends, all devotees of Romanticism, who met regularly at the
Bibliothèque de L’Arsenal. While frequenting this literary circle, which
was called the Cénacle, Hugo shared in launching a new review of
moderate tendencies, the Muse Française (1823–24). In 1824 he published
a new verse collection, Nouvelles Odes, and followed it two years later
with an exotic romance, Bug-Jargal (Eng. trans. The Slave King). In 1826
he also published Odes et ballades, an enlarged edition of his
previously printed verse, the latest of these poems being brilliant
variations on the fashionable Romantic modes of mirth and terror. The
youthful vigour of these poems was also characteristic of another
collection, Les Orientales (1829), which appealed to the Romantic taste
for Oriental local colour. In these poems Hugo, while skillfully
employing a great variety of metres in his verse and using ardent and
brilliant imagery, was also gradually shedding the legitimist royalism
of his youth. It may be noted, too, that “Le Feu du ciel,” a visionary
poem, forecast those he was to write 25 years later. The fusion of the
contemporary with the apocalyptic was always a particular mark of Hugo’s
genius.
Hugo emerged as a true Romantic, however, with the publication in
1827 of his verse drama Cromwell. The subject of this play, with its
near-contemporary overtones, is that of a national leader risen from the
people who seeks to be crowned king. But the play’s reputation rested
largely on the long, elaborate preface, in which Hugo proposed a
doctrine of Romanticism that for all its intellectual moderation was
extremely provocative. He demanded a verse drama in which the
contradictions of human existence—good and evil, beauty and ugliness,
tears and laughter—would be resolved by the inclusion of both tragic and
comic elements in a single play. Such a type of drama would abandon the
formal rules of classical tragedy for the freedom and truth to be found
in the plays of William Shakespeare. Cromwell itself, though immensely
long and almost impossible to stage, was written in verse of great force
and originality. In fact, the preface to Cromwell, as an important
statement of the tenets of Romanticism, has proved far more important
than the play itself.
Success (1830–51)
The defense of freedom and the cult of an idealized Napoleon in such
poems as the ode “À la Colonne” and “Lui” brought Hugo into touch with
the liberal group of writers on the newspaper Le Globe, and his move
toward liberalism was strengthened by the French king Charles X’s
restrictions on the liberty of the press as well as by the censor’s
prohibiting the stage performance of his play Marion de Lorme (1829),
which portrays the character of Louis XIII unfavourably. Hugo
immediately retorted with Hernani, the first performance of which, on
Feb. 25, 1830, gained victory for the young Romantics over the
Classicists in what came to be known as the battle of Hernani. In this
play Hugo extolled the Romantic hero in the form of a noble outlaw at
war with society, dedicated to a passionate love and driven on by
inexorable fate. The actual impact of the play owed less to the plot
than to the sound and beat of the verse, which was softened only in the
elegiac passages spoken by Hernani and Doña Sol.
While Hugo had derived his early renown from his plays, he gained
wider fame in 1831 with his historical novel Notre-Dame de Paris (Eng.
trans. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), an evocation of life in medieval
Paris during the reign of Louis XI. The novel condemns a society that,
in the persons of Frollo the archdeacon and Phoebus the soldier, heaps
misery on the hunchback Quasimodo and the gypsy girl Esmeralda. The
theme touched the public consciousness more deeply than had that of his
previous novel, Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné (1829; The Last Days of a
Condemned), the story of a condemned man’s last day, in which Hugo
launched a humanitarian protest against the death penalty. While
Notre-Dame was being written, Louis-Philippe, a constitutional king, had
been brought to power by the July Revolution. Hugo composed a poem in
honour of this event, Dicté aprés juillet 1830. It was a forerunner of
much of his political verse.
Four books of poems came from Hugo in the period of the July
Monarchy: Les Feuilles d’automne (1831; “Autumn Leaves”), intimate and
personal in inspiration; Les Chants du crépuscule (1835; Songs of
Twilight), overtly political; Les Voix intérieures (1837; “Inner
Voices”), both personal and philosophical; and Les Rayons et les ombres
(1840; “Sunlight and Shadows”), in which the poet, renewing these
different themes, indulges his gift for colour and picturesque detail.
But Hugo was not content merely to express personal emotions; he wanted
to be what he called the “sonorous echo” of his time. In his verse
political and philosophical problems were integrated with the religious
and social disquiet of the period; one poem evoked the misery of the
workers, another praised the efficacy of prayer. He addressed many poems
to the glory of Napoleon, though he shared with his contemporaries the
reversion to republican ideals. Hugo restated the problems of his
century and the great and eternal human questions, and he spoke with a
warmhearted eloquence and reasonableness that moved people’s souls.
So intense was Hugo’s creative activity during these years that he
also continued to pour out plays. There were two motives for this:
first, he needed a platform for his political and social ideas, and,
second, he wished to write parts for a young and beautiful actress,
Juliette Drouet, with whom he had begun a liaison in 1833. Juliette had
little talent and soon renounced the stage in order to devote herself
exclusively to him, becoming the discreet and faithful companion she was
to remain until her death in 1883. The first of these plays was another
verse drama, Le Roi s’amuse (1832; Eng. trans. The King’s Fool), set in
Renaissance France and depicting the frivolous love affairs of Francis I
while revealing the noble character of his court jester. This play was
at first banned but was later used by Giuseppe Verdi as the libretto of
his opera Rigoletto. Three prose plays followed: Lucrèce Borgia and
Marie Tudor in 1833 and Angelo, tyran de Padoue (“Angelo, Tyrant of
Padua”) in 1835. Ruy Blas, a play in verse, appeared in 1838 and was
followed by Les Burgraves in 1843.
Hugo’s literary achievement was recognized in 1841 by his election,
after three unsuccessful attempts, to the French Academy and by his
nomination in 1845 to the Chamber of Peers. From this time he almost
ceased to publish, partly because of the demands of society and
political life but also as a result of personal loss: his daughter
Léopoldine, recently married, was accidentally drowned with her husband
in September 1843. Hugo’s intense grief found some mitigation in poems
that later appeared in Les Contemplations, a volume that he divided into
“Autrefois” and “Aujourd’hui,” the moment of his daughter’s death being
the mark between yesterday and today. He found relief above all in
working on a new novel, which became Les Misérables, published in 1862
after work on it had been set aside for a time and then resumed.
With the Revolution of 1848, Hugo was elected a deputy for Paris in
the Constituent Assembly and later in the Legislative Assembly. He
supported the successful candidacy of Prince Louis-Napoléon for the
presidency that year. The more the president evolved toward an
authoritarianism of the right, however, the more Hugo moved toward the
assembly’s left. When in December 1851 a coup d’état took place, which
eventually resulted in the Second Empire under Napoleon III, Hugo made
one attempt at resistance and then fled to Brussels.
Exile (1851–70)
Hugo’s exile lasted until the return of liberty and the reconstitution
of the republic in 1870. Enforced at the beginning, exile later became a
voluntary gesture and, after the amnesty of 1859, an act of pride. He
remained in Brussels for a year until, foreseeing expulsion, he took
refuge on British territory. He first established himself on the island
of Jersey, in the English Channel, where he remained from 1852 to 1855.
When he was expelled from there, he moved to the neighbouring island of
Guernsey. During this exile of nearly 20 years he produced the most
extensive part of all his writings and the most original.
Immersed in politics as he was, Hugo devoted the first writings of
his exile to satire and recent history: Napoléon le Petit (1852), an
indictment of Napoleon III, and Histoire d’un crime, a day-by-day
account of Louis Bonaparte’s coup. Hugo’s return to poetry was an
explosion of wrath: Les Châtiments (1853; “The Punishments”). This
collection of poems unleashed his anger against the new emperor and, on
a technical level, freed him from his remaining classical prejudices and
enabled him to achieve the full mastery of his poetic powers. Les
Châtiments ranks among the most powerful satirical poems in the French
language. All Hugo’s future verse profited from this release of his
imagination: the tone of this collection of poems is sometimes lyrical,
sometimes epic, sometimes moving, but most often virulent, containing an
undertone of national and personal frustration.
Despite the satisfaction he derived from his political poetry, Hugo
wearied of its limitations and, turning back to the unpublished poems of
1840–50, set to work on the volume of poetry entitled Les Contemplations
(1856). This work contains the purest of his poetry—the most moving
because the memory of his dead daughter is at the centre of the book,
the most disquieting, also, because it transmits the haunted world of a
thinker. In poems such as “Pleurs dans la nuit” and “La Bouche d’ombre,”
he reveals a tormented mind that struggles between doubt and faith in
its lonely search for meaning and significance.
Hugo’s apocalyptic approach to reality was the source of two epic or
metaphysical poems, La Fin de Satan (“The End of Satan”) and Dieu
(“God”), both of them confrontations of the problem of evil. Written
between 1854 and 1860, they were not published until after his death
because his publisher preferred the little epics based on history and
legend contained in the first installment (1859) of the gigantic epic
poem La Légende des siècles (The Legend of the Centuries), whose second
and third installments appeared in 1877 and 1883, respectively. The many
poems that make up this epic display all his spiritual power without
sacrificing his exuberant capacity to tell a story. Hugo’s personal
mythology of the human struggle between good and evil lies behind each
of the legends: Eve’s motherhood is exalted in “Le Sacre de la femme”;
mankind liberating itself from all religions in order to attain divine
truth is the theme of “Le Satyre”; and “Plein Ciel” proclaims, through
utopian prediction of men’s conquest of the air, the poet’s conviction
of indefinite progress toward the final unity of science with moral
awareness.
After the publication of three long books of poetry, Hugo returned to
prose and took up his abandoned novel, Les Misérables. Its extraordinary
success with readers of every type when it was published in 1862 brought
him instant popularity in his own country, and its speedy translation
into many languages won him fame abroad. The novel’s name means “the
wretched,” or “the outcasts,” but English translations generally carry
the French title. The story centres on the convict Jean Valjean, a
victim of society who has been imprisoned for 19 years for stealing a
loaf of bread. A hardened and astute criminal upon his release, he
eventually softens and reforms, becoming a successful industrialist and
mayor of a northern town. Yet he is stalked obsessively by the detective
Javert for an impulsive, regretted former crime, and Jean Valjean
eventually sacrifices himself for the sake of his adopted daughter,
Cosette, and her husband, Marius. Les Misérables is a vast panorama of
Parisian society and its underworld, and it contains many famous
episodes and passages, among them a chapter on the Battle of Waterloo
and the description of Jean Valjean’s rescue of Marius by means of a
flight through the sewers of Paris. The story line of Les Misérables is
basically that of a detective story, but by virtue of its characters,
who are sometimes a little larger than life yet always vital and
engaging, and by its re-creation of the swarming Parisian underworld,
the main theme of humankind’s ceaseless combat with evil clearly
emerges.
The remaining works Hugo completed in exile include the essay William
Shakespeare (1864) and two novels: Les Travailleurs de la mer (1866; The
Toilers of the Sea), dedicated to the island of Guernsey and its
sailors; and L’Homme qui rit (1869; The Man Who Laughs), a curious
baroque novel about the English people’s fight against feudalism in the
17th century, which takes its title from the perpetual grin of its
disfigured hero. Hugo’s last novel, Quatre-vingt-treize (1874;
Ninety-three), centred on the tumultuous year 1793 in France and
portrayed human justice and charity against the background of the French
Revolution.
Last years (1870–85)
The defeat of France in the Franco-German War and the proclamation of
the Third Republic in 1871 brought Hugo back to Paris. He became a
deputy in the National Assembly (1871) but resigned the following month.
Though he still fought for his old ideals, he no longer possessed the
same energies. The trials of recent years had aged him, and there were
more to come: in 1868 he had lost his wife, Adèle, a profound sadness to
him; in 1871 one son died, as did another in 1873. Though increasingly
detached from life around him, the poet of L’Année terrible (1872), in
which he recounted the siege of Paris during the “terrible year” of
1870, had become a national hero and a living symbol of republicanism in
France. In 1878 Hugo was stricken by cerebral congestion, but he lived
on for some years in the Avenue d’Eylau, renamed Avenue Victor-Hugo on
his 80th birthday. In 1885, two years after the death of his faithful
companion Juliette, Hugo died and was given a national funeral. His body
lay in state under the Arc de Triomphe and was buried in the Panthéon.
Reputation
Hugo’s enormous output is unique in French literature; it is said that
he wrote each morning 100 lines of verse or 20 pages of prose. “The most
powerful mind of the Romantic movement,” as he was described in 1830,
laureate and peer of France in 1845, he went on to assume the role of an
outlawed sage who, with the easy consciousness of authority, put down
his insights and prophetic visions in prose and verse, becoming at last
the genial grandfather of popular literary portraiture and the national
poet who gave his name to a street in every town in France.
The recognition of Hugo as a great poet at the time of his death was
followed by a period of critical neglect. A few of his poems were
remembered, and Les Misérables continued to be widely read. The
generosity of his ideas and the warmth of their expression still moved
the public mind, for Hugo was a poet of the common man and knew how to
write with simplicity and power of common joys and sorrows. But there
was another side to him—what Paul Claudel called his “panic
contemplation” of the universe, the numinous fear that penetrates his
sombre poems La Fin de Satan and Dieu. Hugo’s knowledge of the resources
of French verse and his technical virtuosity in metre and rhyme,
moreover, rescued French poetry from the sterility of the 18th century.
Hugo is one of those rare writers who excites both popular and academic
audiences alike.
Jean-Bertrand Barrère
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Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny
born
March 27, 1797, Loches, Fr.
died Sept. 17, 1863, Paris
(count
of )
poet, dramatist, and novelist who was
the most philosophical of the French
Romantic writers.
Youth
and Romantic works.
Vigny was born into an aristocratic
family that had been reduced to modest
circumstances by the French Revolution.
His father, a 60-year-old retired
soldier at the time of his son’s birth,
was a veteran of the Seven Years’ War;
and his maternal grandfather, the
Marquis de Baraudin, had served as
commodore in the royal navy. Vigny grew
up in Paris and took preparatory studies
for the École Polytechnique at the Lycée
Bonaparte, where he conceived an
“inordinate love for the glory of
bearing arms,” a passion common to the
young men of his generation. Attached to
the monarchy by family tradition, he
became a second lieutenant in the king’s
guard when the Bourbons returned to
power in 1814 and when he was only 17
years old.
Though
he was promoted to first lieutenant in
1822 and to captain the following year,
the military profession, limited to
garrison duty rather than pursued on the
battlefield, bored the young officer,
who preferred the adventures of a
literary career. After several leaves of
absence, he abandoned military life in
1827. In the meantime, he had published
his first poem, “Le Bal,” in 1820. Two
years later his first collection of
verse was published as Poèmes, along
with contributions to Victor Hugo’s
politically conservative literary
periodical La Muse Française. Salons and
reviews in Paris hailed the birth of a
poet who combined grace with a strength
and depth that was totally Romantic.
Vigny’s expanded version of Poèmes under
the title Poèmes antiques et modernes
(1826) was also a success.
Vigny,
however, was not content to excel merely
in poetry, and he revealed his narrative
talent in Cinq-Mars (1826), a historical
novel centred around the conspiracy of
Louis XIII’s favourite, the Marquis de
Cinq-Mars, against the Cardinal de
Richelieu. Cinq-Mars was the first
important historical novel in French,
and it derived much of its popularity at
the time from the enormous vogue of the
novels of Sir Walter Scott. Vigny also
showed a typically Romantic interest in
William Shakespeare, freely adapting
Othello (Le More de Venise, first
performed 1829) as well as The Merchant
of Venice (Shylock, 1829). During these
years Vigny was regarded as a literary
leader of the Romantic movement in
France. The Romantic poet Alphonse de
Lamartine recognized his talents, and
Hugo and Charles Sainte-Beuve treated
him as a friend. Vigny and the writer
Delphine Gay, the “muse of the country”
as she was called—for her beauty as well
as her literary talents—formed a
striking couple before his marriage in
February 1825 to Lydia Bunbury, daughter
of a wealthy Englishman.
Maturity and disillusionment.
By 1830 Vigny’s temperament had become
more sombre. The July Revolution
engendered in him a political pessimism
inspired by the repeated faults of the
French monarchy, an issue that had
become evident already in Cinq-Mars. As
a point of honour he, like
Chateaubriand, sought to remain faithful
to the monarchy, but he did not conceal
the fact that the cause of the Bourbon
king Charles X was worth no more than
that of Louis-Philippe, who had been
placed on the throne by the moneyed
bourgeoisie. He searched unsuccessfully
for a political creed and studied every
shade of opinion without giving his
allegiance to any. From this time on he
closely followed current affairs,
grasping them with a clarity that was at
times prophetic, though his overt
political activity remained erratic.
He
acknowledged his disillusionment as
early as 1831 in “Paris,” a poem of a
new genre that he termed élévations. He
felt all the more tormented, for he
could no longer count on the religious
faith of his childhood. His feelings on
this score are evident in another poem
(1832) in which he contemplated suicide:
“And God? Such were the times, they no
longer thought about Him.” The only
thing left for him to doubt was love
itself, a trauma he painfully
experienced in the course of his liaison
(1831–38) with the actress Marie Dorval,
for whom he was to create the role of
Kitty Bell in the play Chatterton in
1835. He accused Dorval of deceiving him
and of having maintained an
overaffectionate friendship with the
writer George Sand. His relationship
with Dorval left Vigny profoundly
embittered.
In
Stello (1832) Vigny put together a
series of consultations, or dialogues,
between two symbolic figures: Doctor
Noir (the Black Doctor), who represents
Vigny’s own intellect; and Stello, who
represents the poet’s desire for an
active part in the public arena. In
seeking to preserve Stello from the
dangers of his imprudent enthusiasm,
Doctor Noir tells him three anecdotes.
In these three short stories Vigny
examines the poet in his dealings with
political authority: the levity of Louis
XV condemns Nicolas Gilbert to die in
privation; the fanaticism of the
republican tyrant Robespierre leads
André Chénier to the scaffold; the
egoism of William Beckford, lord mayor
of London, provokes the suicide of the
poet Thomas Chatterton; all political
regimes inflict on the poet the
harshness of “perpetual ostracism.” What
then is this evil malaise? Vigny
questions himself on the nature of it.
He submits Stello to a sort of
psychoanalytic examination, as confided
to Doctor Noir. After having listened to
Stello, the doctor prescribes a remedy
of “separating poetic life from
political life” and advises the poet
against direct involvement in politics
in order to preserve the dignity of his
art and escape the horrible cruelties
that characterize every kind of
fanaticism.
Vigny
adapted the part of Stello dealing with
the suicide of Chatterton into a prose
drama in three acts, Chatterton (1835).
In presenting the last moments of
Chatterton’s life, he exalts the
nobility and suffering of a
misunderstood genius in a pitiless and
materialistic society. The triumph of
Vigny’s career as a playwright,
Chatterton remains one of the best
Romantic dramas. It is far superior to
La Maréchale d’Ancre (first performed
1831) and expresses Vigny’s melancholy
genius more seasonably than does his
spiritual comedy Quitte pour la peur
(first performed 1833).
Vigny’s
novel Servitude et grandeur militaires
(1835; “Servitude and Military
Greatness”; Eng. trans. The Military
Necessity) is also a consultation. The
book’s three stories, linked by personal
comment, deal with the dignity and
suffering of the soldier, who is obliged
by his profession to kill yet who is
condemned by it to passive obedience as
well. The first and third stories in
this volume are Vigny’s masterpieces in
prose, and the third story’s portrait of
Captain Renaud, an old Napoleonic
soldier, is a profound portrait of human
greatness. Vigny began another ambitious
consultation dealing with the religious
prophet, but only one story, Daphné
(published 1912), about the Roman
emperor Julian the Apostate, survives.
Vigny’s
consultations enlarged upon his
philosophy, formulated theories about
the fate of man, and defined the
principles that he thought should govern
human conduct. To give these ideas the
finish they required, he turned again,
between 1838 and his death, to poetry,
slowly composing the 11 poems that were
later collected under the title Les
Destinées (1864). The early poems are
very pessimistic, but the later ones are
increasingly confident affirmations of
the imperishable nature of human
spiritual powers.
In
middle age Vigny gradually withdrew into
a curious silence and retired, according
to the famous expression of
Sainte-Beuve, to an “ivory tower.” He
rarely went out, preferring the calm of
his country manor to the excitement of
Paris. In 1841 he stood as a candidate
to the Académie Française, but he was
elected only in 1845, after five checks,
and was received there with a perfidious
speech by Count Molé. His wife, Lydia,
whose longtime invalidism had caused him
constant anxiety, died in 1862, and
Vigny himself died of cancer of the
stomach after much suffering the
following year. He left several unedited
works whose posthumous publication
enhanced his reputation: Les Destinées,
Le Journal d’un poète (1867), Daphné,
and Mémoires inédits (1958).
Assessment.
Vigny’s literary art is uneven. He does
not possess great technical facility,
and when not profoundly inspired, he is
prosaic; there are long passages in Les
Destinées that are laborious and dull.
His austere imagination soberly
developed a few symbols of the human
condition and condensed them to achieve
what he called a “hard, brilliant
diamond.”
It is
Les Destinées above all that has earned
Vigny his reputation as a
philosopher-poet. His work is a poignant
plea against all that is inhumane in the
forces that rule the world: expedience (Cinq-Mars),
governments and the mob (Stello and
Daphné), and the treacherous love of
women (“La Colère de Samson”). Vigny is
particularly critical of the
equivocality of Providence, which is
silent in the face of suffering (“Le
Mont des Oliviers”) and as coldly
insensitive as nature (“La Maison du
Berger”). Vigny’s belief in God is just
strong enough for Vigny to reproach him.
As a tormented skeptic, he proposes that
strictly human values—honour, pity, and
the love of beauty—should be adopted.
His last poem celebrates the apotheosis
of a Holy Spirit (“L’Esprit pur”) that
is essentially human and takes over the
place of God.
It
would be unjust, however, to regard
Vigny solely as a philosopher. His
literary creations spring less from a
system of thought than from a
spontaneously tragic conception of
existence. Thwarted love, unrecognized
goodwill, humiliated greatness, the
tormented conscience of the soldier who
detests war but fights on
energetically—these are more than just
general ideas: they express a wounded
sensitivity and a soul torn by moral
scruples. Under the anonymous cloak of
symbols, Vigny extends to the whole of
humanity his own conflicts and agonies,
and his work is an effort to resolve
them. Therein lies the poignancy of his
work.
Paul Viallaneix
Pierre-Georges Castex
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Alfred de Musset
born Dec. 11,
1810, Paris, France
died May 2, 1857, Paris
French Romantic dramatist and poet, best known for
his plays.
Musset’s autobiographical La Confession d’un enfant
du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century), if not entirely trustworthy, presents a
striking picture of Musset’s youth as a member of a
noble family, well-educated but ruled by his
emotions in a period when all traditional values
were under attack. While still an adolescent he came
under the influence of the leaders of the Romantic
movement—Charles Nodier, Alfred de Vigny, and Victor
Hugo—and produced his first work, Contes d’Espagne
et d’Italie (“Stories of Spain and of Italy”) in
1830. At the same time he became a dandy, one of the
elegant Parisian imitators of Beau Brummell, and
embarked on a life of hectic sexual and alcoholic
dissipation.
After
the failure of his play La Nuit
vénitienne (1830; “The Venetian Night”),
Musset refused to allow his other plays
to be performed but continued to publish
historical tragedies—e.g., Lorenzaccio
(1834)—and comedies—e.g., Il ne faut
jurer de rien (1836; “It Isn’t Necessary
to Promise Anything”). He was also an
extraordinarily versatile poet, writing
light satirical pieces and poems of
dazzling technical virtuosity as well as
lyrics, such as “La Nuit d’octobre”
(1837; “The October Night”), which
express with passion and eloquence his
complex emotions.
Though
associated with the Romantic movement,
Musset often poked fun at its excesses.
His Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet
(1836–37), for example, contain a
brilliant and illuminating satire of the
literary fashions of the day. A love
affair with the novelist George Sand
that went on intermittently from 1833 to
1839 inspired some of his finest lyrics,
as recounted in his Confession. He was
elected to the Académie Française in
1852.
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Gérard de Nerval
born
May 22, 1808, Paris, France
died January 26, 1855, Paris
French Romantic poet whose themes and
preoccupations were to greatly influence
the Symbolists and Surrealists.
Nerval’s father, a doctor, was sent to
serve with Napoleon’s Rhine army; his
mother died when he was two years old,
and he grew up in the care of relatives
in the countryside at Mortefontaine in
the Valois. The memory of his childhood
there was to haunt him as an idyllic
vision for the rest of his life. In 1820
he went to live with his father in Paris
and attend the Collège de Charlemagne,
where he met the poet Théophile Gautier,
with whom he formed a lasting
friendship. Nerval received a legacy
from his grandparents and was able to
travel in Italy, but the rest of his
inheritance he poured into an ill-fated
drama review. In 1828 Nerval produced a
notable French translation of Goethe’s
Faust that Goethe himself praised and
which the composer Hector Berlioz drew
freely upon for his opera La Damnation
de Faust.
In 1836
Nerval met Jenny Colon, an actress with
whom he fell passionately in love; two
years later, however, she married
another man, and in 1842 she died. This
shattering experience changed his life.
After her death Nerval traveled to the
Levant, the result being some of his
best work in Voyage en Orient (1843–51;
“Voyage to the East”), a travelogue that
also examines ancient and folk
mythology, symbols, and religion.
During
the period of his greatest creativity,
Nerval was afflicted with severe mental
disorders and was institutionalized at
least eight times. In one of his finest
works, the short story “Sylvie” , which
was written in 1853 and included in Des
Filles du feu (1854; “Girls of Fire”),
he re-creates the countryside of his
happy childhood in lucid, musical prose.
The memory of Jenny Colon dominates the
longer story Aurélia (1853–54), in which
Nerval describes his obsessions and
hallucinations during his periods of
mental derangement. Les Chimères (1854;
“The Chimeras”) is a sonnet sequence of
extraordinary complexity that best
conveys the musical quality of his
writing. Nerval’s years of destitution
and anguish ended in 1855 when he was
found hanging from a lamppost in the rue
de la Vieille Lanterne, Paris.
Nerval
viewed dreams as a means of
communication between the everyday world
and the world of supernatural events,
and his writings reflect the visions and
fantasies that constantly threatened his
grip on sanity. He attained the summit
of his art whenever he combined his
exquisite taste with his infallible
intuition for the appropriate image by
which to transcribe his dreams of a lost
paradise of beauty, fulfillment,
innocence, and youth.
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The novel from Constant to
Balzac
The novel was
the most rapidly developing literary form in
postrevolutionary France, its enormous range
allowing authors great flexibility in examining the
changing relationships of the individual to society.
The Romantic undergrowth encouraged the flourishing
of such subspecies as the Gothic novel and the
terrifying or the fantastic tale—the latter
influenced in many cases by the translation from
German of the works of E.T.A. Hoffmann—works that,
when they are not simply ridiculous, seem to be
straining to provide a fictional equivalent for the
subconscious or an intuition of the mystical.
Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe (1816; Eng. trans.
Adolphe), presented as a fictional autobiography,
belongs to an important strand in the tradition of
the French novel—namely, the novel of concentrated
psychological analysis of an individual—which runs
from the 17th century to the present day. In that
tradition, Adolphe has about it a Classical
intensity and simplicity of line. However, in its
moral ambiguity, the hesitations of the hero and his
confessions of weakness, lies its modernity,
responding to the contemporary sense of moral
sickness. In spite of the difference of style, there
is a clear link with the themes of Chateaubriand’s
René and Étienne Pivert de Senancour’s Oberman
(1804; Eng. trans. Obermann).
Benjamin Constant
in full
Henri-Benjamin Constant de Rebecque
born
Oct. 25, 1767, Lausanne, Switz.
died Dec. 8, 1830, Paris
Franco-Swiss novelist and political
writer, the author of Adolphe, a
forerunner of the modern psychological
novel.
The son of a Swiss officer in the Dutch
service, whose family was of French
origin, he studied at Erlangen, Ger.,
briefly at the University of Oxford, and
at Edinburgh. In 1787 he formed, in
Paris, his first liaison, with Madame de
Charrière, 27 years his senior. His
republican opinions in no way suited him
to the office of chamberlain to the duke
of Brunswick, which he held for several
years. In 1794 he chose the side of the
French Revolution, abandoning his office
and divorcing his wife, a lady of the
court. Madame de Staël had much to do
with his decision. Their tumultuous and
passionate relationship lasted until
1806.
After
the coup d’état of 18 Brumaire (1799),
Constant was nominated to the tribunate,
but he quickly became, like Madame de
Staël, an opponent of the Bonapartist
regime. Expelled from the tribunate in
1802, he followed her into exile the
year after. Thereafter he spent his time
either at Madame de Staël’s salon at
Coppet, near Geneva, or in Germany,
chiefly at Weimar, where he met Goethe
and Friedrich Schiller. Constant was the
associate of the brothers Friedrich and
August von Schlegel, the pioneers of the
Romantic idea, and with them he inspired
Madame de Staël’s book De l’Allemagne
(“On Germany”).
In 1808
Constant secretly married Charlotte von
Hardenberg. But his intellectual
relationship with Madame de Staël and
the group at Coppet remained unbroken.
As a liberal he was disappointed by the
restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in
1814, and he reconciled himself with the
Napoleonic empire of the Hundred Days
under the influence of Madame Récamier,
the other great love of his life. On his
return to Paris, Constant became one of
the leaders of liberal journalism. He
was elected a deputy in 1819. After the
revolution of July 1830, he was
appointed president of the council of
state but died the same year.
During
his exile, Constant began work on De la
religion considérée dans sa source, ses
formes, et ses développements, 5 vol.
(1824–31; “On Religion Considered in Its
Source, Its Forms, and Its
Developments”), a historical analysis of
religious feeling. He is better known,
however, for his novels. Published in
1816 and written in a lucid and
classical style, the autobiographical
Adolphe (Eng. trans. Adolphe) describes
in minute analytical detail a young
man’s passion for a woman older than
himself. Nearly 150 years after the
publication of Adolphe, another of
Constant’s autobiographical novels,
Cécile, dealing with events between 1793
and 1808, was discovered and first
published. Constant is also known for
his Journaux intimes (“Intimate
Journals”), first published in their
entirety in 1952. They add to the
autobiographical picture of Constant
provided by his Le Cahier rouge (1907;
The Red Notebook).
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The historical novel
The acute consciousness of a changed world after the
Revolution and hence of difference between
historical periods led novelists to a new interest
in re-creating the specificity of the past or, more
accurately, reconstituting it in the light of their
own present preoccupations, with a distinct
preference for the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
Until about 1820 the Middle Ages had generally been
regarded as a period of barbarism between Classical
antiquity and the neoclassical 17th and 18th
centuries. Chateaubriand’s lyrical evocation of
Gothic ruins—the relics of the age of religious
faith—and young royalist writers’ attraction to a
certain vision of feudalism provided a different
evaluation of the period. The vogue for historical
novels was at its strongest in the 1820s and was
given impetus by the immense influence of the French
translations of
Sir Walter Scott (though Madame de Genlis claimed strenuously that her own historical
novels had established the vogue long before). The
best example of the picturesque historical novel is
Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831; The Hunchback of
Notre Dame). In it
Hugo re-created an atmosphere of
vivid, colourful, and intense 15th-century life,
associating with it a plea for the preservation of
Gothic architecture as the bearer, before the coming
of the book, of the cultural heritage and
sensibilities of the nation.
A deeper reading of
Scott’s novels is implicit in
some of
Honoré de Balzac’s works.
Balzac’s writing
not only evoked the surface or the atmosphere of a
precise period but also examined the processes of
historical, social, and political transformation.
Scott’s studies of the aftereffects of the Jacobite
rising can be paralleled by
Balzac’s analysis of the
Breton counterrevolution in Les Chouans (1829; “The
Screech Owls,” a name given to any of a number of
bands of peasants). The historical
novel ultimately became the staple of the popular
novel, as in Les Trois Mousquetaires (1844; The
Three Musketeers) by
Alexandre Dumas père.
Alexandre Dumas, père
"The
Three Musketeers"
French author [1802-1870]
born July 24, 1802, Villers-Cotterêts, Aisne, Fr.
died Dec. 5, 1870, Puys, near Dieppe
Main
one of the most prolific and most popular French authors of the 19th
century. Without ever attaining indisputable literary merit, Dumas
succeeded in gaining a great reputation first as a dramatist and then as
a historical novelist, especially for such works as The Count of Monte
Cristo and The Three Musketeers. His memoirs, which, with a mixture of
candour, mendacity, and boastfulness, recount the events of his
extraordinary life, also provide a unique insight into French literary
life during the Romantic period. He was the father (père) of the
dramatist and novelist Alexandre Dumas, called Dumas fils.
Dumas’s father, Thomas-Alexandre Davy de La Pailleterie—born out of
wedlock to the marquis de La Pailleterie and Marie Cessette Dumas, a
black slave of Santo Domingo—was a common soldier under the ancien
régime who assumed the name Dumas in 1786. He later became a general in
Napoleon’s army. The family fell on hard times, however, especially
after General Dumas’s death in 1806, and the young Alexandre went to
Paris to attempt to make a living as a lawyer. He managed to obtain a
post in the household of the Duke d’Orléans, the future King
Louis-Philippe, but tried his fortune in the theatre. He made contact
with the actor François-Joseph Talma and with the young poets who were
to lead the Romantic movement.
Dumas’s plays, when judged from a modern viewpoint, are crude, brash,
and melodramatic, but they were received with rapture in the late 1820s
and early 1830s. Henri III et sa cour (1829) portrayed the French
Renaissance in garish colours; Napoléon Bonaparte (1831) played its part
in making a legend of the recently dead emperor; and in Antony (1831)
Dumas brought a contemporary drama of adultery and honour to the stage.
Though he continued to write plays, Dumas next turned his attention
to the historical novel, often working with collaborators (especially
Auguste Maquet). Considerations of probability or historical accuracy
generally were ignored, and the psychology of the characters was
rudimentary. Dumas’s main interest was the creation of an exciting story
set against a colourful background of history, usually the 16th or 17th
century.
The best known of his works are Les Trois Mousquetaires (published
1844, performed 1845; The Three Musketeers), a romance about four
swashbuckling heroes in the age of Cardinal Richelieu; Vingt ans après
(1845; “Twenty Years After”); Le Comte de Monte Cristo (1844–45; The
Count of Monte Cristo); Dix ans plus tard ou le Vicomte de Bragelonne
(1848–50; “Ten Years Later; or, The Vicomte de Bragelonne”); and La
Tulipe noire (1850; “The Black Tulip”).
When success came, Dumas indulged his extravagant tastes and
consequently was forced to write more and more rapidly in order to pay
his creditors. He tried to make money by journalism and with travel
books but with little success.
The unfinished manuscript of a long-lost novel, Le Chevalier de
Sainte-Hermine (The Last Cavalier), was discovered in the Bibliothèque
Nationale in Paris in the late 1980s and first published in 2005.
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Stendhal
The works of
Stendhal (Henri Beyle), deeply
concerned with the nature of individuality, the
claims of the self, and the search for happiness,
represent an effort to define an aesthetic for prose
fiction and to establish a distinctive, personal
voice. His autobiographical sketches, such as his
Vie de Henri Brulard (The Life of Henry Brulard) and
Souvenirs d’égotisme (published posthumously in 1890
and 1892, respectively; Memoirs of Egotism), give a
fascinating insight into a highly critical
intelligence trying to organize his experience into
a rational philosophy while remaining aware that the
claims of emotion will often undermine whatever
system he creates. In many ways Stendhal is an
18th-century rationalist with a 19th-century
sensibility.
He came to the novel form relatively late in
life. Le Rouge et le noir (1830; The Red and the
Black) and La Chartreuse de Parme (1839; The
Charterhouse of Parma) are his finest works. Both
present a young would-be Napoleonic hero grappling
with the decidedly nonheroic social and political
environment inherited by the post-Napoleonic
generation. The Red and the Black, a masterpiece of
ironic realism both in its characterization and its
language, focuses on France in the late 1820s. The
Charterhouse of Parma, both love story and political
satire, situated in
Stendhal’s beloved Italy (where
he lived for much of his adult life), often reflects
a vision of the Italy of the Renaissance as much as
that of the 19th century. His work had a quicksilver
style, capable of embracing in rapid succession
different emotions, ideas, and points of view and
creating a sense of immediacy and spontaneity. He
had a genius for precise and witty understatement,
combined with an ironic vision that was
simultaneously cynical and tender. All these
qualities, along with his capacity for placing his
floundering, aspiring heroes, with a few
brushstrokes, in a multilayered evocation of the
world in which they must struggle to survive, make
of him one of the most individual, humane, and
perpetually contemporary of novelists.
Sand
George Sand (Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dudevant) was a
dominant figure in the literary life of the 19th
century, and her work, much-published and
much-serialized throughout Europe, was of major
importance in the spread of feminist consciousness.
For a long while after her death, her literary
reputation rested on works such as La Mare au diable
(1846; The Enchanted Lake) and La Petite Fadette
(1849; Little Fadette), sentimental stories of
country life tinged with realistic elements, of
little artistic value. More interesting are the
works modeling the subordinate position of women in
the 19th-century family, such as Indiana (1832; Eng.
trans. Indiana), in which a wife struggles for
independence, or novels creating new images of
heroic femininity, such as Lélia (1833 and 1839;
Eng. trans. Lelia), whose heroine, beautiful,
powerful, and tormented, founds a community to
educate a new generation of independent women.
Sand’s novel Mauprat (1837; Eng. trans. Mauprat) is
immensely readable, with its lyrical alliance of
woman, peasant, and reformed aristocracy effecting a
bloodless transformation of the world by love. From
the later 1830s, influenced by the socialists
Félicité de Lamennais, the former abbé, and Pierre
Leroux, she developed an interest in humanitarian
socialism, an idealism tinged with mysticism,
reflected in works such as Spiridion (1839), Le
Compagnon du tour de France (1840; The Journeyman
Joiner; or, The Companion of the Tour of France),
and Consuelo (1842; Eng. trans. Consuelo). She is an
excellent example of the sentimental socialists
involved in the Revolution of 1848—her record rather
marred by her reluctance to associate herself
closely with the rising groups of women engaged in
their own struggle for civil and political rights. A
different perspective on contemporary feminism
emerges in the vigorous and outspoken travel
writings and journal of the socialist and feminist
activist Flora Tristan, notable for Promenades dans
Londres (1840; The London Journal of Flora Tristan)
and Le Tour de France: journal inédit (written 1844,
published 1973; “The Tour of France: Unpublished
Journal”).
Nodier, Mérimée, and the conte
Charles Nodier and Prosper Mérimée both exploited
the short story and the novella. Nodier specialized
in the conte fantastique (“fantastic tale”) to
explore dream worlds or various forms of madness, as
in La Fée aux miettes (1832; “The Crumb Fairy”),
suggesting the importance of the role of the
unconscious in human beliefs and conduct. Mérimée
also used inexplicable phenomena, as in La Vénus
d’Ille (1837; “The Venus of Ille”), to hint at
repressed aspects of the psyche or the irrational
power of passion. More commonly, combining a
Classical analytic style with Romantic themes, he
directed a cool, ironic look at violent emotions.
Short stories such as Mateo Falcone (1829) and
Carmen (1845; Eng. trans. Carmen) are peaks of this
art.
Balzac
Honoré de Balzac is best known for his Comédie
humaine (“The Human Comedy”), the general title of a
vast series of more than 90 novels and short stories
published between 1829 and 1847. In these works he
concentrated mainly on an examination of French
society from the Revolution of 1789 to the eve of
the Revolution of 1848, organically linking
realistic observation and visionary intuition while
at the same time seeking to analyze the underlying
principles of this new world. He ranged back and
forth, often within the same novel, from the
philosophical to the social, the economic, and the
legal; from Paris to the provinces; and from the
summit of society to the petite bourgeoisie,
studying the destructive power of what he called
thought or passion or vital energy. By using
techniques such as the recurrence of characters in
several novels,
Balzac gave a temporal density and
dynamism to his works. The frustrated ambitions of
his young heroes (Rastignac in Le Père Goriot [1835;
Old Goriot]; Lucien de Rubempré, failed writer
turned journalist, in Illusions perdues [1837–43;
Lost Illusions]) and the subjection of women,
particularly in marriage, are used as eloquent
markers of the moral impasse into which bourgeois
liberalism led the French Revolution. Most
presciently, he emphasized the paradox of money—its
dissolving power and its dynamic force—and of the
every-man-for-himself individualism unleashed by the
Revolution, at once condemning and celebrating the
raw energies of a nascent capitalism. Vautrin, the
master-criminal whose disguises carry him across the
frontiers of Europe, and Madame de Beauséant, the
doyenne of old aristocracy, are the two faces of the
powers that dominate this world, gatekeepers of the
two futures offered to its young inheritors.
Stendhal
French author
pseudonym of Marie-henri Beyle
born Jan. 23, 1783, Grenoble, Fr.
died March 23, 1842, Paris
Main
one of the most original and complex French writers of the first half of
the 19th century, chiefly known for his works of fiction. His finest
novels are Le Rouge et le noir (1830; The Red and the Black) and La
Chartreuse de Parme (1839; The Charterhouse of Parma).
Life.
Stendhal is only one of the many pseudonyms Henri Beyle adopted. His
father, Chérubin Beyle, was a barrister in Grenoble’s high court of
justice. Henri’s mother died when he was seven, and this loss, which he
felt keenly, increased his sense of solitude and his resentment toward
his father. But, though he tended throughout his life to stress the
dreary and oppressive atmosphere of his home after his mother’s death,
there is no reason to believe that he was deprived of affection. As a
student he grew interested in literature and mathematics. In 1799 he
left for Paris, ostensibly to prepare for the entrance examination to
the École Polytechnique, but in reality to escape from Grenoble and from
paternal rule.
His secret ambition on arriving in Paris was to become a successful
playwright. But some highly placed relatives of his, the Darus, obtained
an appointment for him as second lieutenant in the French military
forces stationed in Italy. This led him to discover Piedmont, Lombardy,
and the delights of Milan. The culture and landscape of Italy were the
revelation that was to play a psychologically and thematically
determining role in his life and works.
In 1802 the 19-year-old Henri Beyle was back in Paris and at work on
a number of literary projects, none of which he completed. He dreamed of
becoming a modern Molière, enrolled in drama classes, worked at ridding
himself of his provincial accent, and fell in love with a second-rate
actress (Mélanie Louason), whom he followed to Marseille. By then he was
keeping a diary (posthumously published as his Journal) and writing
other texts dealing with his intimate thoughts.
The year 1806 proved to be a turning point. Count Pierre Daru, having
been appointed intendant-general of Napoleon’s army, had his young
protégé sent as an adjunct military commissary to the German city of
Brunswick. This was the beginning of an administrative career in the
French army that allowed Henri Beyle to discover parts of Germany and
Austria. His army appointment gave him a direct experience of the
Napoleonic regime and of Europe at war. He watched Moscow go up in
flames, took part in the French forces’ retreat from Russia, and helped
organize the military defense of the province of Dauphiné back in
France. In 1814, when the French empire fell, he decided to settle in
Italy.
From the moment he took up residence in Milan, his literary vocation
became irreversible. He became friends with Milanese liberals and
Carbonari patriots, discovered the Edinburgh Review, studied music and
the visual arts, and published his first books: Vies de Haydn, de Mozart
et de Métastase (1814; Lives of Haydn, Mozart and Metastasio) and
Histoire de la peinture en Italie (1817; “History of Painting in
Italy”). In these early works Henri Beyle was not always above
plagiarism, which was seasoned, however, with brilliant and original
insights. His travel book Rome, Naples et Florence en 1817 also appeared
(a later version was published in 1826), and this was the first time he
used the pseudonym of Stendhal. Stendhal’s stay in Milan ended in deep
emotional disappointment: Métilde Dembowski, the woman whose memory was
to haunt him for the rest of his life, rejected him as a lover. His
political friendships had meanwhile compromised him in the eyes of the
Austrian occupying authorities, which finally led him to leave Milan in
1821.
From 1821 to 1830, Stendhal’s social and intellectual life in Paris
was very active. He made a name for himself in the salons as a
conversationalist and polemicist. His wit and unconventional views were
much appreciated, and he had notable friendships and love affairs. In
1822 he published De l’amour (On Love), which claims to study the
operations of love dispassionately and objectively, but which can be
read as a hidden confession of Stendhal’s emotional experiences and
longings. His Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) was one of the first
Romantic manifestos to appear in France. In it Stendhal developed the
central idea that each historical period has been “romantic” in its own
time, that Romanticism is a vital aspect of every cultural period.
Stendhal’s literary production during this period was quite varied. In
addition to his regular contributions to English journals, he published
Vie de Rossini (1823; Life of Rossini); his first novel, Armance (1827);
and the travel book Promenades dans Rome (1829). During this period he
also wrote one of his two masterpieces, the novel Le Rouge et le noir
(The Red and the Black), which appeared in 1830.
The year 1830, during which the July Revolution brought the
constitutional monarch Louis-Philippe to the throne in France, marked a
new turning point in Stendhal’s life. He was appointed French consul in
the port of Civitavecchia in the Papal States. In this small town, where
he felt bored and isolated, Stendhal was occupied by endless
administrative chores and found it difficult to write in a sustained
manner. He sought distractions in nearby Rome, absenting himself
frequently from his official duties. Lonely, aware of age and of failing
health, he felt increasingly drawn to autobiography and began Souvenirs
d’égotisme (1892; Memoirs of an Egotist) and Vie de Henri Brulard (1890;
The Life of Henri Brulard), as well as a new and largely
autobiographical novel entitled Lucien Leuwen (1894). All these works
remained uncompleted, though they were published posthumously, and are
now considered among Stendhal’s finest writings.
During his consulate, Stendhal discovered in Rome unpublished
accounts of crimes of passion and grim executions set in the
Renaissance. They became the inspiration for stories he later published
under the title of Chroniques italiennes (“Italian Chronicles”). But it
was only in Paris, where he took up residence again during a prolonged
leave (1836-1839), that Stendhal could undertake new major literary
work. He composed Mémoires d’un touriste; his second masterpiece, the
novel La Chartreuse de Parme (1839; The Charterhouse of Parma); and
began work on a new novel, Lamiel (1889), which he did not live long
enough to complete. He died in 1842 after suffering a stroke while again
on leave in Paris.
Works
During Stendhal’s lifetime, his reputation was largely based on his
books dealing with the arts and with tourism (a term he helped introduce
in France), and on his political writings and conversational wit. His
unconventional views, his hedonistic inclinations tempered by a capacity
for moral and political indignation, his prankish nature and his hatred
of boredom—all constituted for his contemporaries a blend of provocative
contradictions. But the more authentic Stendhal is to be found
elsewhere, and above all in a cluster of favourite ideas: the hostility
to the concept of “ideal beauty,” the notion of modernity, and the
exaltation of energy, passion, and spontaneity. His personal philosophy,
to which he himself gave the name of “Beylisme” (after his real family
name, Beyle) stressed the importance of the “pursuit of happiness” by
combining enthusiasm with rational skepticism, lucidity with willful
surrender to lyric emotions. “Beylisme,” as he understood it, meant
cultivating a private sensibility while developing the art of hiding and
protecting it.
It was in his novels above all, and in his autobiographical writings
(the interchange between these two literary activities remains a
constant feature in his case), that Stendhal’s thoughts are expressed
most fully. But even these texts remain baffling. Their prosaic and
ironic style at first glance hides the intensity of Stendhal’s vision
and the profundity of his views.
Armance (1827) is a somewhat enigmatic novel in which the hero’s
sexual impotence is symbolic of France’s conformist and oppressive
society after the Restoration. The antagonism between the individual and
society is the central subject of The Red and the Black. This realistic
novel depicts the French social order under the Second Restoration
(1815–30). The story centres on a carpenter’s son, Julien Sorel, a
sensitive and intelligent but extremely ambitious youth who, after
seeing no road to power in the military after Napoleon’s fall,
endeavours to make his mark in the church. Viewing himself as an
unsentimental opportunist, he employs seduction as a means to
advancement, first with Madame de Rênal, whose children he is employed
to tutor. After then spending some time in a seminary, he leaves the
provinces and goes to Paris, where he seduces the aristocratic Mathilde,
the daughter of his second employer. The book ends with Julien’s
execution for the attempted murder of Madame de Rênal after she had
jeopardized his projected marriage to Mathilde.
The title of The Red and the Black apparently refers to both the
tensions in Julien’s character and to the conflicting choice he is faced
with in his quest for success: the army (symbolized by the colour red)
or the church (symbolized by the colour black). A variety of other
polarities tempt the ambitious young hero as he sets out with fierce
determination to rise above his lowly condition: the provinces or Paris,
tender love or sexual conquest, happiness through ambition and
achievement or happiness through reverie and the cultivation of
selfhood. Careerism, political opportunism, the climate of fear and
denunciation in Restoration France, a critique of bourgeois
materialistic values—all these are dealt with in a subtle and incisive
manner in a novel that is based on a newspaper account of a contemporary
crime of passion. Julien Sorel, the central character, is a study in
psychological complexity who both attracts and repels the reader. Timid
and aggressive, sensitive and ruthless, vulnerable and supremely
ambitious, Julien ultimately comes to realize, in prison, the vanity of
worldly success and the superior value of love and a rich inner life.
The Red and the Black also offers delicate portraits of two feminine
figures, the maternal Madame de Renal and the romantic young aristocrat
Mathilde de La Mole. At every point, the novel challenges conventions
and denounces the sham of societal values. As a literary achievement, it
is remarkable for its blend of comedy, satire, and ironic lyricism.
The uncompleted Lucien Leuwen (1894) is perhaps the most
autobiographical of Stendhal’s novels. The memory of Métilde Dembowski
hovers over the relationship between the young hero of the title and
Madame de Chasteller. This biting fictional assessment of French society
and politics during the reign of Louis-Philippe also describes a basic
father-son conflict that corresponds to the conflicting ethos of two
distinct historical periods. As it stands, despite its imperfections and
uncompleted form, Lucien Leuwen contains some of Stendhal’s finest pages
of psychological and social analysis, as well as delicate evocations of
a young lover’s emotional states.
The Charterhouse of Parma is Stendhal’s other masterpiece. It fuses
elements of Renaissance chronicles, fictional and historical sources,
recent historical events (the Napoleonic regime in Italy, the Battle of
Waterloo, the Austrian occupation of Milan), and an imaginative, almost
dreamlike transposition of contemporary reality into fictional terms.
The novel is set mainly in the court of Parma, Italy, in the early 19th
century. Fabrice del Dongo, a young aristocrat and ardent admirer of
Napoleon, goes to Paris to join the French army and is present at the
Battle of Waterloo. He returns thereafter to Parma and enters the church
for worldly advantage under the sponsorship of his aunt, the Duchess de
Sanseverina, who is the mistress of the chief minister of Parma, Count
Mosca. Following an affair with an actress, Fabrice kills a rival, is
imprisoned, escapes, and is pardoned. In prison Fabrice falls in love
with Clélia Conti, the daughter of the citadel’s governor. He continues
his affair with her after she marries, and he becomes a high-ranking
ecclesiastic and an admired preacher. The death of their child and then
of Clélia herself causes Fabrice to retire to the Carthusian monastery,
or charterhouse, of Parma, where he dies.
The incongruous yet always harmonious combination of lyricism and
high comedy, of realism and dreamlike atmosphere, of The Charterhouse of
Parma allows the author to caricaturize the petty tyranny of
post-Napoleonic Europe, to question public morality, and to assert the
prerogatives of love’s follies. There are subtly drawn portraits of the
naive and idealistic young Fabrice del Dongo (notably at the Battle of
Waterloo); of his courageous and passionate aunt, the Duchess de
Sanseverina; of her lover, the benevolent Machiavellian statesman Count
Mosca; and of the young and innocent Clélia Conti, the daughter of
Fabrice’s jailer, who falls in love with the handsome prisoner. Passion
in all its forms is the novel’s recurrent theme. And once again, the
young hero learns the deeper lessons of spirituality, love, and freedom
within the liberating confines of a prison cell.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of The Charterhouse of Parma is
its highly sophisticated psychology. Rejecting traditional notions of a
fixed and determined psychological makeup, Stendhal never defines his
characters and instead depicts individuals in the process of becoming.
His literary devices (his authorial comments, the improvisational tone
of his narration) seem to grant his characters the freedom to discover
themselves. Various forms of freedom are Stendhal’s ultimate
preoccupation, which probably explains why he repeatedly explores the
ambiguities of the prison image. True freedom, in the world of Stendhal,
reveals itself in the context of the cell, once confinement becomes the
symbol of the inner world of dreams and longings. His novels thus
illustrate metaphorically the fundamental conflict between the demands
of society and those of the individual.
Stendhal’s autobiographical writings, Souvenirs d’égotisme (1892;
Memoirs of an Egotist) and Vie de Henri Brulard (1890; The Life of Henri
Brulard), are among his most original achievements. Behind their
vivacity and charming digressions, they reveal the uneasiness of a
tender-hearted and fundamentally insecure human being wearing various
masks. The Life of Henri Brulard in particular is a masterpiece of
ironic self-searching and self-creation, in which the memories of
childhood are closely interwoven with the liberating joy of writing.
Stendhal’s writings and his personality were marked by a striking
independence of mind. He was a romantic who kept his distance from
Romanticism, an antiauthoritarian with a nostalgia for the
pre-Revolutionary world, a dreamer and tender-hearted enthusiast who
passed himself off as a cynic. His writings combine lyrical fervour with
a rationalist’s passion for analysis. Stendhal’s contemporaries,
however, found it difficult to appreciate his nimble and ironic
sensibility. The novelist Honoré de Balzac, in a famous article on The
Charterhouse of Parma published in La Revue parisienne in 1840, was the
only one to recognize his genius as a novelist. Stendhal’s literary fame
came late in the 19th century, and this posthumous fame has steadily
grown since then, largely because of the devotion of “Beylistes” or
“Stendhalians” who have made of him a true cult. Stendhal has now come
to be recognized as one of the great French masters of the novel in the
19th century.
Victor Brombert
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George Sand
pseudonym of Armandine-Aurore-Lucille
Dudevant, née Dupin
born July 1, 1804, Paris, France
died June 8, 1876, Nohant
French Romantic writer, known primarily
for her so-called rustic novels.
She was brought up at Nohant, near La
Châtre in Berry, the country home of her
grandmother. There she gained the
profound love and understanding of the
countryside that were to inform most of
her works. In 1817 she was sent to a
convent in Paris, where she acquired a
mystical fervour that, though it soon
abated, left its mark.
In 1822 Aurore married Baron Casimir
Dudevant. The first years of the
marriage were happy enough, but Aurore
soon tired of her well-intentioned but
somewhat insensitive husband and sought
consolation first in a platonic
friendship with a young magistrate and
then in a passionate liaison with a
neighbour. In January 1831 she left
Nohant for Paris, where she found a good
friend in Henri de Latouche, the
director of Le Figaro, who accepted some
of the articles she wrote with Jules
Sandeau under the pseudonym Jules Sand.
In 1832 she adopted a new pseudonym,
George Sand, for Indiana, a novel in
which Sandeau had had no part. This
novel, which brought her immediate fame,
is a passionate protest against the
social conventions that bind a wife to
her husband against her will and an
apologia for a heroine who abandons an
unhappy marriage and finds love. In
Valentine (1832) and Lélia (1833) the
ideal of free association is extended to
the wider sphere of social and class
relationships. Valentine is the first of
many Sand novels in which the hero is a
peasant or a workman.
Meanwhile, the list of her lovers was
growing; eventually it included, among
others, Prosper Mérimée, Alfred de
Musset, and Frédéric Chopin. She
remained impervious to Musset’s
skeptical views and Chopin’s
aristocratic prejudices, while the man
whose opinions she adopted
wholeheartedly, the philosopher Pierre
Lerous, was never her lover. The fact
remains, however, that most of her early
works, including Lélia, Mauprat (1837),
Spiridion (1839), and Les sept Cordes de
la lyre (1840), show the influence of
one or another of the men with whom she
associated.
Eventually, she found her true form
in her rustic novels, which drew their
chief inspiration from her lifelong love
of the countryside and sympathy for the
poor. In La Mare au diable (1846),
François le Champi (1848), and La Petite
Fadette (1849), the familiar theme of
George Sand’s work—love transcending the
obstacles of convention and class—in the
familiar setting of the Berry
countryside, regained pride of place.
These rustic tales are probably her
finest works. She subsequently produced
a series of novels and plays of
impeccable morality and conservatism.
Among her later works are the
autobiography Histoire de ma vie
(1854–55; “Story of My Life”) and Contes
d’une grand’mère (1873; “Tales of a
Grandmother”), a collection of stories
she wrote for her grandchildren.
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Charles Nodier
born April 29, 1780, Besançon, Fr.
died Jan. 27, 1844, Paris
writer more important for the
influence he had on the French Romantic
movement than for his own writings.
Nodier had an eventful early life, in
the course of which he fell foul of the
authorities for a skit on Napoleon. In
1824 he settled in Paris after his
appointment as director of the
Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal (Arsenal
Library) and soon became one of the
leaders of the literary life of the
capital. In his drawing room at the
Arsenal, Nodier drew together the young
men who were to be the leading lights of
the Romantic movement: Victor Hugo,
Alfred de Musset, and Charles-Augustin
Sainte-Beuve.
An ardent admirer of Goethe and
Shakespeare, he did much to encourage
the French Romantics to look abroad for
inspiration. Nodier wrote a great deal,
but the only works of his that are still
read are his fantastic, masterfully
written short stories, rather in the
style of the German Romantic E.T.A.
Hoffmann. By his revelation of the
creative power of the dream and by his
equation of a state of innocence with
certain conditions normally called mad,
Nodier was rebelling against the tyranny
of “common sense” and opening up a new
literary territory for later
generations. His election to the
Académie Française in 1833 virtually
constituted official recognition that
Romanticism had become a significant and
respectable literary movement.
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Prosper Mérimée
born Sept. 28, 1803, Paris
died Sept. 23, 1870, Cannes, Fr.
French dramatist, historian,
archaeologist, and master of the short
story whose works—Romantic in theme but
Classical and controlled in style—were a
renewal of Classicism in a Romantic age.
Of a cultured, middle-class Norman
background, Mérimée first studied law
but was more devoted to learning the
Greek, Spanish, English, and Russian
languages and their literatures. At 19
he wrote his first play, Cromwell
(1822); his close friend the novelist
Stendhal encouraged him in this literary
direction.
A collection of his plays, Le Théâtre
de Clara Gazul, appeared in 1825.
Indulging his taste for mystification,
he presented them as translations by a
certain Joseph L’Estrange of the work of
a Spanish actress. His next hoax was La
Guzla (1827), by “Hyacinthe Maglanowich,”
ballads about murder, revenge, and
vampires, supposedly translated from the
Illyrian. Both works deceived even
scholars of the day.
Mérimée’s passions were mysticism,
history, and the unusual. Inspired by
the vogue for historical fiction
established by Sir Walter Scott, he
wrote La Jacquerie (1828), 36 dramatic
scenes about a peasant insurrection in
feudal times, and the novel La Chronique
du temps de Charles IX (1829),
concerning French court life during war
and peace.
Mérimée’s short stories best
illustrate his imagination and sombre
temperament; many are mysteries, of
foreign inspiration and local colour.
Spain and Russia were his principal
literary sources; he was the first
interpreter of Russian literature in
France. Pushkin was his master,
especially for his themes of violence
and cruelty and the human psychology
behind them. In one of his best known
stories, “Mateo Falcone” (1833), a
father kills a son for betraying the
family honour. The collection Mosaïque
(1833) was followed by his most famous
novellas: Colomba (1840), the story of a
young Corsican girl who forces her
brother to commit murder for the sake of
a vendetta, and Carmen (1845), in which
an unfaithful gypsy girl is killed by a
soldier who loves her. The latter story
is internationally known through the
opera by Bizet. Lokis (1869) and La
Chambre bleue (1872) show Mérimée’s
fascination with the supernatural.
In 1831 he met a young girl, Jenny
Dacquin, with whom he engaged in a
lifelong correspondence, which was
published after his death as Lettres à
une inconnue (1874; “Letters to an
Unknown Girl”). Mérimée, who served in
the French Admiralty as general
inspector of historical monuments, wrote
his Notes de voyages . . . (1835–40),
covering his travels through Greece,
Spain, Turkey, and France. He was also
an excellent historian and archaeologist
and wrote several works in these fields,
as well as literary criticism.
Mérimée was a longtime friend of the
Countess of Montijo, whom he met in
Spain in 1830. Later, in 1853, when her
daughter became the empress Eugénie of
France, Mérimée was admitted to the
royal circle and made a senator. He was
not fond of Napoleon III, however, and
never became a wholehearted courtier.
His letters to Sir Anthony Panizzi,
principal librarian of the British
Museum and his closest friend in
Mérimée’s old age, have been described
as a “history of the Second Empire.”
They were published posthumously as
Lettres à M. Panizzi: 1850–70 (1881).
Mérimée has been acclaimed for the
precision and restraint of his writing
style. Though his best stories are
imbued with mystery and local colour,
exoticism never seems to take precedence
over the psychological delineation of
character. His use of realistic detail
and precise delineation to establish the
presence of the supernatural and
fantastic is also notable. Mérimée’s
works frequently feature exceptional
characters whose forceful and passionate
natures have something inhuman about
them and which lift them above the
common run of humanity.
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Honoré de Balzac
"Father
Goriot"
French author
original name Honoré Balssa
born May 20, 1799, Tours, France
died August 18, 1850, Paris
French literary artist who produced a
vast number of novels and short stories
collectively called La Comédie humaine
(The Human Comedy). He helped to
establish the traditional form of the
novel and is generally considered to be
one of the greatest novelists of all
time.
Early career
Balzac’s father was a man of southern
peasant stock who worked in the civil
service for 43 years under Louis XVI and
Napoleon. Honoré’s mother came from a
family of prosperous Parisian cloth
merchants. His sister Laure (later de
Surville) was his only childhood friend,
and she became his first biographer.
Balzac was sent to school at the Collège
des Oratoriens at Vendôme from age 8 to
14. At Napoleon’s downfall his family
moved from Tours to Paris, where he went
to school for two more years and then
spent three years as a lawyer’s clerk.
During this time he already aimed at a
literary career, but as the writer of
Cromwell (1819) and other tragic plays
he was utterly unsuccessful. He then
began writing novels filled with mystic
and philosophical speculations before
turning to the production of
potboilers—gothic, humorous, historical
novels—written under composite
pseudonyms. Then he tried a business
career as a publisher, printer, and
owner of a typefoundry, but disaster
soon followed. In 1828 he was narrowly
saved from bankruptcy and was left with
debts of more than 60,000 francs. From
then on his life was to be one of
mounting debts and almost incessant
toil. He returned to writing with a new
mastery, and his literary apprenticeship
was over.
Two works of 1829 brought Balzac to the
brink of success. Les Chouans, the first
novel he felt enough confidence about to
have published under his own name, is a
historical novel about the Breton
peasants called Chouans who took part in
a royalist insurrection against
Revolutionary France in 1799. The other,
La Physiologie du mariage (The
Physiology of Marriage), is a humorous
and satirical essay on the subject of
marital infidelity, encompassing both
its causes and its cure. The six stories
in his Scènes de la vie privée (1830;
“Scenes from Private Life”) further
increased his reputation. These long
short stories are for the most part
psychological studies of girls in
conflict with parental authority. The
minute attention he gave to describing
domestic background in his works
anticipated the spectacularly detailed
societal observations of his later
Parisian studies.
From this point forward Balzac spent
much of his time in Paris. He began to
frequent some of the best-known Parisian
salons of the day and redoubled his
efforts to set himself up as a dazzling
figure in society. To most people he
seemed full of exuberant vitality,
talkative, jovial and robustious,
egoistic, credulous, and boastful. He
adopted for his own use the armorial
bearings of an ancient noble family with
which he had no connection and assumed
the honorific particle de. He was avid
for fame, fortune, and love but was
above all conscious of his own genius.
He also began to have love affairs with
fashionable or aristocratic women at
this time, finally gaining that
firsthand understanding of mature women
that is so evident in his novels.
Between 1828 and 1834 Balzac led a
tumultuous existence, spending his
earnings in advance as a dandy and
man-about-town. A fascinating raconteur,
he was fairly well received in society.
But social ostentation was only a
relaxation from phenomenal bouts of
work—14 to 16 hours spent writing at his
table in his white, quasi-monastic
dressing gown, with his goose-quill pen
and his endless cups of black coffee. In
1832 Balzac became friendly with Éveline
Hanska, a Polish countess who was
married to an elderly Ukrainian
landowner. She, like many other women,
had written to Balzac expressing
admiration of his writings. They met
twice in Switzerland in 1833—the second
time in Geneva, where they became
lovers—and again in Vienna in 1835. They
agreed to marry when her husband died,
and so Balzac continued to conduct his
courtship of her by correspondence; the
resulting Lettres à l’étrangère
(“Letters to a Foreigner”), which
appeared posthumously (4 vol.,
1889–1950), are an important source of
information for the history both of
Balzac’s life and of his work.
To clear his debts and put himself in a
position to marry Madame Hanska now
became Balzac’s great incentive. He was
at the peak of his creative power. In
the period 1832–35 he produced more than
20 works, including the novels Le
Médecin de campagne (1833; The Country
Doctor), Eugénie Grandet (1833),
L’Illustre Gaudissart (1833; The
Illustrious Gaudissart), and Le Père
Goriot (1835), one of his masterpieces.
Among the shorter works were Le Colonel
Chabert (1832), Le Curé de Tours (1832;
The Vicar of Tours), the trilogy of
stories entitled Histoire des treize
(1833–35; History of the Thirteen), and
Gobseck (1835). Between 1836 and 1839 he
wrote Le Cabinet des antiques (1839),
the first two parts of another
masterpiece, Illusions perdues (1837–43;
Lost Illusions), César Birotteau (1837),
and La Maison Nucingen (1838; The Firm
of Nucingen). Between 1832 and 1837 he
also published three sets of Contes
drolatiques (Droll Stories). These
stories, Rabelaisian in theme, are
written with great verve and gusto in an
ingenious pastiche of 16th-century
language. During the 1830s he also wrote
a number of philosophical novels dealing
with mystical, pseudoscientific, and
other exotic themes. Among these are La
Peau de chagrin (1831; The Wild Ass’s
Skin), Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu (1831;
The Unknown Masterpiece), Louis Lambert
(1834), La Recherche de l’absolu (1834;
The Quest of the Absolute), and
Séraphîta (1834–35).
In all these varied works Balzac emerged
as the supreme observer and chronicler
of contemporary French society. These
novels are unsurpassed for their
narrative drive, their large casts of
vital, diverse, and interesting
characters, and their obsessive interest
in and examination of virtually all
spheres of life: the contrast between
provincial and metropolitan manners and
customs; the commercial spheres of
banking, publishing, and industrial
enterprise; the worlds of art,
literature, and high culture; politics
and partisan intrigue; romantic love in
all its aspects; and the intricate
social relations and scandals among the
aristocracy and the haute bourgeoisie.
No theme is more typically Balzacian
than that of the ambitious young
provincial fighting for advancement in
the competitive world of Paris. Balzac
admired those individuals who were
ruthless, astute, and, above all,
successful in thrusting their way up the
social and economic scale at all costs.
He was especially attracted by the theme
of the individual in conflict with
society: the adventurer, the scoundrel,
the unscrupulous financier, and the
criminal. Frequently his villains are
more vigorous and interesting than his
virtuous characters. He was both
fascinated and appalled by the French
social system of his time, in which the
bourgeois values of material
acquisitiveness and gain were steadily
replacing what he viewed as the more
stable moral values of the old-time
aristocracy.
These topics provided material largely
unknown, or unexplored, by earlier
writers of French fiction. The
individual in Balzac’s stories is
continually affected by the pressure of
material difficulties and social
ambitions, and he may expend his
tremendous vitality in ways Balzac views
as socially destructive and
self-destructive. Linked with this idea
of the potentially destructive power of
passionate will, emotion, and thought is
Balzac’s peculiar notion of a vital
fluid concentrated inside the person, a
store of energy that he may husband or
squander as he desires, thereby
lengthening or shortening his vital
span. Indeed, a supremely important
feature in Balzac’s characters is that
most are spendthrifts of this vital
force, a fact that explains his
monomaniacs who are both victim and
embodiment of some ruling passion;
avarice, as in the main character of
Gobseck, a usurer gloating over his
sense of power, or the miserly father
obsessed with riches in Eugénie Grandet;
excessive paternal affection, as in the
idolatrous Learlike father in Le Père
Goriot; feminine vindictiveness, as
evidenced in La Cousine Bette and a
half-dozen other novels; the mania of
the art collector, as in Le Cousin Pons;
the artist’s desire for perfection, as
in Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu; the
curiosity of the scientist, as in the
fanatical chemist of La Recherche de
l’absolu; or the vaulting and frustrated
ambition of the astonishingly
resourceful criminal mastermind Vautrin
in Illusions perdues and Splendeurs et
misères des courtisanes. Once such an
obsession has gained a hold, Balzac
shows it growing irresistibly in power
and blinding the person concerned to all
other considerations. The typical
structure of his novels from the early
1830s onward is determined by this
approach: there is a long period of
preparation and exposition, and then
tension mounts swiftly to an inevitable
climax, as in classical tragedy.
La Comédie humaine
The year 1834 marks a climax in Balzac’s
career, for by then he had become
totally conscious of his great plan to
group his individual novels so that they
would comprehend the whole of
contemporary society in a diverse but
unified series of books. There were to
be three general categories of novels:
Études analytiques (“Analytic Studies”),
dealing with the principles governing
human life and society; Études
philosophiques (“Philosophical
Studies”), revealing the causes
determining human action; and Études de
moeurs (“Studies of Manners”), showing
the effects of those causes, and
themselves to be divided into six kinds
of scènes—private, provincial, Parisian,
political, military, and country life.
This entire project resulted in a total
of 12 volumes (1834–37). By 1837 Balzac
had written much more, and by 1840 he
had hit upon a Dantesque title for the
whole: La Comédie humaine. He negotiated
with a consortium of publishers for an
edition under this name, 17 volumes of
which appeared between 1842 and 1848,
including a famous foreword written in
1842. In 1845, having new works to
include and many others in project, he
began preparing for another complete
edition. A “definitive edition” was
published, in 24 volumes, between 1869
and 1876. The total number of novels and
novellas comprised in the Comédie
humaine is roughly 90.
Also in 1834 the idea of using
“reappearing characters” matured. Balzac
was to establish a pool of characters
from which he would constantly and
repeatedly draw, thus adding a sense of
solidarity and coherence to the Comédie
humaine. A certain character would
reappear—now in the forefront, now in
the background, of different fictions—in
such a way that the reader could
gradually form a full picture of him.
Balzac’s use of this device places him
among the originators of the modern
novel cycle. In the end, the total
number of named characters in the
Comédie humaine is estimated to have
reached 2,472, with a further 566
unnamed characters.
In January 1842 Balzac learned of the
death of Wenceslas Hanski. He now had
good expectations of marrying Éveline,
but there were many obstacles, not the
least being his inextricable
indebtedness. She in fact held back for
many years, and the period of 1842–48
shows Balzac continuing and even
intensifying his literary activity in
the frantic hope of winning her, though
he had to contend with increasing ill
health.
Balzac produced many notable works
during the early and mid-1840s. These
include the masterpieces Une Ténébreuse
Affaire (1841; A Shady Business), La
Rabouilleuse (1841–42; The Black Sheep),
Ursule Mirouët (1841), and one of his
greatest works, Splendeurs et misères
des courtisanes (1843–47; A Harlot High
and Low). Balzac’s last two masterpieces
were La Cousine Bette (1847; Cousin
Bette) and Le Cousin Pons (1847; Cousin
Pons).
In the autumn of 1847 Balzac went to
Madame Hanska’s château at Wierzchownia
and remained there until February 1848.
He returned again in October to stay,
mortally sick, until the spring of 1850.
Then at last Éveline relented. They were
married in March and proceeded to Paris,
where Balzac lingered on miserably for
the few months before his death.
Balzac did not quite realize his
tremendous aim of making his novels
comprehend the whole of society at that
time. His projected scenes of military
and political life were only partially
completed, and there were certain other
gaps, for instance in regard to the new
class of industrial workers.
Nevertheless, few novelists have
thronged their pages with men and women
drawn from so many different spheres,
nor with characters so widely
representative of human passions and
frailties, projected with dynamic and
convincing force.
Balzac was notable for his peculiar
methods of composition. He often began
with a relatively simple subject and a
brief first draft, but fresh ideas came
crowding in during composition until
finally the story expanded far beyond
his first intention. The trouble lay in
the fact that Balzac tended to expand
and amplify his original story by making
emendations after it had been typeset by
the printers. The original skeleton of a
story was thus filled out until it had
reached the proportions of a full-length
novel, but only at a ruinous cost of
printer’s bills to its author. Even when
the novel was in print he would
frequently introduce new variations on
his theme, as successive editions
appeared.
Balzac’s method was almost invariably to
reinforce, to emphasize, and to amplify.
There are lengthy digressions in which
he aired his remarkably detailed
knowledge of legal procedures, financial
manipulations, or industrial processes,
but at its best his style is remarkably
graphic, fast-moving and tersely
epigrammatic but richly studded with
sarcasm, wit, and psychological
observation. His command of the French
language was probably unrivaled, and he
was also an outstanding master of
dialogue. His sardonic humour saves his
more pessimistic stories from being
uniformly dark, and he had a real gift
for comedy.
Balzac is regarded as the creator of
realism in the novel. He is also
acknowledged as having helped to
establish the technique of the
traditional novel, in which consequent
and logically determined events are
narrated by an all-seeing observer (the
omniscient narrator) and characters are
coherently presented. Balzac had
exceptional powers of observation and a
photographic memory, but he also had a
sympathetic, intuitive capacity to
understand and describe other people’s
attitudes, feelings, and motivations. He
was bent on illustrating the relation
between cause and effect, between social
background and character. His ambition
was to “compete with the civil
register,” exactly picturing his
contemporaries in their class
distinctions and occupations. In this he
succeeded, but he went even further in
his efforts to show that the human
spirit has power over men and events—to
become, as he has been called, “the
Shakespeare of the novel.”
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APPENDIX
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Eugène Sue
born Jan. 26,
1804, Paris, France
died Aug. 3, 1857, Annecy, Savoy
French author of sensational novels of the seamy
side of urban life and a leading exponent of the
roman-feuilleton (“newspaper serial”). His
works, although faulted for their melodramatics,
were the first to deal with many of the social
ills that accompanied the Industrial Revolution
in France.
Sue’s early
experiences as a naval surgeon prompted his
first books, several highly coloured sea stories
(e.g., Plik et Plok, 1831). He also wrote a
number of historical novels and worked as a
journalist. Having inherited a fortune from his
father, Sue became a well-known dandy. His
carriage and horses, pack of beagles, and
displays of luxury made him the talk of Paris.
He was one of the first members of the exclusive
French Jockey Club (1834). He depicted
contemporary “high life” in Arthur (1838) and
Mathilde (1841). The latter showed socialist
tendencies, and Sue turned in this direction in
Les Mystères de Paris (1842–43; The Mysteries of
Paris)—which influenced Victor Hugo’s Les
Misérables—and Le Juif errant (1844–45; The
Wandering Jew). Published in installments, these
long but exciting novels vastly increased the
circulation of the newspapers in which they
appeared. Both books display Sue’s powerful
imagination, exuberant narrative style, and keen
dramatic sense. These qualities, along with
Sue’s realistic and sympathetic depictions of
the urban poor, help to compensate for his
implausible plots and one-dimensional
characters. Sue’s other books are less
successful.
After
participating in the 1848 Revolution, Sue was
elected Socialist deputy for the Seine in 1850.
He opposed Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état in 1851,
went into exile at Annecy, Savoy (then
independent of France), and remained there until
his death.
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