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French literature
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19th-century thought
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Louis-Gabriel-Ambroise, vicomte de Bonald
Jules Michelet
Alexis de Tocqueville
Joseph de Maistre
Auguste Comte
Ernest Renan
"The Life of Jesus"
Hippolyte Taine
Théophile Gautier
Théodore de Banville
Charles-Marie-René
Leconte de Lisle
Charles
Baudelaire
"The Flowers of Evil"
Edmond and
Jules
Goncourt
Gustave Flaubert
"Madame Bovary"
PART
I,
PART II,
PART
III
Eugène Scribe
Dumas
Alexandre, fils
"The Lady of the Camellias"
Eugène-Marin Labiche
Henry-François Becque
Alfred Jarry
Émile Zola
"J'accuse" (I accuse)
Guy de Maupassant
"Bel-Ami"
Joris-Karl Huysmans
Jules Barbey
Octave Mirbeau
Paul Verlaine
"Poems"
Jules Laforgue
Stéphane Mallarmé
Arthur Rimbaud
"Poems"
Jean Moréas
Anatole France
Jules Verne
"Twenty
Thousand Leagues Under the Sea."
Illustrations by Alphonse de Neuville and Édouard Riou
"The Children of Captain Grant"
Illustrations by Édouard Riou
"The Mysterious Island"
Illustrations by
Jules Ferat
Edmond
Rostand
"Cyrano De Bergerac"
Alphonse Daudet
"Tartarin
de Tarascon"
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19th-century thought
Literary criticism and journalism
The passionate, even virulent, political journalism
of the Revolutionary period soon slowed to a trickle
under Napoleon. Literary debate interwoven with
political considerations was renewed after 1815, and
a shifting spectrum of royalist Romantics and
Neoclassical liberals moved toward a
liberal-Romantic consensus about 1830. The young
critic
Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve,
himself the author of poems, was an advocate of
Romanticism about 1830, but he progressively
detached himself from it as he elaborated his
biographical critical method. Criticism in the major
literary reviews tended to be from a modified
Neoclassical viewpoint throughout the 1830s and even
the 1840s, the Romantics replying in inflammatory
prefaces attached to their own works. The surge in
newspaper circulation after 1836 tended to create a
more “popular” market for serialized novels with
strong melodramatic effects, as in Eugène Sue’s
Mystères de Paris (1842–43; The Mysteries of Paris).
Historical writing
Early 19th-century historians were committed to
historical erudition, but their works often seem
closer to the world of literature. Augustin
Thierry’s narratives present the histories of
England and France in terms of ethnicity (Normans
against Saxons and Franks against Gallo-Romans).
This is essentially a poetic concept close to that
of
Sir Walter Scott’s
Ivanhoe. Similarly, the early volumes of Jules
Michelet’s great history of France (1833–44) are
constructed in terms of a poetic idea of intuitive
sympathy with the subject, one that would make it
possible to resurrect the essence of a past period
as encapsulated in the symbolic figures of the
historian’s imagination. Alexis de Tocqueville
represents a turning away from Romantic
historiography in his great analytic studies of
social principles in De la démocratie en Amérique
(1835–40; Democracy in America) and L’Ancien Régime
et la Révolution (1856; The Old Regime and the
Revolution).
The
intellectual climate before 1848
The counterrevolutionary era of the early 19th
century saw a renewal of interest in religion,
ranging from the sentimental religiosity of
Chateaubriand to the traditionalist and
antidemocratic theology of Louis-Gabriel-Ambroise, vicomte de Bonald, and
Joseph de Maistre, but 18th-century
sensualism continued and was developed by the
Idéologues.
Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, comte
de Saint-Simon, and his followers
tried to evolve a synthesis, which proved unstable,
between socialistic scientific analysis,
particularly of economics, and Christian belief.
Félicité de Lamennais, a Roman Catholic priest,
moved toward a Christian socialism that ultimately
estranged him from the church. The whole first half
of the century is marked by attempts to reconcile
religious faith, and the hierarchies it supported,
with the legacy of the Enlightenment that
increasingly governed society and its structures:
rationalist thought and the principles of democracy.
Renan,
Taine, and positivism
After the failure of what was seen as the vague
idealism of the 1848 revolution, a consciously
scientific spirit, directed toward observed fact,
came to dominate the study of social and
intellectual life. Auguste Comte’s Cours de
philosophie positive (1830–42; The Positive
Philosophy of Auguste Comte) fathered this new
school of thought, called positivism, which became
almost a new religion.
Ernest Renan adapted this scientific
approach to the study of religion itself, most
notably in his Vie de Jésus (1863;
Life of Jesus), which placed
Jesus in historical, not theological, perspective.
Hippolyte Taine’s continuation of positivist
analysis, which emphasized the importance of
biological science, produced a form of biological
determinism to explain human conduct. His
explanation of how writers are made, by the triple
force of “race,” “milieu,” and “moment,” had a
crucial impact on, for example, the Naturalist
literary theories of
Émile Zola.
Colin Smethurst Jennifer Birkett
Louis-Gabriel-Ambroise, vicomte de
Bonald

born
Oct. 2, 1754, Le Monna, near Millau, Fr. died Nov. 23, 1840, Le Monna
political philosopher and statesman who,
with the French Roman Catholic thinker
Joseph de Maistre, was a leading
apologist for Legitimism, a position
contrary to the values of the French
Revolution and favouring monarchical and
ecclesiastical authority.
Mayor
of Millau from 1785 to 1789, Bonald
became president of the district of
Aveyron’s administration in 1790 but
resigned the next year in protest
against the Civil Constitution of the
Clergy. Passed by the new Constituent
Assembly of the nation, that reform was
rejected by the pope, most of the French
clergy, and King Louis XVI for the
restraints that it put upon the Roman
Catholic church in France. Emigrating to
Heidelberg, Bonald was soon condemned by
the revolutionary Directory for his
highly royalist Théorie du pouvoir
politique et religieux (1796; “Theory of
Political and Religious Power”). In 1797
he returned to France, where he wrote
his Essai analytique sur les lois
naturelles de l’ordre social (1800;
“Analytical Essay on the Natural Laws of
Social Order”); Du divorce (1801); and
Législation primitive considérée . . .
par les seules lumières de la raison, 3
vol. (1802; “Primitive Legislation
Considered . . . by the Light of Reason
Alone”).
After
the exile of Napoleon and the
restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in
1814, Bonald became a member of the
council of public instruction (1814),
was nominated to the Académie Française
(1816), and was created vicomte (1821)
and peer (1823). During these years he
wrote Réflexions sur l’intérêt général
de l’Europe (1815; “Reflections on the
General Interest of Europe”) and
Démonstration philosophique du principe
constitutif de la société (1830;
“Philosophical Demonstration of the
Formative Principle of Society”). With
the advent of the July Revolution of
1830, Bonald resigned his peerage and
retired to spend the last years of his
life at the château Le Monna.
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Jules Michelet

born
Aug. 21, 1798, Paris, France died Feb. 9, 1874, Hyères
French nationalist historian best known
for his monumental Histoire de France
(1833–67). Michelet’s method, an attempt
to resurrect the past by immersing his
own personality in his narrative,
resulted in a historical synthesis of
great dramatic power.
Michelet was the son of a modest printer
who managed to give Jules an education.
A brilliant student, Michelet at 29 was
teaching history and philosophy at the
École Normale Supérieure. He had already
published textbooks and a translation
(1827) of Giambattista Vico’s Scienza
nuova (“New Science”). The July
Revolution (1830) confirmed Vico’s
influence on Michelet in stressing man’s
own part in the making of history,
conceived as a continuous struggle of
human freedom against fatality. This,
the main theme of the Introduction à
l’histoire universelle (1831), was to
underlie Michelet’s later writings.
After
the Histoire romaine, 2 vol. (1831),
Michelet devoted himself to medieval and
modern history; his appointment as head
of the historical section of the Record
Office in the same year provided him
with unique resources for carrying out
his monumental life’s work, the Histoire
de France. The first six volumes
(1833–43) stop at the end of the Middle
Ages; they include the “Tableau de la
France,” in which the emergence of
France as a nation is seen as a victory
over racial and geographic determinism;
they also include his treatment of Joan
of Arc as the very soul of France and
the living symbol of his own patriotic
and democratic ideals.
Michelet deliberately threw his intimate
self into his narrative, convinced that
this was the way to achieve the
historian’s ultimate aim: the
resurrection (or re-creation) of the
past. Such a resurrection must be
integral: all the elements of the
past—artistic, religious, economic, as
well as political—must be brought back,
intertwined, as they once were, in a
living synthesis. Arbitrary and
overambitious as the undertaking seems,
Michelet’s compassionate genius and
romantic imagination enabled him to
conjure up an effective evocation,
unsurpassed for poetic and dramatic
power.
Toward
the end of this period, which was marked
by private crises reflected in his work
(the death of his first wife, in 1839,
and of his friend Mme Dumesnil, in 1842,
cast shadows over whole periods of his
Histoire de France), Michelet turned
away from Christianity and began to
profess a messianic belief in democratic
progress. His increasing hostility to
the church, expressed in his lectures at
the Collège de France, eventually
brought him into conflict with the
Jesuits and caused his lectures to be
suspended in January 1848.
A month
later, the revolution that he had
heralded in Le Peuple (1846) seemed to
bring about the realization of his
dreams. But they were soon shattered: in
1852 Michelet, having refused allegiance
to the Second Empire, lost his posts. In
1847 he had interrupted the sequence of
the Histoire de France to write the
Histoire de la révolution française, 7
vol. (1847–53). He visualized the French
Revolution as a climax, as the triumph
of la Justice over la Grâce (by which he
meant both Christian dogma and the
arbitrary power of the monarchy). These
volumes, written at a feverish pace, are
a vivid, impassioned chronicle.
Michelet then resumed the Histoire de
France from the Renaissance to the eve
of the revolution (11 vol., 1855–67).
Unfortunately, his hatred of priests and
kings, his hasty or abusive treatment of
documents, and his mania for symbolic
interpretation continually distort these
volumes into hallucinations or
nightmares. Also thus distorted is La
Sorcière (1862), an apology for witches
considered as godforsaken souls, victims
of the antinatural interdictions of the
church.
A new
and happier inspiration produced a
series of books on nature: L’Oiseau
(1856); L’Insecte (1858); La Mer (1861);
La Montagne (1868). They reflect the
influence of his second marriage to
Athénaïs Mialaret, 30 years his junior,
in 1849; written in a lyrical vein, they
contain some of the most beautiful pages
of a supreme prose writer. L’Amour
(1858) and La Femme (1860), written
under the same influence, are erotic and
didactic.
The
Franco-German War of 1870 shattered
Michelet’s idealism and his illusions
about Germany. After his death, in 1874,
his widow tampered with his diaries, and
their publication as a whole was begun
only in 1959 (Journal, vol. 1, 1959,
vol. 2, 1962; Écrits de jeunesse, 1959).
They record his travels through Europe,
and, above all, they give a key to his
personality and illuminate the
relationship between his intimate
experiences and his work.
Jean J. Seznec
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Alexis de Tocqueville

French historian and political writer
born July 29, 1805, Paris, France died April 16, 1859, Cannes
Main political scientist, historian, and politician, best known for Democracy
in America, 4 vol. (1835–40), a perceptive analysis of the political and
social system of the United States in the early 19th century.
Early life Tocqueville was a great-grandson of the statesman Chrétien de
Malesherbes (1721–94), a liberal aristocratic victim of the French
Revolution and a political model for the young Tocqueville. Almost
diminutive in stature, acutely sensitive, and plagued by severe bouts of
anxiety since childhood, he remained close to his parents throughout his
life.
Despite a frail voice in a fragile body, distaste for the daily
demands of parliamentary existence, and long periods of illness and
nervous exhaustion, Tocqueville chose politics as his vocation and
adhered to this choice until he was driven from office. His decision in
favour of a public career was made with some assurance of success. His
father was a loyal royalist prefect and in 1827 was made a peer of
France by Charles X. At that time, young Tocqueville moved easily into
government service as an apprentice magistrate. There he prepared
himself for political life while observing the impending constitutional
confrontation between the Conservatives and the Liberals, with growing
sympathy for the latter. He was strongly influenced by the lectures of
the historian and statesman François Guizot (1787–1874), who asserted
that the decline of aristocratic privilege was historically inevitable.
After the manner of Liberals under the autocratic regime of the restored
Bourbon kings, Tocqueville began to study English history as a model of
political development.
He entered public life in the company of a close friend who was to
become his alter ego—Gustave de Beaumont. Their life histories are
virtual mirror images. Of similar backgrounds and positions, they were
companions in their travels in America, England, and Algeria,
coordinated their writings, and ultimately entered the legislature
together.
The July Revolution of 1830 that put the “citizen king”
Louis-Philippe of Orléans on the throne was a turning point for
Tocqueville. It deepened his conviction that France was moving rapidly
toward complete social equality. Breaking with the older liberal
generation, he no longer compared France with the English constitutional
monarchy but compared it with democratic America. Of more personal
concern, despite his oath of loyalty to the new monarch, his position
had become precarious because of his family ties with the ousted Bourbon
king. He and Beaumont, seeking to escape from their uncomfortable
political situation, asked for and received official permission to study
the uncontroversial problem of prison reforms in America. They also
hoped to return with knowledge of a society that would mark them as
especially fit to help mold France’s political future.
Visit to the United States Tocqueville and Beaumont spent nine months in the United States during
1831 and 1832, out of which came first their joint book, On the
Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application in France
(1833); Beaumont’s Marie; or, Slavery in the United States (1835), on
America’s race problems; and the first part of Tocqueville’s Democracy
in America (1835–40). On the basis of observations, readings, and
discussions with a host of eminent Americans, Tocqueville attempted to
penetrate directly to the essentials of American society and to
highlight that aspect—equality of conditions—that was most relevant to
his own philosophy. Tocqueville’s study analyzed the vitality, the
excesses, and the potential future of American democracy. Above all, the
work was infused with his message that a society, properly organized,
could hope to retain liberty in a democratic social order.
The first part of Democracy in America won an immediate reputation
for its author as a political scientist. During this period, probably
the happiest and most optimistic of his life, Tocqueville was named to
the Legion of Honour, the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences
(1838), and the French Academy (1841). With the prizes and royalties
from the book, he even found himself able to rebuild his ancestral
chateau in Normandy. Within a few years his book had been published in
England, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Hungary, Denmark, and Sweden. Although
it was sometimes viewed as having been derived from politically biased
sources, it was soon accorded the status of a classic in the United
States.
In 1836 Tocqueville married Mary Mottely, an Englishwoman.
Tocqueville spent the next four years working on the final portion of
Democracy in America, which was published in 1840. Its composition took
far longer, moved farther afield, and ended far more soberly than
Tocqueville originally had intended. American society slid into the
background, and Tocqueville attempted to complete a picture of the
influence of equality itself on all aspects of modern society. France
increasingly became his principal example, and what he saw there altered
the tone of his work. He observed the curtailment of liberties by the
Liberals, who had come to power in 1830, as well as the growth of state
intervention in economic development. Most depressing to him was the
increased political apathy and acquiescence of his fellow citizens in
this rising paternalism. His chapters on democratic individualism and
centralization in Democracy in America contained a new warning based on
these observations. He argued that a mild, stagnant despotism was the
greatest threat to democracy.
First political career During this period Tocqueville fulfilled his lifelong ambition to enter
politics. He lost his first bid for the Chamber of Deputies in 1837 but
won election two years later. Eventually, Tocqueville built up an
enormous personal influence in his constituency, winning subsequent
elections by more than 70 percent of the vote and becoming president of
his departmental council (a local representative body). In local
politics his quest for preeminence was completely fulfilled, but his
need for uncompromised dignity and independence deprived him of
influence in the Chamber of Deputies for a much longer time. He was not
able to follow the leadership of others, nor did his oratorical style
win him quick recognition as a leader. As a result, he had no major
legislative accomplishment to his credit during the reign of
Louis-Philippe. His speech prophesying revolution only a few weeks
before it took place in France in February 1848 (part of the wider
Revolutions of 1848 that befell Europe that year) fell on deaf ears. The
biting sketches of friend, foe, and even himself in his Recollections
(1893) reflect his feeling of the general mediocrity of political
leadership before and after 1848.
Revolution of 1848 The Revolution of 1848 brought about a new political situation for
France and for Tocqueville. Having decried apathy as the chief danger
for France, Tocqueville recognized even before the revolution that
France was faced with a politically awakened working class that might
well propel French politics into socialist and revolutionary channels.
Tocqueville considered economic independence as necessary to the
preservation of his own intellectual independence. He thus viewed
pressures of the dependent poor for state welfare and of the unemployed
for state employment as the initial steps to a universal and degrading
dependence on the state by all social classes. Unsympathetic to
revolutionaries and contemptuous of socialists before the revolution,
Tocqueville opposed the demands of the Parisian workers during the June
days of 1848, when their uprising was bloodily suppressed by the
military dictator General Louis Cavaignac, as well as in the debates
over the constitution of 1848. The only intellectual change produced in
Tocqueville by the events of 1848 was a recognition of the strength of
socialist ideas and of the problematic nature of the proprietary
society. Although he had sought to reconcile the aristocracy to liberal
democracy in Democracy in America, he rejected social democracy as it
emerged in 1848 as incompatible with liberal democracy.
Politically, Tocqueville’s own position was dramatically improved by
the February Revolution. His electorate expanded from 700 to 160,000
under universal manhood suffrage. He was elected as a conservative
Republican to the Constituent Assembly by 79 percent of the voters and
again in 1849 by more than 87 percent. Along with Beaumont, he was
nominated to the committee that wrote the constitution of the Second
Republic, and the following year he became vice president of the
Assembly. A government crisis produced by French armed intervention to
restore papal authority in Rome prompted his appointment as minister of
foreign affairs between June and October 1849, during which time he
worked cautiously to preserve the balance of power in Europe and to
prevent France from extending its foreign involvements. His speeches
were more successful and his self-confidence soared, but the results
gave him little more durable satisfaction than those he had attained
during the July monarchy under Louis-Philippe.
Shortly after his dismissal from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs by
President Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte in October 1849, Tocqueville suffered
a physical collapse. After a slow recovery he performed a final service
for the Second French Republic. As reporter for the constitutional
revision committee, he attempted to avert the final confrontation
between the president and the legislature, which ended with an executive
seizure of dictatorial power. Briefly imprisoned for opposing Louis-Napoléon’s
coup d’état on December 2, 1851, Tocqueville was deprived of all
political offices for refusing his oath of loyalty to the new regime.
Thrown back on a small circle of political allies and friends, he felt a
deeper sense of isolation and political pessimism than ever before.
Return to politics Seeking to reenter politics, he reverted to the strategy of his youthful
success—the publication of a book on the fundamental themes of liberty
and equality. He chose as his subject the French Revolution, and, after
years of research and intermittent illnesses, The Old Regime and the
Revolution appeared in 1856 as the first part of his projected study.
Tocqueville sought to demonstrate the continuity of political behaviour
and attitudes that made postrevolutionary French society as prepared to
accept despotism as that of the old regime. In this final study the
traumatic events of the years 1848–51 were clearly the source of his
emphasis on the durability of centralization and class hostility in
French history. France seemed less the democratic society of the future
he had glimpsed in America than the prisoner of its own past. Against
the pessimism of his analysis of French political tendencies, The Old
Regime reaffirmed the libertarian example of the Anglo-American world.
The acclaim that greeted this study briefly dispelled the gloom of his
last years. Once again a public figure, he made a visit to England in
1857 that culminated in an audience with the prince consort and was the
last public triumph of his life. He returned to his work, but, before he
could finish his study of the Revolution, he collapsed and died.
Reputation Tocqueville’s reputation in the 19th century reached its high point
during the decade following his death as the great European powers
accommodated themselves to universal suffrage. He died just at the onset
of a revival of liberalism in France. The nine-volume publication of his
works, edited by Beaumont (1860–66), was received as the legacy of a
martyr of liberty. In England his name was invoked during the franchise
reform debates of the 1860s, and in Germany it was linked to
controversies over liberalization and federalization in the years
preceding the empire devised by Otto von Bismarck. After 1870 his
influence began to decline, a process not substantially reversed by
either the posthumous publication of his Recollections in 1893 or that
of his correspondence with his friend, the diplomatist and philosopher
Arthur de Gobineau. By the turn of the century, he was almost forgotten,
and his works, which seemed too abstract and speculative for a
generation that believed only in ascertained knowledge, were generally
regarded as outdated classics. Moreover, Tocqueville’s prediction of
democracy as a vast and uniformly leveling power seemed to have
miscarried by not foreseeing both the extent of the new inequalities and
conflicts produced by industrialization and those produced by European
nationalisms and imperialism. The classless society had failed to appear
in Europe, and America seemed to have become European by becoming
nationalist and imperialist. In France, Tocqueville’s name was too
closely identified with a narrowly defined Liberal tradition, which
rapidly lost influence during the Third Republic. Although his work as
an innovative historian was acknowledged, it is significant that the
revival of his ideas and reputation as a political sociologist owes so
much to American, English, and German scholarship.
The 20th-century totalitarian challenge to the survival of liberal
institutions produced by two world wars and by the Great Depression of
the 1930s fostered a “Tocqueville renaissance.” The outdated facts of
his books seemed less significant than the political philosophy implicit
in his search to preserve liberty in public life and his strategies for
analyzing latent social tendencies. His work was found to display a
wealth of fruitful philosophical and sociological hypotheses. At a
popular level, the renewed upsurge of social democracy in Europe after
1945 combined with the polarization of the Cold War to produce a view of
Tocqueville in the West as an alternative to Marx as a prophet of social
change. Again, as in the late 1850s and 1860s, Tocqueville rose to
heights of popularity, especially in the 1990s in the United States,
where his travels were retraced. It seems certain that Tocqueville will
continue to be invoked as an authority and inspiration by those sharing
his contempt of static authoritarian societies as well as his belief in
the final disappearance of class divisions and in liberty as the
ultimate political value.
Seymour Drescher
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Joseph de Maistre

born
April 1, 1753, Chambéry, France died February 26, 1821, Turin, kingdom
of Sardinia [Italy]
French polemical author, moralist, and
diplomat who, after being uprooted by
the French Revolution in 1789, became a
great exponent of the conservative
tradition.
Maistre
studied with the Jesuits and became a
member of the Savoy Senate in 1787,
following the civil career of his
father, a former Senate president. After
the invasion of Savoy by the armies of
Napoleon in 1792, he began his lifelong
exile in Switzerland, where he
frequented the literary salon of
Germaine de Staël in Coppet. Appointed
envoy to St. Petersburg by the king of
Sardinia in 1803, he remained at the
Russian court for 14 years, writing
Essay on the Generative Principle of
Political Constitutions (1814) and his
best work (unfinished), The St.
Petersburg Dialogues (1821). On his
recall he settled in Turin as chief
magistrate and minister of state of the
Sardinian kingdom.
Maistre
was convinced of the need for the
supremacy of Christianity and the
absolute rule of both sovereign and
pope. He also insisted on the necessity
of the public executioner as a negative
guardian of social order, writing in The
St. Petersburg Dialogues that “all
power, all subordination rests on the
executioner: he is the horror and the
bond of human association. Remove this
incomprehensible agent from the world,
and the very moment order gives way to
chaos, thrones topple, and society
disappears.” A devoutly religious Roman
Catholic, he explained both the French
Revolution and the French revolutionary
and Napoleonic wars as religious
expiation for the sins of the times. He
opposed the progress of science and the
liberal beliefs and empirical methods of
philosophers such as Francis Bacon
(1561–1626), Voltaire (1694–1778),
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), and
John Locke (1632–1704). He also wrote On
the Pope (1819) and Letters on the
Spanish Inquisition (1838), an apology
for the punitive role of the Spanish
Inquisition. In both works Maistre
defended absolutism with rigorous logic,
and it was as a logical thinker,
pursuing consequences from an accepted
premise, that Maistre excelled. The
French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–67)
acknowledged that it was Maistre who
taught him to think.
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Auguste Comte

French philosopher in full Isidore-auguste-marie-françois-xavier Comte
born January 19, 1798, Montpellier, France died September 5, 1857, Paris
Main French philosopher known as the founder of sociology and of
positivism. Comte gave the science of sociology its name and
established the new subject in a systematic fashion.
Life. Comte’s father, Louis Comte, a tax official, and his mother,
Rosalie Boyer, were strongly royalist and deeply sincere
Roman Catholics. But their sympathies were at odds with the
republicanism and skepticism that swept through France in
the aftermath of the French Revolution. Comte resolved these
conflicts at an early age by rejecting Roman Catholicism and
royalism alike. He was intellectually precocious and in 1814
entered the École Polytechnique—a school in Paris that had
been founded in 1794 to train military engineers but was
soon transformed into a general school for advanced
sciences. The school was temporarily closed in 1816, but
Comte soon took up permanent residence in Paris, earning a
precarious living there by the occasional teaching of
mathematics and by journalism. He read widely in philosophy
and history and was especially interested in those thinkers
who were beginning to discern and trace some order in the
history of human society. The thoughts of several important
French political philosophers of the 18th century—such as
Montesquieu, the Marquis de Condorcet, A.-R.-J. Turgot, and
Joseph de Maistre—were critically worked into his own system
of thought.
Comte’s most important acquaintance in Paris was Henri de
Saint-Simon, a French social reformer and one of the
founders of socialism, who was the first to clearly see the
importance of economic organization in modern society.
Comte’s ideas were very similar to Saint-Simon’s, and some
of his earliest articles appeared in Saint-Simon’s
publications. There were distinct differences in the two
men’s viewpoints and scientific backgrounds, however, and
Comte eventually broke with Saint-Simon. In 1826 Comte began
a series of lectures on his “system of positive philosophy”
for a private audience, but he soon suffered a serious
nervous breakdown. He made an almost complete recovery from
his symptoms the following year, and in 1828/29 he again
took up his projected lecture series. This was so
successfully concluded that he redelivered it at the Royal
Athenaeum during 1829–30. The following 12 years were
devoted to his publication (in six volumes) of his
philosophy in a work entitled Cours de philosophie positive
(1830–42; “Course of Positive Philosophy”; Eng. trans. The
Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte).
From 1832 to 1842 Comte was a tutor and then an examiner
at the revived École Polytechnique. In the latter year he
quarreled with the directors of the school and lost his
post, along with much of his income. During the remainder of
his life he was supported in part by English admirers such
as John Stuart Mill and by French disciples, especially the
philologist and lexicographer Maximilien Littré. Comte
married Caroline Massin in 1825, but the marriage was
unhappy and they separated in 1842. In 1845 Comte had a
profound romantic and emotional experience with Clotilde de
Vaux, who died the following year of tuberculosis. Comte
idealized this sentimental episode, which exerted a
considerable influence on his later thought and writings,
particularly with regard to the role of women in the
positivist society he planned to establish.
Comte devoted the years after the death of Clotilde de
Vaux to composing his other major work, the Système de
politique positive, 4 vol. (1851–54; System of Positive
Polity), in which he completed his formulation of sociology.
The entire work emphasized morality and moral progress as
the central preoccupation of human knowledge and effort and
gave an account of the polity, or political organization,
that this required. Comte lived to see his writings widely
scrutinized throughout Europe. Many English intellectuals
were influenced by him, and they translated and promulgated
his work. His French devotees had also increased, and a
large correspondence developed with positivist societies
throughout the world. Comte died of cancer in 1857.
Comte was a rather sombre, ungrateful, self-centred, and
egocentric personality, but he compensated for this by his
zeal for the welfare of humanity, his intellectual
determination, and his strenuous application to his life’s
work. He devoted himself untiringly to the promotion and
systematization of his ideas and to their application in the
cause of the improvement of society.
His other writings include Catéchisme positiviste (1852;
The Catechism of Positive Religion) and Synthèse subjective
(1856; “Subjective Synthesis”). In general, his writing was
well organized, and its exposition proceeded in impressively
orderly fashion, but his style was heavy, laboured, and
rather monotonous. His chief works are notable mainly
because of the scope, magnitude, and importance of his
project and the conscientious persistence with which he
developed and expressed his ideas.
Thought. Comte lived through the aftermath of the French
Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, at a time when a new,
stable social order—without despotism—was sought. Modern
science and technology and the Industrial Revolution had
begun transforming the societies of Europe in directions no
one yet understood. People experienced violent conflict but
were adrift in feeling, thought, and action; they lacked
confidence in established sentiments, beliefs, and
institutions but had nothing with which to replace them.
Comte thought that this condition was not only significant
for France and Europe but was one of the decisive junctures
of human history.
Comte’s particular ability was as a synthesizer of the
most diverse intellectual currents. He took his ideas mainly
from writers of the 18th and early 19th centuries. From
David Hume and Immanuel Kant he derived his conception of
positivism—i.e., the theory that theology and metaphysics
are earlier imperfect modes of knowledge and that positive
knowledge is based on natural phenomena and their properties
and relations as verified by the empirical sciences. From
various French clericalist thinkers Comte took the notion of
a hypothetical framework for social organization that would
imitate the hierarchy and discipline found in the Roman
Catholic church. From various Enlightenment philosophers he
adopted the notion of historical progress. Most importantly,
from Saint-Simon he came to appreciate the need for a basic
and unifying social science that would both explain existing
social organizations and guide social planning for a better
future. This new science he called “sociology” for the first
time.
Comte shared Saint-Simon’s appreciation of the growing
importance of modern science and the potential application
of scientific methods to the study and improvement of
society. Comte believed that social phenomena could be
reduced to laws in the same way that the revolutions of the
heavenly bodies had been made explicable by gravitational
theory. Furthermore, he believed that the purpose of the new
scientific analysis of society should be ameliorative and
that the ultimate outcome of all innovation and
systematization in the new science should be the guidance of
social planning. Comte also thought a new and secularized
spiritual order was needed to supplant what he viewed as the
outdated supernaturalism of Christian theology.
Comte’s main contribution to positivist philosophy falls
into five parts: his rigorous adoption of the scientific
method; his law of the three states or stages of
intellectual development; his classification of the
sciences; his conception of the incomplete philosophy of
each of these sciences anterior to sociology; and his
synthesis of a positivist social philosophy in a unified
form. He sought a system of philosophy that could form a
basis for political organization appropriate to modern
industrial society.
Comte’s “law of the three stages” maintained that human
intellectual development had moved historically from a
theological stage, in which the world and human destiny
within it were explained in terms of gods and spirits;
through a transitional metaphysical stage, in which
explanations were in terms of essences, final causes, and
other abstractions; and finally to the modern positive
stage. This last stage was distinguished by an awareness of
the limitations of human knowledge. Knowledge could only be
relative to man’s nature as a species and to his varying
social and historical situations. Absolute explanations were
therefore better abandoned for the more sensible discovery
of laws based on the observable relations between phenomena.
Comte’s classification of the sciences was based upon the
hypothesis that the sciences had developed from the
understanding of simple and abstract principles to the
understanding of complex and concrete phenomena. Hence, the
sciences developed as follows: from mathematics, astronomy,
physics, and chemistry to biology and finally to sociology.
According to Comte, this last discipline not only concluded
the series but would also reduce social facts to laws and
synthesize the whole of human knowledge, thus rendering the
discipline equipped to guide the reconstruction of society.
Though Comte did not originate the concept of sociology
or its area of study, he greatly extended and elaborated the
field and systematized its content. Comte divided sociology
into two main fields, or branches: social statics, or the
study of the forces that hold society together; and social
dynamics, or the study of the causes of social change. He
held that the underlying principles of society are
individual egoism, which is encouraged by the division of
labour, and the combination of efforts and the maintenance
of social cohesion by means of government and the state.
Comte revealed his conception of the ideal positivist
society in his System of Positive Polity. He believed that
the organization of the Roman Catholic church, divorced from
Christian theology, could provide a structural and symbolic
model for the new society, though Comte substituted a
“religion of humanity” for the worship of God. A spiritual
priesthood of secular sociologists would guide society and
control education and public morality. The actual
administration of the government and of the economy would be
in the hands of businessmen and bankers, while the
maintenance of private morality would be the province of
women as wives and mothers.
Though unquestionably a man of genius, Comte inspired
discipleship on the one hand and derision on the other. His
plans for a future society have been described as ludicrous,
and Comte was deeply reactionary in his rejection of
democracy, his emphasis on hierarchy and obedience, and his
opinion that the ideal government would be made up of an
intellectual elite. But his ideas influenced such notable
social scientists as Émile Durkheim of France and Herbert
Spencer and Sir Edward Burnett Tylor of Great Britain.
Comte’s belief in the importance of sociology as the
scientific study of human society remains an article of
faith among contemporary sociologists, and the work he
accomplished remains a remarkable synthesis and an important
system of thought.
Ronald Fletcher Harry Elmer Barnes
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Ernest Renan
"The Life of Jesus"

born Feb. 28, 1823, Tréguier, Fr. died Oct. 2, 1892, Paris
French philosopher, historian, and scholar of religion, a
leader of the school of critical philosophy in France. Early career. Renan was educated at the ecclesiastical college in his native
town of Tréguier. He began training for the priesthood, and in
1838 he was offered a scholarship at the seminary of
Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet. He later went on to the seminary of
Saint-Sulpice, where he soon underwent a crisis of faith that
finally led him, reluctantly, to leave the Roman Catholic church
in 1845. In his view, the church’s teachings were incompatible
with the findings of historical criticism; but he kept a
quasi-Christian faith in God.
Early works. For Renan, the February revolution of 1848 in France and other
parts of Europe was a religion in the making. Sometimes
enthusiastic, sometimes critical, he participated in the
revolution’s messianic expectations and carried this ambiguous
attitude over into L’Avenir de la science (1890; The Future of
Science). The main theme of this work is the importance of the
history of religious origins, which he regarded as a human
science having equal value to the sciences of nature. Though he
was now somewhat anticlerical, the French government sent him in
1849 to Italy, where the papacy was still politically important,
to help classify manuscripts previously inaccessible to French
scholars. Renan returned to Paris in 1850 to live with his sister,
Henriette, on her savings and the small salary attached to his
own post at the Bibliothèque Nationale. He began to make a name
for himself with his doctoral thesis, Averroès et l’Averroïsme
(1852; “Averroës and Averroism”), concerning the thought of that
medieval Muslim philosopher. He continued his scholarly writings
with two collections of essays, Études d’histoire religieuse
(1857; Studies of Religious History) and Essais de morale et de
critique (1859; “Moral and Critical Essays”), first written for
the Revue des Deux Mondes and the Journal des Débats. The Études
inculcated into a middle-class public the insight and
sensitivity of the historical, humanistic approach to religion.
Many of the Essais denounce the materialism and intolerance of
the Second Empire (1852–70) in the name of Renan’s aristocratic
ideal: intellectuals, acting as “bastions of the spirit,” must,
he affirms, resist tyranny by intellectual and spiritual
refinement. In 1856 Renan married Cornélie Scheffer, niece of the painter
Ary Scheffer. In October 1860 Renan was entrusted with an
archaeological mission to Lebanon. The Phoenician inscriptions
that he discovered were published in his Mission de Phénicie
(1864–74; “Phoenician Expedition”). They were later included in
the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum (“Corpus of Semitic
Inscriptions”), which he helped to bring out through the
Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. But archaeology was
not his main interest. In April 1861, with his wife and sister,
he visited the Holy Land in search of materials and inspiration
concerning a life of Jesus that he was bent on writing. He
finished a first draft of it in Lebanon but at tragic cost, for
Henriette died of malaria at ʿAmshīt on Sept. 24, 1861, while he
himself fell desperately ill.
Religious controversies. Renan had counted on the writing of his life of Jesus to secure
election to the chair of Hebrew at the Collège de France. He was
elected, before the book was ready, on Jan. 11, 1862. But in his
opening lecture, on February 21, he referred to Jesus in the
words of Jacques Bossuet, a French bishop and historian of the
17th and 18th centuries, as “an incomparable man.” Though this
was, in his eyes, the highest praise one could bestow on a man,
it was not sufficient for the clericals, who took advantage of
its implied atheism and the uproar caused by the lecture to have
Renan suspended. Contemptuously refusing an appointment to the
Bibliothèque Imperiale (June 1864), Renan decided to live by his
pen for the next few years. He had to wait until 1870, however,
before the chair was restored to him. He was thus pushed into
opposition to the church but had already begun to frequent such
dissident salons as that of Princess Mathilde, niece of Napoleon
Bonaparte, and to associate with such literary notables as
Gustave Flaubert, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Hippolyte
Taine, and the Goncourt brothers. When the Vie de Jésus (Life of Jesus) did appear in 1863, it was
virulently denounced by the church. Though not Renan’s best
historical work, it can still claim the attention of
20th-century readers because it presents a “mythical” account of
the making of Christianity by the popular imagination and thus
has a place, like his other historical works, in the literature
of messianism. After a journey in Asia Minor in 1864–65 with his
wife, he published Les Apôtres (1866; The Apostles) and Saint
Paul (1869), to follow the Vie de Jésus as parts of a series,
Histoire des origines du christianisme (The History of the
Origins of Christianity). Both these volumes, containing
brilliant descriptions of how Christianity spread among the
rootless proletariat of the cities of Asia Minor, illustrate his
preoccupation with the question: would the intellectuals of the
19th century lead the masses toward a new enlightenment?
Interest in politics. Renan began to interest himself increasingly in politics. In
1869, at the beginning of the “liberal” phase of the Second
Empire, he stood unsuccessfully for Parliament. In the same year
he defended constitutional monarchy in an article, “La Monarchie
constitutionnelle en France” (“Constitutional Monarchy in
France”). Thus far he was a liberal. In the same spirit he
tried, during the Franco-German War of 1870–71, to work across
frontiers: he corresponded with David Friedrich Strauss, a
German theologian, and tried to persuade the Prussian crown
prince (later German emperor as Frederick III) to stop the war.
But the bitterness of France’s defeat and his anger with
democracy caused him to become authoritarian. Thus, La Réforme
intellectuelle et morale (1871), concerning intellectual and
moral reform, argues that France, to achieve national
regeneration, must follow the example set by Prussia after the
Battle of Jena in 1806. By taking his advice, however, France
would have become the sort of clerical monarchy that Renan soon
found he did not want. He had to resign himself to accepting the
Third Republic (1870–1940), but he withdrew from public life.
Though he continued to travel zestfully all over Europe,
visiting surviving Bonapartists, such as Prince Jérôme Napoléon,
his life became more and more identified with his writings. He
was elected to the Académie Française in 1878.
Later writings. Renan’s ironical yet imaginative vision of the “festival of the
universe” found expression in L’Antéchrist (1873; The
Antichrist, 1896; vol. iv of the Histoire des origines), with
its satirical portrait of Nero and its apocalyptic
atmosphere—replete with expectations of a cataclysmic
consummation of history—assuredly the most impressive of his
historical narratives. The “festival of the universe” provides a
visionary end to the Dialogues et fragments philosophiques
(1876; Philosophical Dialogues and Fragments, 1899). In the
first of these, however, Renan is more ironically skeptical
about the hidden God than he had been. In fact, the Epicureanism
of his later years masks an anxiety about death and the
hereafter. His more superficial side is illustrated in the
“philosophic dramas” (collected edition 1888), which trace his
acceptance of the Republic, especially Caliban (written 1877)
and L’Eau de jouvence (written 1879; “The Water of Youth”). In
the former, the aristocracy (Prospero and Ariel) loses to
democracy (Caliban) because alchemical spells (traditional
sanctions) are powerless against a people infected by
positivism; scientific power politics would be an effective
answer, but this is out of the question because in practice it
would mean a clerical monarchy. As to the remaining volumes of the Histoire des origines, if
Renan’s Epicureanism is hard to find in Les Évangiles (1877; The
Gospels, 1889), it is present in L’Église chrétienne (1879; “The
Christian Church”) in the portrait of the Roman emperor Hadrian;
but in Marc-Aurèle (1882; Marcus Aurelius, 1904), the study of
Marcus Aurelius, again a self-portrait, is dominated by the
author’s preoccupation with death. Since 1876 Renan had been
working on his memoirs, Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse
(1883; Recollections of My Youth, 1883), in which he
reconstructs his life so as to show that he was predestined to
become a prêtre manqué (failed priest) and that, in spite of
heavy odds, his wager on the hidden God had paid off in terms of
happiness. In the Souvenirs Renan is too serene for some tastes, though his
irony keeps his complacency in check. In L’Ecclésiaste (1882;
“Ecclesiastes”) and two articles on Amiel (1884), he is above
all an ironist combatting the Pharisees (religious legalists).
On the other hand, in some of his speeches at the Académie
Française, on Claude Bernard, a French physiologist (1879), and
Paul-Émile Littré, a French philologist (1882), he reveals his
anguish in moments of doubt. Thus, he manifests a baffling
variety of characteristics, but the moral heart of the man is to
be found in one of the later dramas, Le Prêtre de Némi (1885;
“The Priest of Némi”), and above all in his Histoire du peuple
d’Israël (1887–93; History of the People of Israel, 1888–96).
For him, the history of Jewish messianism bore witness to man’s
capacity for faith when the odds are against him. Thus, it
revived his own faith. He could therefore hope that, though
Judaism would disappear, the dreams of its prophets would one
day come true, so that “without a compensatory Heaven justice
will really exist on earth.” Having exhausted himself in an
effort to finish the work, he died shortly after its completion
in 1892. With his leanings toward liberalism and authoritarianism in
politics and faith and skepticism in religion, Renan embodied
the contradictions of the middle class of his time. Politically,
his influence after his death was far-reaching, on nationalists,
such as Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras, on republicans, such
as Anatole France and Georges Clemenceau. He succeeded in
assuaging one of the great anxieties of his time, the antagonism
between science and religion, but he very much felt this
anxiety.
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Hippolyte Taine

born
April 21, 1828, Vouziers, Ardennes,
France died March 5, 1893, Paris
French
thinker, critic, and historian, one of
the most esteemed exponents of
19th-century French Positivism. He
attempted to apply the scientific method
to the study of the humanities.
Early life and career Taine was born into a professional
middle-class family; his father was a
lawyer. He was educated privately at
home until shortly after his father’s
death; thereafter, he went with his
mother to live in Paris and became an
outstanding pupil at the Collège Bourbon
and then at the highly prestigious École
Normale. He gained his licenceès-lettres
(preliminary degree) in 1848 and began
to study for his agrégation (advanced
degree) in philosophy, one of his
dominant interests. He already held
unorthodox intellectual views. He had
apparently lost his Christian faith by
the age of 15, and his youthful
rationalist attitude led him to admire
the ideas of the Idéologue philosophers
who held that all knowledge must be
based on sense experience, on
observation, and on controlled
experiment; this overriding conviction
guided his later career. He was also
already attracted by the metaphysical
ideas of Hegel and Spinoza, which
inspired in him a desire to find a total
explanation of the causal forces of life
and the universe.
In
contrast to these views, his new
teachers of philosophy in Paris held the
prevailing philosophical doctrine of
eclecticism; consequently—and not
without creating some scandal in
academic circles—Taine’s agrégation jury
failed him in 1851. He then taught for
brief periods at Nevers and Poitiers but
in 1852 applied for leave of absence.
Returning to Paris, he devoted himself
to preparing his two dissertations for
the doctorate in literature: De Personis
Platonicis (“Concerning Plato’s
Characters”) and his first well-known
work, a study of La Fontaine (1853;
revised and published in 1861 as La
Fontaine et ses fables [“La Fontaine and
His Fables”]).
He
gained his doctoral degree in May 1853
and began an essay on Livy, Essai sur
Tite-Live (1856), which, despite further
criticism of his philosophical outlook,
won a prize from the Académie Française.
During this period he was also attending
lectures in science and gathering the
knowledge of physiology that he utilized
later in his work on psychology.
Reluctant to return to full-time
teaching, he lived by private tutoring
and as a man of letters. Even a holiday
in 1854, necessitated by ill health, was
turned to advantage: in 1855 he
published a literary guidebook based on
his travels, Voyage aux eaux des
Pyrénées (“Voyage to the Waters of the
Pyrenees”).
Attack on eclecticism More important for his own development,
he contributed frequent literary and
historical articles to such leading
journals as the Revue des Deux Mondes,
the Revue de l’Instruction Publique, and
the Journal des Débats, articles that
provided the basis for three books
further enhancing the reputation he had
gained by his works on La Fontaine and
Livy. These were Les Philosophes
français du XIXe siècle (1857; “The
French Philosophers of the 19th
Century”), a critical polemic against
the prevailing eclectic philosophy of
Victor Cousin and his group, which also
provides in its later chapters a lucid
exposition of his own Positivist theory
of knowledge; a first collection of
Essais de critique et d’histoire (1858;
“Essays of Criticism and History”); and
his notable Histoire de la littérature
anglaise, 4 vols. (1863–64; History of
English Literature, 1871).
The
celebrated “Introduction” to the
Histoire gives a succinct statement of
Taine’s approach to literary and
cultural history and a basic text for
the understanding of his scientific
attitude to literary criticism. The same
great causal factors underlie any
cultural artifact of a given age and
society, he claims. By studying the
literary documents one may understand
the psychology of their author, and
this, complemented by scrutiny of the
facts of his life and personality,
illuminates the “faculté maîtresse,” the
predominant characteristic that
determines his work; this, in turn, can
then be “explained” by reference to
three great conditioning facts, “la
race,” “le milieu,” and “le moment”;
i.e., the writer’s inherited
personality, his social, political, and
geographical background, and the
historical situation in which he writes.
It is evident that Taine’s interest here
is less in literature itself than in
historical causation and psychology, and
his method may well be thought to have
encouraged in his admirers an excessive
preoccupation with biography and
literary history at the expense of
critical judgment, though Taine’s own
abilities as a critic were considerable.
Throughout the 1860s Taine continued
indefatigably his researches and his
writing. Even his travels (to England,
Italy, Germany, and The Netherlands)
were utilized to gather notes for future
work—for example, his closely observed
if simplifying Notes sur l’Angleterre
(1872; Notes on England, 1872); and even
his life in Paris led to his Notes sur
Paris: Vie et opinions de M.
Frédéric-Thomas Graindorge (1867; Notes
and Opinions of Mr.
Frédérick-Graindorge, 1875), perhaps the
most personal and entertaining of his
books.
In
1864, by a happy decision of Napoleon
III, he was appointed to succeed
Viollet-le-Duc, the architect, as
professor of aesthetics and of the
history of art at the École des
Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he lectured
for 20 years. The lecture courses, which
he eventually published, include
Philosophie de l’art (1865; The
Philosophy of Art, 1865), De l’idéal
dans l’art (1867; “On the Ideal in
Art”), and those on the philosophy of
art in Italy (1866), The Netherlands
(1868), and Greece (1869).
This
post also gave him a security that
favoured his more protracted scientific
studies and helped make the later 1860s
a happy and fertile period in his life.
He published, in addition to the works
named, his second volume of essays,
Nouveaux essais de critique et
d’histoire (1865; “New Essays of
Criticism and History”), including his
perceptive articles on Racine, Balzac,
and Stendhal (whose psychological acuity
he was one of the first to admire). In
1868 he married Mlle Denuelle, the
daughter of a well-known architect and
artist, by whom he had a son and a
daughter.
Publication of De l’intelligence In 1870 he published the two volumes of
De l’intelligence (On Intelligence,
1871), a major work in the discipline of
psychology, which had interested him
since his youth. His devotion to science
is most fully illustrated here; he
opposes the speculative and
introspective approach of the eclectics
and outlines a scientific methodology
for the study of human personality that
established him, alongside thinkers such
as Théodule Ribot and Pierre Janet, as a
founder of empirical psychology. Though
much of the work is now outdated, in its
day it helped to modify methods of
research by its emphasis on experiment,
the search for causes, the study of
pathological cases, and the
physiological basis of personality. It
also intensified opposition to his
ideas, and he was angrily accused of
holding a strictly determinist and
materialist view of man—not altogether
unfairly, even though he claimed to
reject materialism and argued that moral
responsibility was compatible with
determinism as he conceived it.
The
work also develops his long-standing
attempt to fuse Positivism and Hegelian
Idealism and to provide a method for a
scientific metaphysics. Through such a
metaphysics, he maintained, the final
causes of life itself might be
discovered; its insights inspired him to
an exalted pantheistic trust in nature
that is movingly expressed in essays on
Marcus Aurelius (in Nouveaux essais) and
Iphigeneia (in Derniers essais).
Germany’s invasion and defeat of France
in 1870–71 had a profound impact upon
Taine (already prepared in his mind by a
visit in 1869 that had disabused him of
his earlier enthusiasm for German
civilization). The French defeat, in his
view, sprang from a deep national
sickness, and he determined to devote
his final years to examining its causes.
A shift of interest toward politics is
illustrated by a brochure of 1872 on the
problems and effects of universal
suffrage, but, above all, his approach
was historical: to seek the sources of
the political instability that he held
responsible for his country’s plight.
Historical theories This major reorientation of concern led
to his great historical work, Les
Origines de la France contemporaine
(“The Origins of Contemporary France”),
a monumental analysis, claiming
scientific objectivity (although its
factual and interpretative reliability
have been challenged). It seeks to show
that France’s primary fault lay in
excessive centralization, originating
during the ancien régime, and
intensified by the French Revolution,
about which he shares and develops
Edmund Burke’s hostile view. Taine
asserted that far from promoting
liberty, as most of the French believe,
the Revolution merely transferred
absolute power to even more illiberal
hands. A first volume, on L’Ancien
Régime (“The Old Regime”), appeared in
1876, followed by three volumes on the
Revolution (1878–85). In 1878 he was
also elected to the Académie Française.
To have
more time for his self-appointed task he
withdrew increasingly from Paris and
after 1883 even resigned his
professorship. Only one volume of Le
Régime moderne (“The Modern Regime”),
however, was published in his lifetime
(1891), the second volume coming out in
November 1893. The entire work was
reissued in 1899. There also appeared
after his death his Derniers essais de
critique et d’histoire (1894; “Last
Essays of Criticism and History”) and an
unfinished autobiographical and
psychological novel, written about 1861,
Étienne Mayran (1910). He died in Paris
in 1893 and was buried at
Menthon-Saint-Bernard.
Taine
achieved fame over a wide range of
disciplines—as a leading French thinker,
as a literary and art critic, and as a
historian. His greatest influence upon
his contemporaries, however, was as an
intellectual leader, one of the most
esteemed exponents of 19th-century
French positivism, the cult of science
in its most devoted, high-minded, and
rational form. His work represents a
reaction against excessive emotionalism
and spiritualist philosophy and was
unified by his attempt to apply the
scientific method to the study of
literature and art, psychology, cultural
history, and to ethics and metaphysics.
Taine’s ideas helped provide a
theoretical basis for the literary
movement of naturalism; the novel, he
argued, should contribute to the
scientific understanding of human
nature, revealing, like the new
scientific psychology he advocated, the
physiological and psychological
determinants of human behaviour.
Donald Geoffrey Charlton
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From 1850 to 1900
Literature in the second half of the 19th century
continued a natural expansion of trends already
established in the first half. Intellectuals and
artists remained acutely aware of the same essential
problems. They continued to use the language of
universalism, addressing themselves to the nature of
man, his relationship with the universe, the
guarantees of morality, the pursuit of beauty, and
the duties of the artist. But the insights gained
since the middle of the Enlightenment into the
importance of historical and social
specificity—which was, for the most idealistic of
the Romantics, the mark of modernity—continued to
restructure underlying attitudes.
As writers became progressively alienated from
the official culture of the Second Empire (1852–70),
the forms of their revolt became more and more
disparate. While the principles of positivism were
easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of
developing capitalist society, even many rationalist
thinkers were drawn to forms of idealism that placed
faith in progress through science. The
antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged
into various types of mysticism and aesthetic
formalism. Even before the watershed of the Commune,
in 1871, there was writing that acknowledged the
situation of the repressed elements of the
entrepreneurial world, workers and women, and sought
to represent their search for different forms of
social organization. By 1891, when the Vatican
issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“New Things”)
on the need for social justice in a modern world,
the voice of the masses was already beginning to
find literary expression.
New directions in poetry
The greatest changes
occurred in poetry; the second half of the 19th
century is often treated as a period of reaction
against Romanticism. The important exception to this
rule is Victor Hugo, nearly all of whose major
poetry was published after 1850. The three
collections Les Châtiments (1853; “Chastisements”),
Les Contemplations (1856; “Contemplations”), and La
Légende des siècles (1859, 1877, 1883; “The Legend
of the Centuries”) are linked by their epic quality.
Different as they are in content, intention, and
tone, each is loosely structured to create an
overall unity. Les Châtiments, written from exile in
the Channel Islands and published clandestinely, is
a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness,
and greed of Louis-Napoléon (Napoleon III) and the
society of the Second Empire, a deluge of
brilliantly comic and cutting satire, caricature,
and irony, interspersed with outbursts of compassion
for the poor and oppressed. The poems are arranged
so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and
the light of the future, as
Hugo proclaims his
optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace,
liberty, and social justice. In contrast to this
political saga, Les Contemplations embodies
Hugo’s
philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as
prophet and representative of humanity, penetrating
the mysteries of creation and recounting the
metaphysical truths perceived. La Légende des
siècles reveals the same urge to prophesy. The poems
are a series of historical and mythological
narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit
that informed Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle’s
work but with none of the same attention to
preliminary scholarly research. Together they form
not only an intensely personal and imaginative
account of the origins and development of French
culture and society but a key text for students of
the representation of the European cultural
tradition. After the three epic cycles, Hugo
returned to writing short lyrics on personal themes,
although he never abandoned his role as didactic
poet, as the collections he churned out in the 1880s
testify.
Gautier and l’art pour l’art
Hugo apart, the movement to new perspectives on
poetry—stressing form over social engagement—was
incontrovertible. Turning his back on his own
earlier attempts to treat grand themes in the grand
manner, Théophile Gautier sought a new direction for
lyric poetry by linking idealism with aesthetics. He
thus became an advocate of l’art pour l’art, or “art
for art’s sake”—a belief that art need serve no
extrinsic purpose. From the first edition of Émaux
et camées (1852; “Enamels and Cameos”) to the
posthumously published Derniers vers (1872; “Last
Verse”), he devoted himself to a form of literary
miniature painting, attempting to make something
aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most
part deliberately chosen for their triviality. The
fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had
grown up during the 1840s. Gautier simply developed
the implications of this trend to the ultimate,
concentrating on the language of shape, colour, and
texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the
very restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes
that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine
spiritual unrest, such as the fluid nature of
identity or the destructive power of love, become
the occasion for virtuoso ornamental elaboration.
The best of these poems are transpositions from one
art form to another, particularly those based on
music.
Théophile Gautier

byname Le
Bon Théo
born
Aug. 31, 1811, Tarbes, France died Oct. 23, 1872, Neuilly-sur-Seine
poet,
novelist, critic, and journalist whose
influence was strongly felt in the
period of changing sensibilities in
French literature—from the early
Romantic period to the aestheticism and
naturalism of the end of the 19th
century.
Gautier lived most of his life in Paris.
At the Collège de Charlemagne he met
Gérard de Nerval and began a lasting
friendship. He studied painting but soon
decided that his true vocation was
poetry. Sympathetic to the Romantic
movement, he took part in the cultural
battle that ensued when Victor Hugo’s
play Hernani was first performed in
Paris in 1830. He humorously recalled
this period in Histoire du romantisme
(1874; “History of Romanticism”) and in
Portraits contemporains (1874;
“Contemporary Portraits”), in which he
gave an excellent description of his
friend Honoré de Balzac. He satirized
his own extravagances, as well as those
of other Romanticists, in Les Jeunes-France
(1833; “Young France”). Les Grotesques
(1834–36) is about more obscure earlier
writers whose individualism anticipated
that of the Romantics.
Gautier’s first poems appeared in 1830.
Albertus, a long narrative about a young
painter who falls into the hands of a
sorcerer, was published in 1832. At this
time he turned from the doctrines of
Romanticism and became an advocate of
art for art’s sake. The preface to
Albertus and the novel Mademoiselle de
Maupin (1835) express his views, which
caused a considerable stir in literary
circles by their disregard of
conventional morality and insistence on
the sovereignty of the beautiful. His
pessimism and fear of death were
expressed in the narrative poem La
Comédie de la mort (1838; “The Comedy of
Death”).
In 1840
Gautier visited Spain; the colour of the
land and people inspired some of his
best poetry, in España (1845), and
prose, in Voyage en Espagne (1845).
After this trip he found traveling to be
a welcome escape from the constant
pressures of his journalistic work,
which he pursued to support himself, two
mistresses, and his three children, as
well as his two sisters. From 1836 to
1855 he was a weekly contributor to La
Presse and Le Moniteur Universel; in
1851, editor of Revue de Paris; in 1856,
editor of L’Artiste. Besides this work
he contributed to many other periodicals
and papers. Gautier often bemoaned the
conditions of his existence; he felt
that journalism was draining off the
creative energy that should have been
reserved for poetry.
Traveling, especially in Greece,
strengthened his theory of art, his
admiration of classical forms. He felt
that art should be impersonal, free from
the obligation of teaching moral
lessons. The aim of the artist is to
concentrate on achieving perfection of
form. He developed a technique in poetry
that he called transposition d’art
(“transposing art”), recording his exact
impressions when experiencing a painting
or other work of art. These poems,
published in Émaux et camées (1852;
“Enamels and Cameos”), are among his
finest, and the book was a point of
departure for the writers Théodore de
Banville and Leconte de Lisle. Charles
Baudelaire paid tribute to Gautier in
the dedication of his verse collection
Les Fleurs du mal.
Gautier’s poetic and fantastic
imagination is seen to advantage in his
short fiction—e.g., the evocations of
ancient Pompeii in Arria Marcella (1852)
and the vampire story La Mort amoureuse
(1857; “The Dead Lover”). His literary
output was prodigious, but his art and
dramatic criticism alone—partly
reprinted in Les Beaux-Arts en Europe
(1855) and in Histoire de l’art
dramatique en France depuis vingt-cinq
ans, 6 vol. (1858–59; “History of Drama
in France for Twenty-Five Years”)—would
ensure his reputation. As a ballet
critic he remains unrivaled. He also
wrote plays and the popular ballet
Giselle, written in collaboration with
Vernoy de Saint-Georges.
Gautier
was held in esteem by many of his
contemporaries who were also prominent
literary figures: Gustave Flaubert,
Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, the
Goncourt brothers, Banville, and
Baudelaire. In his last years he became
the friend of the Princess Mathilde, who
gave him a sinecure post as a librarian
to ease his financial strain.
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Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism
Gautier’s cult of form is also to be met in the work
of Théodore de Banville. But the reaction against
the expression of personal emotion in rambling
rhetorical verse was not confined to the formalism
of the l’art pour l’art poets. Charles-Marie-René
Leconte de Lisle, who came to be labeled the founder
of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his
Poèmes antiques (1852; “Antique Poems”), Poèmes
barbares (1862; “Barbarous Poems”), and Poèmes
tragiques (1884; “Tragic Poems”). Although his
theoretical pronouncements on the supremacy of
beauty suggest affinities with Gautier, Leconte de
Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter
of poetry was of no significance. He wanted his
poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of
truth, and he believed in the necessity of
systematic research before composition. The highly
material surface of his poems is used to disguise a
profound nihilism. For Leconte de Lisle the history
of mankind presents a long, slow decline from the
golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably toward
the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian
biologists saw as the natural end of evolution. The
stories recounted from European and Eastern
mythology and the portraits of exotic animals and
landscapes, though superficially scientific in their
blending of scholarly documentation and objective
narrative manner, all distill the same sense of
revolt against a destiny that binds mankind to
expiate crimes it is fated to commit. Leconte de
Lisle’s manner and matter were taken up with
enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les
Trophées (The Trophies), the exquisitely miniaturist
sonnets of José Maria de Heredia, written over a
quarter of a century but not published until 1893,
are still read.
Théodore de Banville

in full
Étienne-Claude-Jean-Baptiste-Théodore-Faullain
de Banville
born
March 14, 1823, Moulins, France died March 13, 1891, Paris
French poet of the mid-19th century who
was a late disciple of the Romantics, a
leader of the Parnassian movement, a
contributor to many of the literary
reviews of his time, and an influence on
the Symbolists.
His
first book of verse, Les Cariatides
(1842; “The Caryatids”), owed much to
the style and manner of Victor Hugo, but
Banville rejected the poor craftsmanship
of much French Romantic poetry. His
Petit Traité de poésie française (1872;
“Little Treatise on French Poetry”)
shows his interest in the technicalities
of versification, of which he became a
master. He considered rhyme to be the
single most important element in French
verse. Following the lead of the critic
Charles Sainte-Beuve, who had revived
interest in the sonnet, Banville
experimented with various fixed forms
that had been neglected since the
mid-16th century—e.g., the ballade and
the rondeau. The chief quality of his
poetry is its technical virtuosity, but
contemporaries also admired its delicate
wit and fantasy. His best-known
collection is Les Odes funambulesques
(1857; “Fantastic Odes”).
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Charles-Marie-René
Leconte de Lisle

born
Oct. 22, 1818, Saint-Paul, Réunion died July 17, 1894, Louveciennes, near
Paris
poet,
leader of the Parnassians, who from 1865
to 1895 was acknowledged as the foremost
French poet apart from the aging Victor
Hugo.
Leconte
de Lisle’s theories, reacting against
Romanticism and stressing the need for
impersonality and discipline in poetry,
were expressed with deliberate
provocativeness and exaggeration. His
epic poetry is often overweighted by
erudition and ornamentation, but his
shorter poems convey a compelling and
individual vision, and “Qaïn” (1869;
“Cain”) is one of the most impressive
short epics of the 19th century.
Leconte
de Lisle was sent to the Université de
Rennes in 1837 but gave up law for
literature. Recalled to Réunion by his
family, he remained unwillingly on the
island from 1843 to 1846, when he
returned to France to work on La
Démocratie pacifique, a daily journal
that propagated the utopian social
theories of Charles Fourier. In the
poems of the next few years he drew on
Greek mythology for symbols of his
Revolutionary views; he wrote political
articles and unsuccessfully attempted
practical work for the February
Revolution of 1848. Later, while
remaining a republican, he became
convinced that the poet should not
engage in direct political action.
His
first volume of poetry was published in
1852. He eventually arranged the poems,
which had appeared in different
collections during his lifetime, to form
Poèmes antiques, Poèmes barbares, and
Poèmes tragiques. Derniers poèmes was
published in 1895.
He
spent most of his life in financial
need, attempting to support his mother,
sisters, and wife by his writings. He
published a series of translations from
Greek and Latin; three anticlerical and
republican booklets (1871–72); and,
under the pseudonym Pierre Gosset,
Histoire du Moyen Âge (1876). In 1873 he
obtained a sinecure as librarian of the
Senate and in 1886 was elected to
succeed Hugo as a member of the Académie
Française.
At the
centre of Leconte de Lisle’s poetry is a
sense of the impermanence of a vast and
pitiless universe. Influenced by the new
study of comparative religion and by
contemporary scientific discoveries, his
epics show the death of religions and
civilizations—Greek, Indian, Celtic,
Scandinavian, Polynesian, Jewish, and
Christian. Some of Leconte de Lisle’s
finest poems describe scenes of cosmic
destruction with exultation rather than
terror. They assert that, in the face of
the cruel forces that create and destroy
an ephemeral world, the poet must savour
the more sharply its rich physical
beauty.
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Baudelaire
Gautier,
Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three
contemporary French poets for whom
Charles
Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he
had no time for formalism, didacticism, or the cult
of antiquity. Antithetical in all things,
Baudelaire
was torn both by the desire to express an urgent
sense of personal and collective anguish (the
dedicatory poem opening
Les Fleurs du mal
"The Flowers of Evil"
famously addresses the “hypocrite lecteur—mon semblable—mon frère” [“hypocrite
reader—my likeness—my brother”]) and an aesthetic
conviction that the effectiveness of art depends on
precision and control. It is as misguided to look
for consistency in
Baudelaire’s critical works (such
as L’Art romantique and Curiosités esthétiques, both
published posthumously in 1868) as it is in his
poetry, since his ideas evolved constantly and in
some cases radically throughout his most creative
period (1845–64). To two basic ideas, however, he
remained constant: that it is the responsibility of
the artist, the representative of humanity, to
create meaning—signifying symbols—out of the raw
material of life; and that the material world, like
the artist himself, is irredeemably corrupt,
possessed by forces of inertia or dissolution. The
first of these explains the importance that he
assigns to intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and
the thrilling necessity for the artist to plunge
himself into the world about him. The second led him
to a poetics of frustration and revolt: the artist
could rise above material corruption only through
the creative act, but the creative act could not
occur without the stimulus of a reality that would
always be recalcitrant. Whether the Catholic images
and doctrines—the language of his age and class—in
which he formulated his poems are to be taken
literally or whether they are best viewed as the
discourse he chose to grapple with in formulating
the material and historical specificities of modern
life,
Baudelaire was a poet deeply concerned with
the relationship between humanity, morality, and
art. He located morality for the artist (pictured,
as in
Hugo, as the prophet and representative of his
generation) in his effort to see and communicate to
his contemporaries the truth about themselves. The
artist must bring clarity of vision into a world he
saw as given over to the fogs and miasmas of
hypocrisy, fudging, slothful conformism, and vicious
self-seeking. He was genuinely distressed by the
official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) on a charge of obscenity
provoked by its supposed erotic realism.
The tensions within
Baudelaire are depicted at
their height in the second edition of Les Fleurs du
mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to
present a “self” who struggles to transcend the
limitations of the material world. The struggle is
presented in a series of experiences that start with
the poet himself, move out into the ugly—and yet, he
finds, thrilling—urban environment of contemporary
Paris, and gradually uncover the black depths of
deformation and decay within the men and women who
inhabit this modern landscape of masses and markets.
In the last analysis, at the end of the poetic
journey, death stands revealed as the matter and the
form of the whole social and poetic endeavour, and
the final thrill is the sadomasochistic tearing of
the veil on his own and society’s bankruptcy. The
stylistic antitheses mirror the content. Within
individual poems
Baudelaire shifts between the
rhetorical, the impressionist, the abstract, and the
intensely physical, concrete instance. He balances
banality and originality, the prosaic and the
melodic, to emphasize the interdependence of
opposites, the chaos of forms and experience that he
sees as the ground of the human condition.
In the last years of his life,
Baudelaire tried
to extend the literary means at his disposal by
experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes
in the posthumously edited Petits Poèmes en prose
(1868; “Short Poems in Prose”) is similar to that of
Les Fleurs du mal, though the balance is different:
urban landscapes, the ambivalent relationship of
artist and crowd, and the degradations of urban
poverty are given more space than is love. The
relative freedom of the prose form gave scope for
the shifts of tone and the innovative turns of
syntax that, in Walter Benjamin’s insight, enabled
Baudelaire to write for himself and his
contemporaries their appropriate image, the man of
the urban crowd: the juxtaposition of the ironic and
the lyrical, the interweaving of anecdote,
narrative, and reflection, the imaginative shock of
the unexpected vision, the rhythms of pleasure and
terror caught in the movement and turn of the phrase
(in Benjamin’s essay On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,
1939).
Baudelaire
"The Flowers of
Evil"

in full Charles-Pierre Baudelaire
born April 9, 1821, Paris, France died August 31, 1867, Paris
French poet, translator, and literary
and art critic whose reputation rests
primarily on Les Fleurs du mal (1857;
The Flowers of Evil), which was perhaps
the most important and influential
poetry collection published in Europe in
the 19th century. Similarly, his Petits
poèmes en prose (1868; “Little Prose
Poems”) was the most successful and
innovative early experiment in prose
poetry of the time.
Early life
Baudelaire was the only child of
François Baudelaire and his much younger
second wife, Caroline Defayis, whom he
married in 1819. Having begun his career
as a priest, François had abandoned holy
orders in 1793 and ultimately became a
prosperous middle-ranking civil servant.
A painter and poet of modest talent, he
introduced his son to art, or what the
younger Baudelaire would later call his
greatest, most consuming, and earliest
of passions, “the cult of images.” His
father died in February 1827, and for
some 18 months thereafter Baudelaire and
his mother lived together on the
outskirts of Paris in conditions that he
would always remember, writing to her in
1861 of that “period of passionate love”
for her when “I was forever alive in
you; you were solely and completely
mine.” This “verdant paradise of
childhood loves” abruptly ended in
November 1828 when Caroline married
Jacques Aupick, a career soldier who
rose to the rank of general and who
later served as French ambassador to the
Ottoman Empire and Spain before becoming
a senator under the Second Empire.
In 1831 Aupick was posted to Lyons, and
Baudelaire began his education at the
Collège Royal there in 1832 before
transferring, on the family’s return to
Paris in 1836, to the prestigious Lycée
Louis-le-Grand. Baudelaire showed
promise as a student and began to write
his earliest poems, but to his masters
he seemed an example of precocious
depravity, adopting what they called
“affectations unsuited to his age.” He
also developed a tendency to moods of
intense melancholy, and he became aware
that he was solitary by nature. Regular
acts of indiscipline led to his being
expelled from the school after a trivial
incident in April 1839. After passing
his baccalauréat examinations while
enrolled at the Collège Saint-Louis,
Baudelaire became a nominal student of
law at the École de Droit while in
reality leading a “free life” in the
Latin Quarter. There he made his first
contacts in the literary world and also
contracted the venereal disease that
would eventually kill him, probably from
a prostitute nicknamed Sarah la
Louchette (“Squint-Eyed Sarah”), whom he
celebrated in some of his most affecting
early poems.
In an attempt to wean his stepson from
such disreputable company, Aupick sent
him on a protracted voyage to India in
June 1841, but Baudelaire effectively
jumped ship in Mauritius and, after a
few weeks there and in Réunion, returned
to France in February 1842. The voyage
had deepened and enriched his
imagination, however, and his brief
encounter with the tropics would endow
his writing with an abundance of exotic
images and sensations and an everlasting
theme of nostalgic reverie.
Baudelaire came into his inheritance in
April 1842 and rapidly proceeded to
dissipate it on the lifestyle of a
dandified man of letters, spending
freely on clothes, books, paintings,
expensive food and wines, and, not
least, hashish and opium, which he first
experimented with in his Paris apartment
at the Hôtel Pimodan (now the Hôtel
Lauzun) on the Île Saint-Louis between
1843 and 1845. It was shortly after
returning from the South Seas that
Baudelaire met Jeanne Duval, who, first
as his mistress and then, after the
mid-1850s, as his financial charge, was
to dominate his life for the next 20
years. Jeanne would inspire Baudelaire’s
most anguished and sensual love poetry,
her perfume and, above all, her
magnificent flowing black hair provoking
such masterpieces of the exotic-erotic
imagination as La Chevelure (“The Head
of Hair”).
Baudelaire’s continuing extravagance
exhausted half his fortune in two years,
and he also fell prey to cheats and
moneylenders, thus laying the foundation
for an accumulation of debt that would
cripple him for the rest of his life. In
September 1844 his family imposed on him
a legal arrangement that restricted his
access to his inheritance and
effectively made of him a legal minor.
The modest annual allowance henceforth
granted him was insufficient to clear
his debts, and the resulting state of
permanently straitened finances led him
to still greater emotional and financial
dependence on his mother and also
exacerbated his growing detestation of
his stepfather. The agonizing moods of
isolation and despair that Baudelaire
had known in adolescence, and which he
called his moods of “spleen,” returned
and became more frequent.
Early writings Baudelaire had returned from the South
Seas in 1842 determined as never before
to become a poet. From then until 1846
he probably composed the bulk of the
poems that make up the first edition
(1857) of Les Fleurs du mal. He
refrained from publishing them as
separate texts, however, which suggests
that from the outset he had in mind a
coherent collection governed by a tight
thematic architecture rather than a
simple sequence of self-contained poems.
In October 1845 he announced the
imminent appearance of a collection
entitled Les Lesbiennes (“The
Lesbians”), followed, at intervals after
1848, by Les Limbes (“Limbo”), the
stated goal of which was to “represent
the agitations and melancholies of
modern youth.” Neither collection ever
appeared in book form, however, and
Baudelaire first established himself in
the Parisian cultural milieu not as a
poet but as an art critic with his
reviews of the Salons of 1845 and 1846.
Inspired by the example of the Romantic
painter Eugène Delacroix, he elaborated
in his Salons a wide-ranging theory of
modern painting, with painters being
urged to celebrate and express the
“heroism of modern life.” In January
1847 Baudelaire published a novella
entitled La Fanfarlo whose hero, or
antihero, Samuel Cramer, is widely, if
simplistically, seen as a self-portrait
of the author as he agonizedly
oscillates between desire for the
maternal and respectable Madame de
Cosmelly and the erotic actress-dancer
of the title.
Thereafter little is heard of Baudelaire
until February 1848, when he is widely
reported to have participated in the
riots that overthrew King Louis-Philippe
and installed the Second Republic; one
uncorroborated account has him
brandishing a gun and urging the
insurgents to shoot General Aupick, who
was then director of the École
Polytechnique. Such stories have led
some to dismiss Baudelaire’s involvement
in the revolutionary events of 1848–51
as mere rebelliousness on the part of a
disaffected (and still unpublished)
bourgeois poet. More recent studies
suggest he had a serious commitment to a
radical political viewpoint that
probably resembled that of the
socialist-anarchist Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon. Baudelaire is reliably
reported to have taken part both in the
working-class uprising of June 1848 and
in the resistance to the Bonapartist
military coup of December 1851; the
latter, he claimed shortly afterwards,
ended his active interest in politics.
Henceforth his focus would be
exclusively on his writing.
Maturity and decline In 1847 Baudelaire had discovered the
work of Edgar Allan Poe. Overwhelmed by
what he saw as the almost preternatural
similarities between the American
writer’s thought and temperament and his
own, he embarked upon the task of
translation that was to provide him with
his most regular occupation and income
for the rest of his life. His
translation of Poe’s Mesmeric Revelation
appeared as early as July 1848, and
thereafter translations appeared
regularly in reviews before being
collected in book form in Histoires
extraordinaires (1856; “Extraordinary
Tales”) and Nouvelles Histoires
extraordinaires (1857; “New
Extraordinary Tales”), each preceded by
an important critical introduction by
Baudelaire. These were followed by Les
Aventures d’Arthur Gordon Pym (1857),
Eurêka (1864), and Histoires grotesques
et sérieuses (1865; “Grotesque and
Serious Tales”). As translations these
works are, at their best, classics of
French prose, and Poe’s example gave
Baudelaire greater confidence in his own
aesthetic theories and ideals of poetry.
Baudelaire also began studying the work
of the conservative theorist Joseph de
Maistre, who, together with Poe,
impelled his thought in an increasingly
antinaturalist and antihumanist
direction. From the mid-1850s Baudelaire
would regard himself as a Roman
Catholic, though his obsession with
original sin and the Devil remained
unaccompanied by faith in God’s
forgiveness and love, and his
Christology was impoverished to the
point of nonexistence.
Between 1852 and 1854 Baudelaire
addressed a number of poems to Apollonie
Sabatier, celebrating her, despite her
reputation as a high-class courtesan, as
his madonna and muse, and in 1854 he had
a brief liaison with the actress Marie
Daubrun. In the meantime Baudelaire’s
growing reputation as Poe’s translator
and as an art critic at last enabled him
to publish some of his poems. In June
1855 the Revue des deux mondes published
a sequence of 18 of his poems under the
general title of Les Fleurs du mal. The
poems, which Baudelaire had chosen for
their original style and startling
themes, brought him notoriety. The
following year Baudelaire signed a
contract with the publisher
Poulet-Malassis for a full-length poetry
collection to appear with that title.
When the first edition of Les Fleurs du
mal was published in June 1857, 13 of
its 100 poems were immediately arraigned
for offences to religion or public
morality. After a one-day trial on
August 20, 1857, six of the poems were
ordered to be removed from the book on
the grounds of obscenity, with
Baudelaire incurring a fine of 300
(later reduced to 50) francs. The six
poems were first republished in Belgium
in 1866 in the collection Les Épaves
(“Wreckage”), and the official ban on
them would not be revoked until 1949.
Owing largely to these circumstances,
Les Fleurs du mal became a byword for
depravity, morbidity, and obscenity, and
the legend of Baudelaire as the doomed
dissident and pornographic poet was
born.
The last years The failure of Les Fleurs du mal, from
which he had expected so much, was a
bitter blow to Baudelaire, and the
remaining years of his life were
darkened by a growing sense of failure,
disillusionment, and despair. Shortly
after his book’s condemnation, he had a
brief and apparently botched physical
liaison with Apollonie Sabatier,
followed, in late 1859, by an equally
brief and unhappy reunion with Marie
Daubrun. Although Baudelaire wrote some
of his finest works in these years, few
were published in book form. After
publishing his earliest experiments in
prose poetry, he set about preparing a
second edition of Les Fleurs du mal. In
1859, while living with his mother at
Honfleur on the Seine River estuary,
where she had retired after Aupick’s
death in 1857, Baudelaire produced in
rapid succession a series of poetic
masterpieces beginning with Le Voyage in
January and culminating in what is
widely regarded as his greatest single
poem, Le Cygne (“The Swan”), in
December. At the same time, he composed
two of his most provocative essays in
art criticism, the Salon de 1859 and Le
Peintre de la vie moderne (“The Painter
of Modern Life”). The latter essay,
inspired by the draftsman Constantin
Guys, is widely viewed as a prophetic
statement of the main elements of the
Impressionist vision and style a decade
before the actual emergence of that
school. The year 1860 saw the
publication of Les Paradis artificiels,
Baudelaire’s translation of sections of
the English essayist Thomas De Quincey’s
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
accompanied by his own searching
analysis and condemnation of drugs. In
February 1861 a second, and greatly
enlarged and improved, edition of Les
Fleurs du mal was published by
Poulet-Malassis. Concurrently Baudelaire
published important critical essays on
Théophile Gautier (1859), Richard Wagner
(1861), Victor Hugo and other
contemporary poets (1862), and Delacroix
(1863), all of which would be collected
after his death in L’Art romantique
(1869). The tantalizing autobiographical
fragments entitled Fusées (“Rockets”)
and Mon coeur mis à nu (“My Heart Laid
Bare”) also date from the 1850s and
early ’60s.
In 1861 Baudelaire made an ill-advised
and unsuccessful attempt to gain
election to the French Academy. In 1862
Poulet-Malassis was declared bankrupt;
Baudelaire was involved in his
publisher’s failure, and his financial
difficulties became desperate. By this
time he was in a critical state both
physically and psychologically, and
feeling what he chillingly called “the
wind of the wing of imbecility” pass
over him. Abandoning verse poetry as his
medium, Baudelaire now concentrated on
writing prose poems, a sequence of 20 of
which was published in La Presse in
1862. In April 1864 he left Paris for
Brussels in the hope of persuading a
Belgian publisher to publish his
complete works. He would remain in
Belgium, increasingly embittered and
impoverished, until the summer of 1866,
when, following a collapse in the Church
of Saint-Loup at Namur, he was stricken
with paralysis and aphasia from which he
would never recover. Baudelaire died at
age 46 in the Paris nursing home in
which he had been confined for the last
year of his life.
At the time of Baudelaire’s death, many
of his writings were unpublished and
those that had been published were out
of print. This was soon to change,
however. The future leaders of the
Symbolist movement who attended his
funeral were already describing
themselves as his followers, and by the
20th century he was widely recognized as
one of the greatest French poets of the
19th century.
Les Fleurs du mal Baudelaire’s poetic masterpiece, the
1861 edition of Les Fleurs du mal,
consists of 126 poems arranged in six
sections of varying length. Baudelaire
always insisted that the collection was
not a “simple album” but had “a
beginning and an end,” each poem
revealing its full meaning only when
read in relation to the others within
the “singular framework” in which it is
placed. A prefatory poem makes it clear
that Baudelaire’s concern is with the
general human predicament of which his
own is representative. The collection
may best be read in the light of the
concluding poem, Le Voyage, as a journey
through self and society in search of
some impossible satisfaction that
forever eludes the traveler.
The first section, entitled “Spleen et
idéal,” opens with a series of poems
that dramatize contrasting views of art,
beauty, and the artist, who is depicted
alternately as martyr, visionary,
performer, pariah, and fool. The focus
then shifts to sexual and romantic love,
with the first-person narrator of the
poems oscillating between extremes of
ecstasy (“idéal”) and anguish (“spleen”)
as he attempts to find fulfillment
through a succession of women whom it is
possible, if simplistic, to identify
with Jeanne Duval, Apollonie Sabatier,
and Marie Daubrun. Each set of love
poems describes an erotic cycle that
leads from intoxication through conflict
and revulsion to an eventual ambivalent
tranquillity born of memory and the
transmutation of suffering into art. Yet
the attempt to find plenitude through
love comes in the end to nothing, and
“Spleen et idéal” ends with a sequence
of anguished poems, several of them
entitled “Spleen,” in which the self is
shown imprisoned within itself, with
only the certainty of suffering and
death before it.
The second section, “Tableaux parisiens,”
was added to the 1861 edition and
describes a 24-hour cycle in the life of
the city through which the Baudelairean
traveler, now metamorphosed into a
flaneur (idle man-about-town), moves in
quest of deliverance from the miseries
of self, only to find at every turn
images of suffering and isolation that
remind him all too pertinently of his
own. The section includes some of
Baudelaire’s greatest poems, most
notably Le Cygne, where the memory of a
swan stranded in total dereliction near
the Louvre becomes a symbol of an
existential condition of loss and exile
transcending time and space. Having gone
through the city forever meeting
himself, the traveler turns, in the much
shorter sections that follow,
successively to drink (Le Vin), sexual
depravity (Fleurs du mal), and Satanism
(Révolte) in quest of the elusive ideal.
His quest is predictably to no avail
for, as the final section, entitled La
Mort, reveals, his journey is an
everlasting, open-ended odyssey that,
continuing beyond death, will take him
into the depths of the unknown, always
in pursuit of the new, which, by
definition, must forever elude him.
Prose poems Baudelaire’s Petits poèmes en prose was
published posthumously in 1869 and was
later, as intended by the author,
entitled Le Spleen de Paris (translated
as The Parisian Prowler). He did not
live long enough to bring these poems
together in a single volume, but it is
clear from his correspondence that the
work he envisaged was both a
continuation of, and a radical departure
from, Les Fleurs du mal. Some of the
texts may be regarded as authentic poems
in prose, while others are closer to
miniature prose narratives. Again the
setting is primarily urban, with the
focus on crowds and the suffering lives
they contain: a broken-down street
acrobat (Le Vieux Saltimbanque), a
hapless street trader (Le Mauvais
Vitrier), the poor staring at the
wealthy in their opulent cafés (Le Yeux
des pauvres), the deranged (Mademoiselle
Bistouri) and the derelict (Assommons
les pauvres!), and, in the final text
(Les Bons Chiens), the pariah dogs that
scurry and scavenge through the streets
of Brussels. Not only is the subject
matter of the prose poems essentially
urban, but the form itself, “musical but
without rhythm and rhyme, both supple
and staccato,” is said to derive from
“frequent contact with enormous cities,
from the junction of their innumerable
connections.” In its deliberate
fragmentation and its merging of the
lyrical with the sardonic, Le Spleen de
Paris may be regarded as one of the
earliest and most successful examples of
a specifically urban writing, the
textual equivalent of the city scenes of
the Impressionists, embodying in its
poetics of sudden and disorienting
encounter that ambiguous “heroism of
modern life” that Baudelaire celebrated
in his art criticism.
Influence and assessment As both poet and critic, Baudelaire
stands in relation to French and
European poetry as Gustave Flaubert and
Édouard Manet do to fiction and
painting, respectively: as a crucial
link between Romanticism and modernism
and as a supreme example, in both his
life and his work, of what it means to
be a modern artist. His catalytic
influence was recognized in the 19th
century by Arthur Rimbaud, Paul
Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé, and
Algernon Charles Swinburne and, in the
20th century, by Paul Valéry, Rainer
Maria Rilke, and T.S. Eliot. In his
pursuit of an “evocative magic” of
images and sounds, his blending of
intellect and feeling, irony and
lyricism, and his deliberate eschewal of
rhetorical utterance, Baudelaire moved
decisively away from the Romantic poetry
of statement and emotion to the modern
poetry of symbol and suggestion. He was,
said his disciple Jules Laforgue, the
first poet to write of Paris as one
condemned to live day to day in the
city, his greatest originality being, as
Verlaine wrote as early as 1865, to
“represent powerfully and essentially
modern man” in all his physical,
psychological, and moral complexity. He
is a pivotal figure in European
literature and thought, and his
influence on modern poetry has been
immense.
Richard D.E. Burton
|
Realism in the novel
Diversity among the Realists
The label Realism came to be applied to literature
by way of painting as a result of the controversy
surrounding the work of Gustave Courbet in the early
1850s. Courbet’s realism consisted in the
emotionally neutral presentation of a slice of life
chosen for its ordinariness rather than for any
intrinsic beauty. Literary realism, however, was a
much less easily definable concept. Hence the loose
use of the term in the late 1850s, when it was
applied to works as various as
Gustave
Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary (1857),
Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du
mal, and the social dramas of
Alexandre Dumas fils.
Even the members of the so-called Realist school
were not entirely in agreement. Edmond Duranty,
cofounder of the monthly journal Réalisme (1856),
supported the view that novels should be written in
a plain style about the ordinary lives of middle- or
working-class people, but he insisted that the
Realists’ main aim should be to serve a social
purpose. Jules-François-Félix Husson (known as
Champfleury), an art critic and novelist, stressed
the need for careful research and documentation and
rejected any element of didactic intention. The
practice of those labeled Realists was even more
diverse than their theory. The writers who most
fully realized Champfleury’s ideal of a documentary
presentation of the day-to-day, Edmond and Jules
Goncourt, were also the most concerned with that
aesthetic perfection of style that Duranty and
Champfleury rejected in practice as well as in
principle. In the Goncourts’ six jointly written
novels that appeared in the 1860s, and in four
further novels written by Edmond Goncourt after his
brother’s death, plot is reduced to a minimum and
the interest of the novel is divided equally between
stylistic bravura and the minutely documented
portrayal of a milieu or a psychological state—the
upbringing of a middle-class girl in Renée Mauperin
(1864; Eng. trans. Renée Mauperin) or the
degenerating lifestyle of a female servant in
Germinie Lacerteux (1864; Eng. trans. Germinie
Lacerteux).
Edmond and Jules
Goncourt

in full
Edmond-Louis-Antoine Huot de Goncourt
and Jules-Alfred Huot de Goncourt
born
May 26, 1822, Nancy, France died July 16, 1896, Champrosay born December 17, 1830, Paris died June 20, 1870, Auteuil
French brothers, writers and constant
collaborators who made significant
contributions to the development of the
naturalist novel and to the fields of
social history and art criticism. Above
all, they are remembered for their
perceptive, revealing Journal and for
Edmond’s legacy, the Académie Goncourt,
which annually awards the Prix Goncourt
to the author of an outstanding work of
French literature.
The
Goncourts’ widowed mother left them an
income that enabled the brothers to live
in modest comfort without working and
rescued Edmond from a treasury clerkship
that had driven him to suicidal despair.
The brothers immediately began to lead a
life doubly dominated by aesthetics and
self-indulgence. Amateur artists, they
first made a sketching tour of France,
Algeria, and Switzerland. Back home in
their Paris flat, they made a fetish of
orderly housekeeping, but their lives
were continually disordered by noises,
upset stomachs, insomnia, and
neurasthenia. Neither of them married.
All the mistresses appearing in the
Journal no doubt belonged to Jules,
whose fatal stroke presumably was
preceded by syphilis.
From
attempts at art the brothers turned to
plays and in 1851 published a novel, En
18, all without success. As journalists,
they were arrested in 1852, though later
acquitted, for an “outrage against
public morality,” which consisted of
quoting mildly erotic Renaissance verses
in one of their articles. The brothers
achieved more success with a series of
social histories, which they began
publishing in 1854. These drew on
private correspondence, newspaper
accounts, brochures, even dinner menus
and dress patterns to recreate the life
of specific periods in French history.
As art critics, the Goncourts’ most
notable achievement was L’Art du
dix-huitième siècle (1859–75; French
Eighteenth Century Painters), which
helped redeem the reputations of such
masters of that time as Antoine Watteau.
The
same meticulous documentation and
attention to detail went into the
Goncourts’ novels. The brothers covered
a vast range of social environments in
their novels: the world of journalism
and literature in Charles Demailly
(1860); that of medicine and the
hospital in Soeur Philomène (1861);
upper middle-class society in Renée
Mauperin (1864); and the artistic world
in Manette Salomon (1867). The
Goncourts’ frank presentation of upper
and lower social classes and their
clinical dissection of social relations
helped establish literary naturalism and
paved the way for such novelists as
Émile Zola and George Moore. The most
lasting of their novels, Germinie
Lacerteux (1864), was based on the
double life of their ugly, seemingly
impeccable servant, Rose, who stole
their money to pay for nocturnal orgies
and men’s attentions. It is one of the
first realistic French novels of
working-class life. Most of the other
novels, however, suffer from overly long
exposition and description, excessive
detail, and mannered, artificial
language. The Goncourts were also known
for the theoretical prefaces to their
novels; Edmond gathered a selection of
these writings for the collection
Préfaces et manifestes littéraires
(1888; “Prefaces and Literary
Manifestos”).
The
Goncourts began keeping their monumental
Journal in 1851, and Edmond continued it
for 26 more years from Jules’s death in
1870 until his own. The diary weaves
through every social stratum, from the
hovels where the brothers sought
atmosphere for Germinie Lacerteux to
dinners with great men of the day. Full
of critical judgments, scabrous
anecdotes, descriptive sketches,
literary gossip, and thumbnail
portraits, the complete Journal is at
once a revealing autobiography and a
monumental history of social and
literary life in 19th-century Paris.
The
Académie Goncourt, first conceived by
the brothers in 1867, was officially
constituted in 1903.
|
Flaubert
It is easy to see why
Gustave Flaubert was so firm
in dissociating himself from such writers as Champfleury and Duranty, given that his own work
undermined all sense of stability in perceptions and
values by emphasizing the idea that any version of
reality is relative to the person who perceives it.
Furthermore,
Flaubert rejected the idea that there
was any merit in attempting to transpose a “slice of
life” onto the page in “everyday language.” For him,
only art could give meaning to the raw material
provided by the external world; only through its
reworking by the artist could language be lifted
above the utilitarian emptiness of everyday use and
forced to inscribe objectively the perceptions of
the author, and characters, that create a world.
Flaubert’s juvenilia show the writer’s struggle
to control his own instinctive idealism and to find
a way of reconciling his belief in the primacy of
facts with his rejection of the pettiness of
contemporary materialism. His fascination with
escapism and Romantic excess was to reappear in
Salammbô (1863; Eng. trans. Salammbo) and La
Tentation de Saint-Antoine (1874; The Temptation of
Saint Anthony), in which he portrays exotic subjects
in a heightened lyrical fashion. However, his major
novels—Madame Bovary (1857; Eng. trans. Madame
Bovary) and L’Éducation sentimentale (1869;
Sentimental Education)—fuse his poetic gifts with
discourses closer to everyday experience to evoke
the thoughts and feelings of trivial lives frittered
away in hopeless attempts to transcend the banality
of the modern world. Emma Bovary, trapped in the
unrelieved dullness of provincial landscape and
domesticity, destroys herself by attempting to base
her life on the ideas of passion and happiness she
has gathered from popular romance. In her efforts to
make the world around her fit her preconceived
images, Emma—at best a dreamer, at worst a social
climber—is an easy victim for the exploitative men
who come her way, and she is inexorably drawn onward
to financial ruin and, eventually, suicide. Emma’s
own mediocrity is part and parcel of the provincial
society in which she lives, and her illusory view is
paralleled by the various illusions entertained by
all the major characters. Most of these, however,
being men, have more scope to pursue their dreams,
or else they are happy to confine desire within the
limits of bourgeois values and convention—as, for
example, the apothecary Homais, the master of the
idées reçues (“received ideas”) that
Flaubert so
loathed (and would later satirize in his unfinished
novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet [published posthumously
in 1881; Eng. trans. Bouvard and Pécuchet]).
Sentimental Education extends the study to cover the
entire “generation of 1848,” showing how all
emotional, artistic, and social ideals are corroded
by contact with reality. Its central character,
Frédéric Moreau, is a passive version of Emma, and
the ruling motif is one of prostitution—the sale of
love, talent, and principle.
The key to both
Madame Bovary and Sentimental
Education is the brilliance of a style that manages
to mold its contours to the personality, ambitions,
and limits of each character it evokes. Syntactic
rhythms and images are drawn from each character’s
own experience and point of perception, as well as
from the common stock of discourses to which their
historical situation gives them access. Over the
whole,
Flaubert casts his own authorial presence,
unobtrusive but visible, drily ironic, and sharply
analytic. His Trois contes (1877; Three Tales) is a
stylistic tour de force, evoking the possibilities
and limits of three lives, each lived at a distinct
and significant moment of historical transition, and
telling the tale of each life in the language,
artistic forms, and perspectives each moment offers.

Gustave Flaubert
"Madame Bovary"
PART I,
PART II,
PART III

born December 12, 1821, Rouen, France died May 8, 1880, Croisset
novelist regarded as the prime mover of
the realist school of French literature
and best known for his masterpiece,
Madame Bovary (1857), a realistic
portrayal of bourgeois life, which led
to a trial on charges of the novel’s
alleged immorality.
Early life and works Flaubert’s father, Achille Cléophas
Flaubert, who was from Champagne, was
chief surgeon and clinical professor at
the Hôtel-Dieu hospital in Rouen. His
mother, a doctor’s daughter from Pont
l’Évêque, belonged to a family of
distinguished magistrates typical of the
great provincial bourgeoisie.
Gustave Flaubert began his literary
career at school, his first published
work appearing in a little review, Le
Colibri, in 1837. He early formed a
close friendship with the young
philosopher Alfred Le Poittevin, whose
pessimistic outlook had a strong
influence on him. No less strong was the
impression made by the company of great
surgeons and the environment of
hospitals, operating theatres, and
anatomy classes, with which his father’s
profession brought him into contact.
Flaubert’s intelligence, moreover, was
sharpened in a general sense. He
conceived a strong dislike of accepted
ideas (idées reçues), of which he was to
compile a “dictionary” for his
amusement. He and Le Poittevin invented
a grotesque imaginary character, called
“le Garçon” (the Boy), to whom they
attributed whatever sort of remark
seemed to them most degrading. Flaubert
came to detest the “bourgeois,” by which
he meant anyone who “has a low way of
thinking.”
In November 1841 Flaubert was enrolled
as a student at the Faculty of Law in
Paris. At age 22, however, he was
recognized to be suffering from a
nervous disease that was taken to be
epilepsy, although the essential
symptoms were absent. This made him give
up the study of law, with the result
that henceforth he could devote all his
time to literature. His father died in
January 1846, and his beloved sister
Caroline died in the following March
after giving birth to a daughter.
Flaubert then retired with his mother
and his infant niece to his estate at
Croisset, near Rouen, on the Seine. He
was to spend nearly all the rest of his
life there.
On a visit to Paris in July 1846, at the
sculptor James Pradier’s studio,
Flaubert met the poet Louise Colet. She
became his mistress, but their
relationship did not run smoothly. His
self-protecting independence and her
jealousy made separation inevitable, and
they parted in 1855.
In 1847 Flaubert went on a walking tour
along the Loire and the coast of
Brittany with the writer Maxime du Camp,
whose acquaintance he had made as a law
student. The pages written by Flaubert
in their journal of this tour “over
fields and shores” were published after
his death under that title, Par les
champs et par les grèves. This book
contains some of his best writing—e.g.,
his description of a visit to
Chateaubriand’s family estate, Combourg.
Mature career Some of the works of Flaubert’s maturity
dealt with subjects on which he had
tried to write earlier. At age 16, for
instance, he completed the manuscript of
Mémoires d’un fou (“Memoirs of a Mad
Man”), which recounted his devastating
passion for Elisa Schlésinger, 11 years
his senior and the wife of a music
publisher, whom he had met in 1836. This
passion was only revealed to her 35
years later when she was a widow. Elisa
provided the model for the character
Marie Arnoux in the novel L’Education
sentimentale. Before receiving its
definitive form, however, this work was
to be rewritten in two distinct
intermediate versions in manuscript:
Novembre (1842) and a preliminary draft
entitled L’Éducation sentimentale
(1843–45). Stage by stage it was
expanded into a vast panorama of France
under the July Monarchy—indispensable
reading, according to Georges Sorel, for
any historian studying the period that
preceded the coup d’etat of 1851.
The composition of La Tentation de Saint
Antoine provides another example of that
tenacity in the pursuit of perfection
that made Flaubert go back constantly to
work on subjects without ever being
satisfied with the results. In 1839 he
was writing Smarh, the first product of
his bold ambition to give French
literature its Faust. He resumed the
task in 1846–49, in 1856, and in 1870,
and finally published the book as La
Tentation de Saint Antoine in 1874. The
four versions show how the author’s
ideas changed in the course of time. The
version of 1849, influenced by Spinoza’s
philosophy, is nihilistic in its
conclusion. In the second version the
writing is less diffuse, but the
substance remains the same. The third
version shows a respect for religious
feeling that was not present in the
earlier ones, since in the interval
Flaubert had read Herbert Spencer and
reconciled the Spencerian notion of the
Unknown with his Spinozism. He had come
to believe that science and religion,
instead of conflicting, are rather the
two poles of thought. The published
version incorporated a catalog of errors
in the field of the Unknown (just as
Bouvard et Pécuchet was to contain a
list of errors in the field of science).
From November 1849 to April 1851
Flaubert was travelling in Egypt,
Palestine, Syria, Turkey, Greece, and
Italy with Maxime du Camp. Before
leaving, however, he wanted to finish La
Tentation and to submit it to his friend
the poet Louis Bouilhet and to du Camp
for their sincere opinion. For three
days in September 1849 he read his
manuscript to them, and they then
condemned it mercilessly. “Throw it all
into the fire, and let’s never mention
it again.” Bouilhet gave further advice:
“Your Muse must be kept on bread and
water or lyricism will kill her. Write a
down-to-earth novel like Balzac’s
Parents pauvres. The story of Delamare,
for instance. . . .”
Eugéne Delamare was a country doctor in
Normandy who died of grief after being
deceived and ruined by his wife,
Delphine (née Couturier). The story, in
fact that of Madame Bovary, is not the
only source of that novel. Another was
the manuscript Mémoires de Mme Ludovica,
discovered by Gabrielle Leleu in the
library of Rouen in 1946. This is an
account of the adventures and
misfortunes of Louise Pradier (née
d’Arcet), the wife of the sculptor James
Pradier, as dictated by herself, and,
apart from the suicide, it bears a
strong resemblance to the story of Emma
Bovary. Flaubert, out of kindness as
well as out of professional curiosity,
had continued to see Louise Pradier when
the “bourgeois” were ostracizing her as
a fallen woman, and she must have given
him her strange document. Even so, when
inquisitive people asked him who served
as model for his heroine, Flaubert
replied, “Madame Bovary is myself.” As
early as 1837 he had written Passion et
vertu, a short and pointed story with a
heroine, Mazza, resembling Emma Bovary.
For Madame Bovary he took a commonplace
story of adultery and made of it a book
that will always be read because of its
profound humanity. While working on his
novel Flaubert wrote: “My poor Bovary
suffers and cries in more than a score
of villages in France at this very
moment.” Madame Bovary, with its
unrelenting objectivity—by which
Flaubert meant the dispassionate
recording of every trait or incident
that could illuminate the psychology of
his characters and their role in the
logical development of his story—marks
the beginning of a new age in
literature.
Madame Bovary cost the author five years
of hard work. Du Camp, who had founded
the periodical Revue de Paris, urged him
to make haste, but he would not. The
novel, with the subtitle Moeurs de
province (“Provincial Customs”),
eventually appeared in installments in
the Revue from October 1 to December 15,
1856. The French government then brought
the author to trial on the ground of his
novel’s alleged immorality, and he
narrowly escaped conviction
(January–February 1857). The same
tribunal found the poet Charles
Baudelaire guilty on the same charge six
months later.
To refresh himself after his long
application to the dull world of the
bourgeoisie in Madame Bovary, Flaubert
immediately began work on Salammbô, a
novel about ancient Carthage, in which
he set his sombre story of Hamilcar’s
daughter Salammbô, an entirely
fictitious character, against the
authentic historical background of the
revolt of the mercenaries against
Carthage in 240–237 bc. His
transformation of the dry record of
Polybius into richly poetic prose is
comparable to Shakespeare’s treatment of
Plutarch’s narrative in the lyrical
descriptions in Antony and Cleopatra. A
play, Le Château des coeurs (The Castle
of Hearts, 1904), written in 1863, was
not printed until 1880.
Later years The merits of L’Éducation sentimentale,
which appeared a few months before the
outbreak of the Franco-German War of
1870, were not appreciated, and Flaubert
was much disappointed. Two plays, Le
Sexe faible (“The Feeble Sex”) and Le
Candidat (The Candidate, 1904), likewise
had no success, though the latter was
staged for four performances in March
1874. The last years of his life,
moreover, were saddened by financial
troubles. In 1875 his niece Caroline’s
husband, Ernest Commanville, a timber
importer, found himself heavily in debt.
Flaubert sacrificed his own fortune to
save him from bankruptcy. Flaubert
sought consolation in his work and in
the friendship of George Sand, Ivan
Turgenev, and younger novelists—Émile
Zola, Alphonse Daudet, and, especially,
Guy de Maupassant, who was the son of
his friend Alfred Le Poittevin’s sister
Laure and who regarded himself as
Flaubert’s disciple.
Flaubert temporarily abandoned work on a
long novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet, in
order to write Trois Contes, containing
the three short stories “Un Coeur
simple,” a tale about the drab and
simple life of a faithful servant; “La
Légende de Saint Julien l’Hospitalier”;
and “Hérodias.” This book, through the
diversity of the stories’ themes, shows
Flaubert’s talent in all its aspects and
has often been held to be his
masterpiece.
The heroes of Bouvard et Pécuchet are
two clerks who receive a legacy and
retire to the country together. Not
knowing how to use their leisure, they
busy themselves with one abortive
experiment after another and plunge
successively into scientific farming,
archaeology, chemistry, and
historiography, as well as taking an
abandoned child into their care.
Everything goes wrong because their
futile book learning cannot compensate
for their lack of judgment.
The profound meaning of Bouvard et
Pécuchet, which was left unfinished by
Flaubert and which was not published
until after his death, has been
seriously misunderstood by those critics
who have regarded it as a denial of the
value of science. In fact it is
“scientism” (and by analogy the
confusion of doctrines) that Flaubert is
arraigning—i.e., the practice of taking
science out of its own domain, of
confusing efficient and final causes,
and of convincing oneself that one
understands fundamentals when one has
not even grasped the superficial
phenomena. Intoxicated with empty words,
Bouvard and Pécuchet awake from their
dream only when catastrophe overtakes
all of their efforts.
Flaubert has been accused of presenting
them as imbeciles, but in fact he
expresses his compassion for them: “They
acquire a faculty deserving of pity,
they recognize stupidity and can no
longer tolerate it. Through their
inquisitiveness their understanding
grows; having had more ideas, they
suffered more.” Flaubert’s satire is
thus to some extent the history of his
own experience told with a sad humour.
Flaubert died suddenly of an apoplectic
stroke. He left on his table an
unfinished page and notes for the second
volume of his novel. Bouvard and
Pécuchet, tired of experimenting, were
to go back to the work of transcribing
and copying that they had done as
clerks. The matter that they chose to
transcribe was the subject of the notes:
it was to be a selection of quotations,
a sottisier , or anthology of foolish
remarks. There has been much controversy
about this bitter conclusion, as the
form that it was to take was left
undetermined in the notes Flaubert left,
though the materials were gathered and
have been published.
Method of composition Flaubert’s aim in art was to create
beauty, and this consideration often
overrode moral and social issues in his
depiction of truth. He worked slowly and
carefully, and, as he worked, his idea
of his art became gradually more exact.
His letters to Louise Colet, written
while he was working on Madame Bovary,
show how his attitude changed. His
ambition was to achieve a style “as
rhythmical as verse and as precise as
the language of science” (letter of
April 24, 1852). In his view “the faster
the word sticks to the thought, the more
beautiful is the effect.” He often
repeated that there was no such thing as
a synonym and that a writer had to track
down le seul mot juste, “the unique
right word,” to convey his thought
precisely. But at the same time he
always wanted a cadence and a harmony of
sounding syllables in his prose, so that
it would appeal not only to the reader’s
intelligence but also to his
subconscious mind in the same way as
music does and thus have a more
penetrating effect than the mere sense
of the words at their face value.
Composition for him was a real anguish.
Flaubert sought objectivity above all
else in his writing: “The author, in his
work, must be like God in the Universe,
present everywhere and visible nowhere.”
It is paradoxical, therefore, that his
personality should be so clearly
discernible in all his work and that his
letters, written casually to his
intimates and full of disarming
sincerity, delicate sensibility, and
even exquisite tenderness—side by side
with jovial coarseness of
expression—should be considered by some
critics as his masterpiece.
René Dumesnil Jacques Barzun
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Drama
The society of the Second Empire, and indeed
that of the early decades of the Third Republic, did
not like to see itself too accurately portrayed on
the stage; yet at the same time, in reaction against
the escapism and nonconformity of Romantic drama,
its members wanted the stage to reflect contemporary
values and preoccupations. Hence the predominance
from 1850 to 1890 of social drama on the one hand
and light comedy, farce, and operetta on the other.
Social drama, denied the use of political issues by
censorship, confined itself to the tension between
new money and old social position, the morality of
financial speculation, and the threat to family life
posed by extramarital sexual relationships—all
themes touched upon previously in light comedy (in,
for example, the plays of Eugène Scribe). The
settings and character types were related to the
audience’s milieu; hence the plays were considered
to be realistic at the time, although their
sentimentality, black-and-white morality, and
melodramatic turns of plot make them seem highly
artificial in modern terms. The major writers of
social drama were
Dumas fils and Émile Augier.
Dumas
fils is best remembered for his romanticization of
the courtesan in
La Dame aux camélias (1848; The
Lady with the Camellias), the novel and play on
which the libretto of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata
was based, but the moralizing Les Idées de Mme
Aubray (1867), with its plea for the social
redemption of repentant fallen women, is more
typical of his major works. Augier’s morality was
more solidly conservative than was
Dumas’s, as can
be seen from one of his best-known plays, Le Mariage
d’Olympe (1855; “The Marriage of Olympia”), which
proposes that what makes a woman into a prostitute
in the first place is an innate propensity to vice.
On the other hand, Augier’s treatment of the
venality of the press and the corruption of
financiers in Les Effrontés (1861; “The Shameless
Ones”) is as trenchant as comparable portraits in
the Naturalist novelists.
Light comedy and farce similarly relied upon a
thin layer of contemporary social relevance, with
marriage, the ménage à trois, and the pretensions of
the lower middle class as the main subjects. In
farce in particular, social criticism passed from
being an end to a means, and the return to sanity at
the end of the plays confirmed the audience’s
assumption that the world would ultimately always
conform to expected and accepted standards. The
classic examples of the genre are the plays of
Eugène-Marin Labiche, notably Un Chapeau de paille
d’Italie (1851; The Italian Straw Hat).
When their taste ventured into something more
literary, Second Empire audiences were obliged to
look to the fantastical comedies of
Alfred de
Musset, written 30 years earlier but not staged
until the 1850s and ’60s. In light comedy proper and
costume drama, the leading figure of the age was
George Bernard Shaw’s bugbear, Victorien Sardou. But
the most successful genre of all was undoubtedly
operetta, especially the absurd comedies of the
collaborators Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy,
whose work was set to music by Jacques Offenbach. La
Belle Hélène (1864; Fair Helen), in which a
frivolous pastiche of Classical legend is spiced by
an acute satire on the manners, morals, and values
of the court of Napoleon III, was the nearest thing
to political satire that the French stage could
boast for 20 years.
The Franco-German War and the consequent collapse
of the empire had little perceptible effect on
mainline theatre, though Offenbach lost favour
because of his German associations. Attempts by
other writers (Flaubert, the
Goncourts,
Zola) to
establish a more genuinely realistic form of theatre
failed, partly because public taste and theatrical
commercialism made experiment nearly impossible and
partly because the plays written were theatrically
incompetent. The only effective Naturalist dramatist
was Henry-François Becque.
That Becque owed his success to André Antoine,
the founder and director of the Théâtre Libre
(1887–96), is symptomatic of the way in which
literary theatre in the last decades of the century
was largely dependent for its revival on small-scale
directorial experimentation. Antoine, who aimed at
creating a unity between the staging (decor and
acting style) of a play and its content, in the
interest of total realism, introduced Paris to the
drama of
Henrik Ibsen and
August
Strindberg. From
1891 Paul Fort, founder of the Théâtre d’Art, and
his successor, Aurélien Lugné-Poë, who restyled the
company as the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, applied
Antoine’s principles to the creation of
antinaturalistic theatre. It was these little
experimental companies that principally staged
Symbolist plays and began to explore the spectacular
resources of the stage, including puppet theatre and
shadow plays, as well as the theatre’s capacity to
create a new antirealist drama focused on ideas,
fantasy, and dream. Most productions were of minor
work (by, for example, Auguste, comte de Villiers de
l’Isle-Adam, and Rachilde [Marguerite Eymery]); even
the Belgian
Maurice Maeterlinck, whose influence
made itself felt throughout Europe, won only small,
select audiences for such plays as Pelléas et
Mélisande (1892; Eng. trans. Pelleas and Melisande),
Monna Vanna (1902; Eng. trans. Monna Vanna), and the
celebrated children’s play L’Oiseau bleu (1908; The
Blue Bird). The significance of such theatrical
innovation was felt more widely in the following
century. Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi (King Ubu), a
vicious lampoon on the violence of despotic rule,
has been said to foreshadow Surrealism and the
Theatre of the Absurd. The play opened at the
Théâtre de l’Oeuvre on December 11, 1896, played to
pandemonium and near-riot, and closed the following
night.
Eugène Scribe

in full
Augustin-Eugène Scribe
born Dec.
24, 1791, Paris, France
died Feb. 20, 1861, Paris
French
dramatist whose works dominated the Parisian
stage for more than 30 years.
Scribe began his career as a playwright by
resurrecting the vaudeville, an obsolete
form of short satirical comedy that used
rhymed and sung couplets and featured
musical interludes. He soon began replacing
its stock characters with ones drawn from
contemporary society and introducing
elements of the comedy of manners into his
plays. He eliminated the musical interludes
altogether and expanded the elements of
comic intrigue until his plays had become
genuine comedies. He went on to become one
of the great masters of the neatly plotted,
tightly constructed well-made play.
Although
mostly forgotten today, Scribe was a writer
of prodigious industry who also achieved
great popular success. He wrote almost 400
theatre pieces of every kind, often in
collaboration in what was virtually a
literary factory. His comedies, which
express the values and predilections of
bourgeois society and praise the virtues of
commerce and family life, were intended to
appeal to the material aspirations of a
middle-class audience whose capacity for
idealism was limited. Among his many
comedies are Une Nuit de la garde nationale
(1815; “A Night with the National Guard”),
Le Charlatanisme (1825), and Le Mariage
d’argent (1827; “Marriage for Money”).
Scribe is also remembered for such
historical plays as Le Verre d’eau (1840;
“The Glass of Water”), which derives great
historical events from a trivial incident,
and Bertrand et Raton (1833), a historical
comedy. His Adrienne Lecouvreur (1849), a
melodrama about an actress who loves a
nobleman, unaware of his high rank and true
identity, was favoured as a vehicle by such
notable actresses as Sarah Bernhardt and
Helena Modjeska. Scribe also wrote a ballet
and several opera libretti. He was elected
to the Académie Française in 1836.
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Dumas
Alexandre, fils
"The Lady of the
Camellias"

born July
27, 1824, Paris, Fr.
died Nov. 27, 1895, Marly-le-Roi
French playwright and novelist, one of the
founders of the “problem play”—that is, of
the middle-class realistic drama treating
some contemporary ill and offering
suggestions for its remedy. He was the son
(fils) of the dramatist and novelist
Alexandre Dumas, called Dumas père.
Dumas fils
possessed a good measure of his father’s
literary fecundity, but the work of the two
men could scarcely be more different. His
first success was a novel, La Dame aux
camélias (1848), but he found his vocation
when he adapted the story into a play, known
in English as Camille, first performed in
1852. (Giuseppe Verdi based his opera La
Traviata, first performed in 1853, on this
play.) Although Dumas père had written
colourful historical plays and novels, Dumas
fils specialized in drama set in the
present. The unhappy witness of the ruin
brought on his father by illicit love
affairs, Dumas fils—himself the child of one
of these affairs—devoted his plays to
sermons on the sanctity of the family and of
marriage. Le Demi-Monde (performed 1855),
for example, dealt with the threat to the
institution of marriage posed by
prostitutes. Modern audiences usually find
Dumas’s drama verbose and sententious, but
in the late 19th century eminent critics
praised his plays for their moral
seriousness. He was admitted to the Académie
Française in 1875.
Among his
most interesting plays are Le Fils naturel
(1858; “The Natural Son”) and Un Père
prodigue (1859), a dramatization of Dumas’s
interpretation of his father’s character.
Eleonora Duse as Marguerite Gautier in "The
Lady of the Camellias"; late 19th century
"The Lady of the
Camellias" (French: La Dame
aux camélias) is a novel by
Dumas
Alexandre, fils,
first published in 1848, that was
subsequently adapted for the stage. The Lady
of the Camellias premiered at the Théâtre du
Vaudeville in Paris, France on February 2,
1852. An instant success, Giuseppe Verdi
immediately set about to put the story to
music. His work became the 1853 opera La
Traviata with the female protagonist
"Marguerite Gautier" renamed "Violetta
Valéry".
In the
English-speaking world, The Lady of the
Camellias became known as Camille and 16
versions have been performed at Broadway
theatres alone. The titular lady is
Marguerite Gautier, who is based on Rose
Marie Duplessis, the real-life lover of
author
Dumas
Alexandre, fils
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Eugène-Marin Labiche

born May 5,
1815, Paris, France
died Jan. 23, 1888, Paris
comic playwright who wrote many of the most
popular and amusing light comedies of the
19th-century French stage.
Born into
the bourgeois class that was to provide him
with the social setting for most of his
works, Labiche read for the bar and then
briefly worked as a journalist before
turning to writing fiction. In 1838 he
published a novel, La Clef des champs (“The
Key to the Fields”). Of his early plays,
Monsieur de Coislin (1838), written in
collaboration with Marc Michel, was his
first great success. A long series of
hilarious full-length and one-act plays
followed. Written together with other
authors, these works were presented mostly
at the Palais-Royal, the home of light
comedy. Typically, the plays are based on an
improbable incident evolving into an
imbroglio that brings out the folly and
frailty of the characters. The best of his
works include Le Chapeau de paille d’Italie
(1851; The Italian Straw Hat), which
inspired René Clair’s classic film of the
same name (1927); Le Misanthrope et
l’Auvergnat (1852); Le Voyage de M.
Perrichon (1860; The Journey of Mr.
Perrichon); and La Poudre aux yeux (1861;
“The Bluff”).
Though full
of dramatic devices, Labiche’s plays
nonetheless show real insight into human
nature. When his plays were first presented,
the exaggerated and slapstick style of his
favourite actors—such as Jean Geoffroy, for
whom many of the parts were written—somewhat
obscured the delightfully precise
delineations of character. With the
publication of his Théâtre complet, 10 vol.
(1878–83) while he was in retirement,
Labiche was engulfed by renewed acclaim and
success, including election to the Académie
Française in 1880. Sound and entertaining,
his works raised the lowly farce to a much
higher level of literary accomplishment.
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Henry-François Becque

born April
18, 1837, Neuilly, Fr.
died May 12, 1899, Paris
dramatist and critic whose loosely
structured plays, based on character and
motivation rather than on closely knit
plots, provided a healthy challenge to the
“well-made plays” that held the stage in his
day. Although Becque disliked literary
theory and refused identification with any
school, he has been remembered as a
forerunner of the Naturalist movement, whose
chief exponent was the novelist Émile Zola.
From 1867
Becque tried his hand at various types of
drama, including vaudeville and a play on a
socialist theme. Les Corbeaux (1882; The
Vultures, 1913), his masterpiece, describes
a bitter struggle for an inheritance. The
unvaried egotism of the characters and the
realistic dialogue were unfavourably
received, except by the Naturalist critics,
and the play had only three performances. La
Parisienne (1885; Parisienne, 1943)
scandalized the public by its treatment of
the story of a married woman and her two
lovers. Its importance, like that of Les
Corbeaux, was not recognized until a decade
after its appearance. In his last years, a
withdrawn and somewhat misanthropic figure,
Becque devoted himself to journalism and to
a drama of the financial world that he never
completed.
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Alfred
Jarry

born Sept.
8, 1873, Laval, France
died Nov. 1, 1907, Paris
French
writer mainly known as the creator of the
grotesque and wild satirical farce Ubu roi
(1896; “King Ubu”), which was a forerunner
of the Theatre of the Absurd.
A brilliant youth who had come to Paris at
18 to live on a small family inheritance,
Jarry frequented the literary salons and
began to write. His fortune was soon
dissipated, and he lapsed into a chaotic and
anarchic existence in which he met the
demands of day-to-day life with
self-conscious buffoonery. He died in a
state of utter destitution and alcoholism.
On Dec. 10,
1896, at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, the
director Aurélien Lugné-Poë presented Ubu
roi, a dramatic sketch that was first
conceived by Jarry at the age of 15, with
some schoolmates, to caricature a pompous
schoolmaster. The play’s principal character
is Père Ubu, a grotesque and repulsive
character who becomes the king of Poland.
Ubu symbolizes the crass stupidity and
avarice of the bourgeoisie as his lust for
power drives him to abuse his authority and
commit acts of cruelty in the name of
questionable principles. The play’s first
production caused a scandal, and it closed
after two nights. This inauspicious debut
was partly a result of the outrage felt by
the audience at Ubu’s speech, which was
purposely deformed and vulgar, riddled with
malapropisms and derisive absurdities.
Jarry’s sequels to Ubu roi included Ubu
enchaîné (1900; Ubu Enchained), Ubu sur la
butte (1901; “Ubu on the Mound”) and Ubu
cocu (published posthumously in 1944; “Ubu
Cuckolded”). The first three plays were
performed by Jean Vilar at the Théâtre
National Populaire in 1958. Jean-Louis
Barrault directed a composite production
drawn from his works, Jarry sur la butte
(“Jarry on the Mound”), in 1970.
Jarry also
published stories, novels, and poems, but
the brilliant imagery and wit of these works
usually lapse into incoherence and a
meaningless and often scatological
symbolism. Jarry invented a logic of the
absurd that he christened “pataphysique”; he
presented this eccentric metaphysical scheme
in Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll,
pataphysicien (published 1911; “Deeds and
Opinions of Doctor Faustroll,
Pataphysician”).
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Naturalism
The argument for the existence of a
distinctive Naturalist school of writing depends on
the joint publication, in 1880, of Les Soirées de Médan, a volume of short stories by
Émile Zola,
Guy
de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Henry Céard,
Léon Hennique, and Paul Alexis. The Naturalists
purported to take a more scientifically analytic
approach to the presentation of reality than had
their predecessors, treating dissection as a
prerequisite for description. Hence
Zola’s
attachment to the term naturalisme, borrowed from
Hippolyte Taine, the positivist philosopher who
claimed for literary criticism the status of a
branch of psychology. It is difficult to find a
coherent statement of the Naturalist theoretical
position.
Zola’s work notes are fragmentary, and his
public statements about the novel are all distorted
by their polemical purpose—particularly the essay
“Le Roman expérimental” (1880; “The Experimental
Novel”), in which he developed a parallel between
the methods of the novelist and those of the
experimental scientist. An examination of the views
held in common by
Zola,
Maupassant (in, for example,
“Le Roman,” the introductory text to his novel
Pierre et Jean [1888; Pierre and Jean]), and
Huysmans indicates that the basis of Naturalism can
best be defined as the analytic study of a given
milieu, the demonstration of a deterministic
relation between milieu and characters, the
application of a (more or less) mechanistic theory
of psychology, and the rejection of any sort of
idealism. However, like
Flaubert, the Naturalists
did not see reality as capable of any simple
objective transcription.
Zola and
Maupassant
accepted as part of literary truth the transposition
of reality through the temperament of the individual
writer and the role played by form in the
construction of the real.
Zola
Émile Zola’s Naturalism depends on the extensive
documentation that he undertook before writing each
novel. This extensiveness is emphasized by the
subtitle of his 20-novel cycle Les Rougon-Macquart:
histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le
second Empire (“The Rougon-Macquart: Natural and
Social History of a Family Under the Second
Empire”). The linking of so many novels through a
single family and the emphasis on the deterministic
effects of heredity and environment confirm the
scientific purpose. Zola’s canvas is broader than
Flaubert’s or even Balzac’s: he handles subjects as
diverse as a miners’ strike in Germinal (1885; Eng.
trans. Germinal), working-class alcoholism in
L’Assommoir (1877; Eng. trans. The Drunkard or
L’Assommoir), the sexual decadence of the upper
classes in La Curée (1872; The Kill) and Nana (1880;
Eng. trans. Nana), and the ferocious attachment of
the peasantry to their land in La Terre (1887;
Earth). But there are countless examples of
manipulation of facts, particularly in the
chronology of the novels, which show that for
Zola
documentary accuracy was not paramount. Indeed, his
work notes reveal that he saw the scientific
principles underlying the novels as a literary
device to hold them together and thus strengthen the
personal vision of reality that they contained. The
sense of period and family unity is soon submerged,
as
Zola becomes both poet and moralist in his
portrayal of contemporary values. All the major
novels are dominated by symbolically
anthropomorphized forces that control and destroy
both individual and mass. Thus the mine in Germinal
is represented as a voracious beast devouring those
who work in it. This tendency to symbolism, which
for
Zola is a mode of both analysis and commentary,
can be seen in an even more extreme form in the
reinterpretation of the Genesis story in La Faute de
l’abbé Mouret (1875; The Sin of Father Mouret). As
the cycle progresses, the sense of a doomed society
rushing toward the apocalypse grows, to be confirmed
in
Zola’s penultimate novel, on the Franco-German
War, La Débâcle (1892; The Debacle).
The trilogy Les Trois Villes (1894–98; “The Three
Cities”) and the unfinished tetralogy Les Quatres
Évangiles (1899–1903; “The Four Gospels”), which
followed Les Rougon-Macquart, are unreadably
didactic, laying bare the obsessions with scientific
progress and socialist humanitarianism, and the
hostility toward the philosophy and politics of
Roman Catholicism, which had been present in a
concealed form in the earlier novels.
Zola’s
contribution to French life after Les
Rougon-Macquart lay more in his spirited
intervention in the Dreyfus Affair, with his
combative open letter, “J’accuse,” of January 13,
1898, taking up the cause of the Jewish army officer
unjustly convicted of treason.
Émile Zola
"J'accuse" (I accuse)

in full
Émile-Édouard-Charles-Antoine Zola
born , April 2, 1840, Paris, France
died Sept. 28, 1902, Paris
French
novelist, critic, and political activist who
was the most prominent French novelist of
the late 19th century. He was noted for his
theories of naturalism, which underlie his
monumental 20-novel series Les
Rougon-Macquart, and for his intervention in
the Dreyfus Affair through his famous open
letter, “J’accuse.”
Life
Though born in Paris in 1840, Zola spent
his youth in Aix-en-Provence in southern
France, where his father, a civil engineer
of Italian descent, was involved in the
construction of a municipal water system.
The senior Zola died in 1847, leaving Madame
Zola and her young son in dire financial
straits. In Aix, Zola was a schoolmate of
the painter Paul Cézanne, who would later
join him in Paris and introduce him to
Édouard Manet and the Impressionist
painters.
Although
Zola completed his schooling at the Lycée
Saint-Louis in Paris, he twice failed the
baccalauréat exam, which was a prerequisite
to further studies, and in 1859 he was
forced to seek gainful employment. Zola
spent most of the next two years unemployed
and living in abject poverty. He subsisted
by pawning his few belongings and, according
to legend, by eating sparrows trapped
outside his attic window. Finally, in 1862
he was hired as a clerk at the publishing
firm of L.-C.-F. Hachette, where he was
later promoted to the advertising
department. To supplement his income and
make his mark in the world of letters, Zola
began to write articles on subjects of
current interest for various periodicals; he
also continued to write fiction, a pastime
he had enjoyed since boyhood. In 1865 Zola
published his first novel, La Confession de
Claude (Claude’s Confession), a sordid,
semiautobiographical tale that drew the
attention of the public and the police and
incurred the disapproval of Zola’s employer.
Having sufficiently established his
reputation as a writer to support himself
and his mother, albeit meagerly, as a
freelance journalist, Zola left his job at
Hachette to pursue his literary interests.
In the
following years Zola continued his career in
journalism while publishing two novels:
Thérèse Raquin (1867), a grisly tale of
murder and its aftermath that is still
widely read, and Madeleine Férat (1868), a
rather unsuccessful attempt at applying the
principles of heredity to the novel. It was
this interest in science that led Zola, in
the fall of 1868, to conceive the idea of a
large-scale series of novels similar to
Honoré de Balzac’s La Comédie humaine (The
Human Comedy), which had appeared earlier in
the century. Zola’s project, originally
involving 10 novels, each featuring a
different member of the same family, was
gradually expanded to comprise the 20
volumes of the Rougon-Macquart series.
La Fortune
des Rougon (The Rougon Family Fortune), the
first novel in the series, began to appear
in serial form in 1870, was interrupted by
the outbreak of the Franco-German War in
July, and was eventually published in book
form in October 1871. Zola went on to
produce these 20 novels—most of which are of
substantial length—at the rate of nearly one
per year, completing the series in 1893.
In the
1860s and ’70s Zola also defended the art of
Cézanne, Manet, and the Impressionists
Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Pierre-Auguste
Renoir in newspaper articles. During this
period he was a constant presence at weekly
gatherings of the painters at various
studios and cafés, where theories about the
arts and their potential interrelationships
were vociferously debated. Zola’s friendship
with Cézanne and the other artists was,
however, irreparably damaged by the
publication of his novel L’Oeuvre (1886; The
Masterpiece), which depicts the life of an
innovative painter who, unable to realize
his creative potential, ends up hanging
himself in front of his final painting.
Cézanne, in particular, chose to see the
novel as a thinly disguised commentary on
his own temperament and talent.
In 1870
Zola married Gabrielle-Alexandrine Meley,
who had been his companion and lover for
almost five years, and the young couple
assumed the care of Zola’s mother. In the
early ’70s Zola expanded his literary
contacts, meeting frequently with Gustave
Flaubert, Edmond Goncourt, Alphonse Daudet,
and Ivan Turgenev, all successful novelists
whose failures in the theatre led them to
humorously refer to themselves as auteurs
sifflés (“hissed authors”). Beginning in
1878 the Zola home in Médan, on the Seine
River not far from Paris, served as a
gathering spot for a group of the novelist’s
disciples, the best-known of whom were Guy
de Maupassant and Joris-Karl Huysmans, and
together they published a collection of
short stories, Les Soirées de Médan (1880;
Evenings at Médan).
As the
founder and most celebrated member of the
naturalist movement, Zola published several
treatises to explain his theories on art,
including Le Roman expérimental (1880; The
Experimental Novel) and Les Romanciers
naturalistes (1881; The Naturalist
Novelists). Naturalism involves the
application to literature of two scientific
principles: determinism, or the belief that
character, temperament, and, ultimately,
behaviour are determined by the forces of
heredity, environment, and historical
moment; and the experimental method, which
entails the objective recording of precise
data in controlled conditions.
If Zola’s
penchant for polemics and publicity led him
to exaggerate his naturalist principles in
his early writings, in later years, it can
be said, rather, that controversy sought out
the reluctant novelist. His publication of a
particularly grim and sordid portrait of
peasant life in La Terre in 1887 led a group
of five so-called disciples to repudiate
Zola in a manifesto published in the
important newspaper Le Figaro. His novel La
Débâcle (1892), which was openly critical of
the French army and government actions
during the Franco-German War (1870–71), drew
vitriolic criticism from French and Germans
alike. Despite Zola’s undisputed prominence,
he was never elected to the French Academy,
although he was nominated on no fewer than
19 occasions.
Although
Zola’s marriage to Alexandrine endured until
his death, the author had a fourteen-year
affair with Jeanne Rozerot, one of his
wife’s housemaids, beginning in 1888. Jeanne
bore him his only children—Denise and
Jacques—who were “recognized” by Madame Zola
after her husband’s death.
In 1898
Zola intervened in the Dreyfus Affair—that
of a Jewish French army officer whose
wrongful conviction for treason in 1894
sparked a 12-year controversy that deeply
divided French society. At an early stage in
the proceedings Zola had decided rightly
that Alfred Dreyfus was innocent. On Jan.
13, 1898, in the newspaper L’Aurore, Zola
published a fierce denunciation of the
French general staff in an open letter
beginning with the words “J’accuse” (“I
accuse”). He charged various high-ranking
military officers and, indeed, the War
Office itself of concealing the truth in the
wrongful conviction of Dreyfus for
espionage. Zola was prosecuted for libel and
found guilty. In July 1899, when his appeal
appeared certain to fail, he fled to
England. He returned to France the following
June when he learned that the Dreyfus case
was to be reopened with a possible reversal
of the original verdict. Zola’s intervention
in the controversy helped to undermine
anti-Semitism and rabid militarism in
France.
Zola’s
final series of novels, Les Trois Villes
(1894–98; The Three Cities) and Les Quatre
Évangiles (1899–1903; The Four Gospels) are
generally conceded to be far less forceful
than his earlier work. However, the titles
of the novels in the latter series reveal
the values that underlay his entire life and
work: Fécondité (1899; Fecundity), Travail
(1901; Work), Vérité (1903; Truth), and
Justice (which, ironically, remained
incomplete).
Zola died
unexpectedly in September 1902, the victim
of coal gas asphyxiation resulting from a
blocked chimney flue. Officially, the event
was determined to be a tragic accident, but
there were—and still are—those who believe
that fanatical anti-Dreyfusards arranged to
have the chimney blocked.
At the time
of his death, Zola was recognized not only
as one of the greatest novelists in Europe
but also as a man of action—a defender of
truth and justice, a champion of the poor
and the persecuted. At his funeral he was
eulogized by Anatole France as having been
not just a great man, but “a moment in the
human conscience,” and crowds of mourners,
prominent and poor alike, lined the streets
to salute the passing casket. In 1908 Zola’s
remains were transferred to the Panthéon and
placed alongside those of Voltaire,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Victor Hugo,
other French authors whose works and deeds,
like those of Zola, had changed the course
of French history.
Les Rougon-Macquart
Although he produced some 60 volumes of
fiction, theory, and criticism, in addition
to numerous pieces of journalism, during his
40-year career, Zola is best known for his
20-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart, which
is “the natural and social history of a
family under the Second Empire.” As the
subtitle suggests, the naturalist goal of
demonstrating the deterministic influence of
heredity is fulfilled by tracing the lives
of various members of the three branches of
the Rougon-Macquart family. At the same
time, the weight of historical moment is
shown by limiting the action of the novels
to one historical period, that of the Second
Empire (1852–70), which was the reign of
Napoleon III, the nephew and pale imitation
of Napoleon Bonaparte. Finally, Zola
examines the impact of environment by
varying the social, economic, and
professional milieu in which each novel
takes place.
La Curée
(1872; The Kill), for example, explores the
land speculation and financial dealings that
accompanied the renovation of Paris during
the Second Empire. Le Ventre de Paris (1873;
The Belly of Paris) examines the structure
of the Halles, the vast central market-place
of Paris, and its influence on the lives of
its workers. The 10 steel pavilions that
make up the market are compared alternately
to a machine, a palace, and an entire city,
thereby situating the market within a
broader social framework. Son Excellence
Eugène Rougon (1876; His Excellency Eugène
Rougon) traces the machinations and
maneuverings of cabinet officials in
Napoleon III’s government.
L’Assommoir
(1877; “The Club”; Eng. trans. The
Drunkard), which is among the most
successful and enduringly popular of Zola’s
novels, shows the effects of alcoholism in a
working-class neighbourhood by focusing on
the rise and decline of a laundress,
Gervaise Macquart. Zola’s use of slang, not
only by the characters but by the narrator,
and his vivid paintings of crowds in motion
lend authenticity and power to his portrait
of the working class. Nana (1880) follows
the life of Gervaise’s daughter as her
economic circumstances and hereditary
penchants lead her to a career as an
actress, then a courtesan, professions
underscored by a theatrical metaphor that
extends throughout the novel, revealing the
ceremonial falseness of the Second Empire.
Au Bonheur des Dames (1883; Ladies’ Delight)
depicts the mechanisms of a new economic
entity, the department store, and its impact
on smaller merchants. The sweeping
descriptions of crowds and dry-goods
displays justify Zola’s characterization of
the novel as “a poem of modern activity.”
Germinal
(1885), which is generally acknowledged to
be Zola’s masterpiece, depicts life in a
mining community by highlighting relations
between the bourgeoisie and the working
class. At the same time, the novel weighs
the events of a miners’ strike and its
aftermath in terms of those contemporary
political movements (Marxism, anarchism,
trade unionism) that purport to deal with
the problems of the proletariat. Zola’s
comparison of the coal mine to a devouring
monster and his use of animal and botanical
imagery to characterize the workers create a
novel of epic scope that replicates, in
modern terms, ancient myths of damnation and
resurrection. A quite different work,
L’Oeuvre (1886), explores the milieu of the
art world and the interrelationship of the
arts by means of the friendship between an
Impressionist painter, Claude Lantier, and a
naturalist novelist, Pierre Sandoz. Zola’s
verbal style mirrors the visual techniques
of Impressionism in word-pictures of Paris
transformed by varying effects of colour,
light, and atmosphere.
In La Terre
(1887; Earth) Zola breaks with the tradition
of rustic, pastoral depictions of peasant
life to show what he considered to be the
sordid lust for land among the French
peasantry. In La Bête humaine (1890; The
Human Beast) he analyzes the hereditary urge
to kill that haunts the Lantier branch of
the family, set against the background of
the French railway system, with its powerful
machinery and rapid movement. La Débâcle
(1892; The Debacle) traces both the defeat
of the French army by the Germans at the
Battle of Sedan in 1870 and the anarchist
uprising of the Paris Commune. Zola
superimposes the viewpoints of numerous
characters to capture the vividness of
individual vision while at the same time
obtaining an overall strategic sense of the
war. Finally, in Le Docteur Pascal (1893) he
uses the main character, the doctor Pascal
Rougon, armed with a genealogical tree of
the Rougon-Macquart family published with
the novel, to expound the theories of
heredity underlying the entire series.
The
Rougon-Macquart series thus constitutes a
family saga, not unlike those of today’s
television miniseries, while providing a
valuable sociological document of the
events, institutions, and ideas that marked
the rise of modern industrialism and the
cultural changes it entailed. However, if
the novels continue to be widely read today,
it is largely due to Zola’s unique artistry,
a poetry of machine and motion, vitalized by
the individual viewpoint, yet structured by
vast networks of imagery that capture the
intense activity and alienation of modern
industrial society. Zola’s novels have had
an immense impact on modern literature, from
the existentialist novel and the “new novel”
in France to the works of the “muckrakers”
in the United States. In their striking
combination of visuality and movement,
Zola’s novels can even be said to foreshadow
the motion picture, for which they have
proved admirably suited for adaptation, from
the pioneering version of La Bête humaine by
Jean Renoir in 1938 to the big-budget
rendition of Germinal by Claude Berri in
1993. Above all, Zola’s writings endure on
account of his forthright portrayal of
social injustice, his staunch defence of the
downtrodden, and his unwavering belief in
the betterment of the human condition
through individual and collective action.
William J. Berg
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Maupassant
Of the other Naturalists, only
Guy de Maupassant, a
protégé of
Flaubert, is still widely read. His
Naturalism, as evidenced in Le Roman (1887; The
Novel) by his declaration that his intention was to
“write the history of the heart, soul and mind in
their normal state,” involves the use of significant
detail to indicate the neuroses and vicious desires
masked by everyday appearances. Many of his short
stories, whether set in Normandy or Paris, rely on
sharply reductive, satiric techniques directed
against his favourite targets—women, the middle
classes, the Prussians—and designed to bring out
hypocrisy and dishonesty as the central forces in
human life (as in Boule de suif [1880; Butterball in
Butterball]). His tales of mystery and imagination
(for example, Le Horla [1886–87]) bring sharp
psychological insight to the evocation of the
supernatural. There is a shift in manner and matter
from Une Vie (1883; A Woman’s Life), with its echoes
of Madame Bovary, through the detached but
destructive portrait of the worlds of journalism and
finance in Bel-Ami (1885; Eng. trans. Bel-Ami), to
the powerful evocation of the crippling effects of
jealousy in Pierre et Jean (1888; Pierre and Jean).
The reaction against reasonIn the last decades of
the century, particularly from 1880 onward, the
opposition intensified between those creative
writers who grounded their thinking in the material
world and those who rejected physical experience as
meaningless without reference to some spiritual
dimension or intellectual ideal. Whereas
Baudelaire
and
Flaubert incorporated elements of both attitudes
into their writings, other poets and novelists who
followed them tended to take one or the other line
to an extreme. The turn of the century saw the rise
of a variety of disparate movements: Naturalism,
Decadence, Symbolism, and the Roman Catholic
revival.
Guy de Maupassant
"Bel-Ami"

French writer
in full Henry-René-Albert-Guy de Maupassant
born August 5, 1850, Château de Miromesnil?, near Dieppe, France
died July 6, 1893, Paris
Main
French naturalist writer of short stories and novels who is by general
agreement the greatest French short-story writer.
Early life
Maupassant was the elder of the two children of Gustave and Laure de
Maupassant. His mother’s claim that he was born at the Château de
Miromesnil has been disputed. The couple’s second son, Hervé, was born
in 1856.
Both parents came of Norman families, the father’s of the minor
aristocracy, but the marriage was a failure, and the couple separated
permanently when Guy was 11 years old. Although the Maupassants were a
free-thinking family, Guy received his first education from the church
and at age 13 was sent to a small seminary at Yvetot that took both lay
and clerical pupils. He felt a decided antipathy for this form of life
and deliberately engineered his own expulsion for some trivial offense
in 1868. He moved to the lycée at Le Havre and passed his baccalaureate
the following year. In the autumn of 1869 he began law studies in Paris,
which were interrupted by the outbreak of the Franco-German War.
Maupassant volunteered, served first as a private in the field, and was
later transferred through his father’s intervention to the quartermaster
corps. His firsthand experience of war was to provide him with the
material for some of his finest stories.
Maupassant was demobilized in July 1871 and resumed his law studies
in Paris. His father came to his assistance again and obtained a post
for him in the Ministry of Marine, which was intended to support him
until he qualified as a lawyer. He did not care for the bureaucracy but
was not unsuccessful and was several times promoted. His father managed
to have him transferred, at his own wish, to the Ministry of Public
Instruction in 1879.
Apprenticeship with Flaubert
Maupassant’s mother, Laure, was the sister of Alfred Le Poittevin, who
had been a close friend of Gustave Flaubert, and she herself remained on
affectionate terms with the novelist for the rest of his life. Laure
sent her son to make Flaubert’s acquaintance at Croisset in 1867, and
when he returned to Paris after the war, she asked Flaubert to keep an
eye on him. This was the beginning of the apprenticeship that was the
making of Maupassant the writer. Whenever Flaubert was staying in Paris,
he used to invite Maupassant to lunch on Sundays, lecture him on prose
style, and correct his youthful literary exercises. He also introduced
him to some of the leading writers of the time, such as Émile Zola, Ivan
Turgenev, Edmond Goncourt, and Henry James. “He’s my disciple and I love
him like a son,” Flaubert said of Maupassant. It was a concise
description of a twofold relationship: if Flaubert was the inspiration
for Maupassant the writer, he also provided the child of a broken
marriage with a foster father. Flaubert’s sudden and unexpected death in
1880 was a grievous blow to Maupassant.
Zola described the young Maupassant as a “terrific oarsman able to
row fifty miles on the Seine in a single day for pleasure.” Maupassant
was a passionate lover of the sea and of rivers, which accounts for the
setting of much of his fiction and the prevalence in it of nautical
imagery. In spite of his lack of enthusiasm for the bureaucracy, his
years as a civil servant were the happiest of his life. He devoted much
of his spare time to swimming and to boating expeditions on the Seine.
One can see from a story like Mouche (1890; Fly) that the latter were
more than merely boating expeditions and that the girls who accompanied
Maupassant and his friends were usually prostitutes or prospective
prostitutes. Indeed, there can be little doubt that the early years in
Paris were the start of his phenomenal promiscuity.
When Maupassant was in his early 20s, he discovered that he was
suffering from syphilis, one of the most frightening and widespread
maladies of the age. The fact that his brother died at an early age of
the same disease suggests that it might have been congenital. Maupassant
was adamant in refusing to undergo treatment, with the result that the
disease was to cast a deepening shadow over his mature years and was
accentuated by neurasthenia, which had also afflicted his brother.
During his apprenticeship with Flaubert, Maupassant published one or
two stories under a pseudonym in obscure provincial magazines. The
turning point came in April 1880, the month before Flaubert’s death.
Maupassant was one of six writers, led by Zola, who each contributed a
short story on the Franco-German War to a volume called Les Soirées de
Médan. Maupassant’s story, Boule de suif (“Ball of Fat”), was not only
by far the best of the six, it is probably the finest story he ever
wrote. In it, a prostitute traveling by coach is companionably treated
by her fellow French passengers, who are anxious to share her provisions
of food, but then a German officer stops the coach and refuses to let it
proceed until he has possessed her; the other passengers induce her to
satisfy him, and then ostracize her for the rest of the journey. Boule
de suif epitomizes Maupassant’s style in its economy and balance.
Mature life and works
As soon as Boule de suif was published, Maupassant found himself in
demand by newspapers. He left the ministry and spent the next two years
writing articles for Le Gaulois and the Gil Blas. Many of his stories
made their first appearance in the latter newspaper. The 10 years from
1880 to 1890 were remarkable for their productivity; he published some
300 short stories, six novels, three travel books, and his only volume
of verse.
La Maison Tellier (1881; “The Tellier House”), a book of short
stories on various subjects, is typical of Maupassant’s achievement as a
whole, both in his choice of themes and in his determination to present
men and women objectively in the manifold aspects of life. His concern
was with l’humble vérité—words which he chose as the subtitle to his
novel Une Vie (1883; A Woman’s Life). This book, which sympathetically
treats its heroine’s journey from innocent girlhood through the
disillusionment of an unfortunate marriage and ends with her subsequent
widowhood, records what Maupassant had observed as a child, the little
dramas and daily preoccupations of ordinary people. He presents his
characters dispassionately, foregoing any personal moral judgment on
them but always noting the word, the gesture, or even the reticence that
betrays each one’s essential personality, all the while enhancing the
effect by describing the physical and social background against which
his characters move. Concision, vigour, and the most rigorous economy
are the characteristics of his art.
Collections of short stories and novels followed one another in quick
succession until illness struck Maupassant down. Two years saw six new
books of short stories: Mademoiselle Fifi (1883), Contes de la bécasse
(1883; “Tales of the Goose”), Clair de lune, Les Soeurs Rondoli (“The
Rondoli Sisters”), Yvette, and Miss Harriet (all 1884). The stories can
be divided into groups: those dealing with the Franco-German War, the
Norman peasantry, the bureaucracy, life on the banks of the Seine River,
the emotional problems of the different social classes, and—somewhat
ominously in a late story such as Le Horla (1887)—hallucination.
Together, the stories present a comprehensive picture of French life
from 1870 to 1890.
Maupassant’s most important full-length novels are Une Vie, Bel-Ami
(1885; “Good Friend”), and Pierre et Jean (1888). Bel-Ami is drawn from
the author’s observation of the world of sharp businessmen and cynical
journalists in Paris, and it is a scathing satire on a society whose
members let nothing stand in the way of their ambition to get rich
quick. Bel-Ami, the amiable but amoral hero of the novel, has become a
standard literary personification of an ambitious opportunist. Pierre et
Jean is the tale of a man’s tragic jealousy of his half-brother, who is
the child of their mother’s adultery.
Maupassant prospered from his best-sellers and maintained an
apartment in Paris with an annex for clandestine meetings with women, a
house at Étretat, a couple of residences on the Riviera, and several
yachts. He began to travel in 1881, visiting French Africa and Italy,
and in 1889 he paid his only visit to England. While lunching in a
restaurant there as Henry James’s guest, he shocked his host profoundly
by pointing to a woman at a neighbouring table and asking James to “get”
her for him.
The French critic Paul Léautaud called Maupassant a “complete
erotomaniac.” His extraordinary fascination with brothels and
prostitution is reflected not only in Boule de suif but also in stories
such as La Maison Tellier. It is significant, however, that as the
successful writer became more closely acquainted with women of the
nobility there was a change of angle in his fiction: a move from the
peasantry to the upper classes, from the brothel to the boudoir.
Maupassant’s later books of short stories include Toine (1886), Le Horla
(1887), Le Rosier de Madame Husson (1888; “The Rose-Bush of Madame
Husson”), and L’Inutile Beauté (1890; “The Useless Beauty”). Four more
novels also appeared: Mont-Oriol (1887), on the financing of a
fashionable watering place; Pierre et Jean; Fort comme la mort (1889;
“As Strong as Death”); and Notre coeur (1890; “Our Heart”).
Although Maupassant appeared outwardly a sturdy, healthy, athletic
man, his letters are full of lamentations about his health, particularly
eye trouble and migraine headaches. With the passing of the years he had
become more and more sombre. He had begun to travel for pleasure, but
what had once been carefree and enjoyable holidays gradually changed, as
a result of his mental state, into compulsive, symptomatic wanderings
until he felt a constant need to be on the move.
A major family crisis occurred in 1888. Maupassant’s brother was a
man of minimal intelligence—today one would call it arrested
development—and could work at nothing more demanding than nursery
gardening. In 1888 he suddenly became violently psychotic, and he died
in an asylum in 1889. Maupassant was reduced to despair by his brother’s
death; but though his grief was genuine, it cannot have been unconnected
with his own advanced case of syphilis. On January 2, 1892, when he was
staying near his mother, he tried to commit suicide by cutting his
throat. Doctors were summoned, and his mother agreed reluctantly to his
commitment. Two days later he was removed, according to some accounts in
a straitjacket, to Dr. Blanche’s nursing home in Paris, where he died
one month before his 43rd birthday.
Maupassant’s work is thoroughly realistic. His characters inhabit a
world of material desires and sensual appetites in which lust, greed,
and ambition are the driving forces, and any higher feelings are either
absent or doomed to cruel disappointment. The tragic power of many of
the stories derives from the fact that Maupassant presents his
characters, poor people or rich bourgeois, as the victims of ironic
necessity, crushed by a fate that they have dared to defy yet still
struggling against it hopelessly.
Because so many of his later stories deal with madness, it has been
suggested that Maupassant himself was already mentally disturbed when he
wrote them. Yet these stories are perfectly well balanced and are
characterized by a clarity of style that betrays no sign of mental
disorder. The lucid purity of Maupassant’s French and the precision of
his imagery are in fact the two features of his work that most account
for its success.
By the second half of the 20th century, it was generally recognized
that Maupassant’s popularity as a short-story writer had declined and
that he was more widely read in the English-speaking countries than in
France. This does not detract from his genuine achievement—the invention
of a new, high-quality, commercial short story, which has something to
offer to all classes of readers.
Martin Turnell
René Dumesnil
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The Decadents
The basis of Decadence—bitter regret for the loss of
a world of moral and political absolutes, and
middle-class fears of supersession in a society
where the power of the masses (as workers, voters,
purchasers, and consumers) is slowly but inexorably
on the increase—is well illustrated both in
Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À rebours (1884; Against
Nature or Against the Grain) and the Culte du moi
(“Cult of the Ego”) trilogy (1888–91) by Maurice
Barrès. It derives from the same determinist
philosophy as Naturalism and has much in common
aesthetically with Impressionism in that it focuses
on subjectively perceived moments of physical
experience, held to have no significance beyond
themselves. It is also a form of late Romanticism,
looking for inspiration to the strand of
Baudelaire
that treats of revolt, neurosis, the cult of
cruelty, and extreme sensation, cast into novel and
highly wrought forms. Originally associated
primarily with poetry (generally of poor quality),
it found its best stroke in prose, in the track of
Baudelaire’s admirer and fellow dandy,
Jules Barbey
d’Aurevilly, celebrated for his novels and tales of
blasphemy and sadism. Huysmans’s Là-bas (1891; “Down
There”; Eng. trans. Là-Bas: A Journey into the Self)
combined a heavy-footed study of Satanism in
modern-day Paris with a documentary investigation of
the exploits of the medieval Bluebeard, Gilles de
Rais. As Huysmans changed direction yet again,
toward a Roman Catholicism characterized by a
mixture of right-wing political prejudice,
superstition, and antiquarian interest in symbols
and doctrine, other writers emerged who were more
subtle and experimental in both content and form.
The novels of Octave Mirbeau (Le Jardin des
supplices [1899; The Torture Garden]) and Jean
Lorrain (Monsieur de Phocas [1901; Eng. trans.
Monsieur de Phocas]), with their lyrical evocations
of the bizarre contradictions of bourgeois fantasy,
evoking formations of homosexual as well as
heterosexual desire, have also a sharp satiric edge;
they criticize their own posturing, and they
highlight the unjust class privilege on which it
depends. Though Rachilde is sometimes considered to
belong to the Symbolist movement—mostly for her
connections with its journal, the Mercure de France,
edited by her husband—her novels are best understood
as productions of the Decadent ethos: for example,
Monsieur Vénus (1884; Eng. trans. Monsieur Venus),
reversing gender roles in the power play of sexual
exploitation, or La Marquise de Sade (1887), with
its vampiric heroine.
The aristocratic hero of
Huysmans’s À rebours
included on his shelves the poetry of
Paul Verlaine,
Jules Laforgue, the comte de Lautréamont (pseudonym
of Isidore Ducasse, whose poem Les Chants de
Maldoror [1868–69; Maldoror] influenced the
Surrealists), and
Stéphane Mallarmé.
Verlaine and
Laforgue remain linked in critical memory with the
Decadent movement.
Much of
Verlaine’s early poetry imitated the work
of
Baudelaire and the Parnassians in the Fêtes galantes (1869; “Parties of Pleasure”) and in his
major collection, Romances sans paroles (1874;
“Songs Without Words”). In his famous manifesto
poem, L’Art poétique (The Art of Poetry), written in
1874 and collected in Jadis et Naguère (1885;
“Yesteryear and Yesterday”) he created the blend of
musicality, physical atmospherics, and sense of
psychological distortion that constitute his
greatest poetic achievement. In so doing, he used
lines with an odd number of syllables (vers impair),
ambiguous syntax, and unusual collocations of
abstract and concrete concepts in a way that
radically advanced the technical range of French
verse. In his work two impressions predominate: that
only the self is important and that the function of
poetry is to preserve moments of extreme sensation
and unique impression. These features, together with
his experiments in dissolving form, were seized on
by the younger generation of poets in the 1880s and
developed in the review Le Décadent, founded in
1886, whose title adopted a label coined by hostile
critics. The poetic movement found its best exponent
in Jules Laforgue, who brought together a
subjectivism and pessimism fed by his studies in
contemporary German philosophy and a genius for
harnessing effects of poetic contrast. His first two
published collections, Les Complaintes (1885;
“Lamentations”) and L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la
Lune (1886; “Imitation of Our Lady of the Moon”),
are a series of variations on the Decadent themes of
the flight from life, woman, and ennui, each
explored through a host of recurring images (the
wind, Sundays, moonlight, and the tragicomic figure
Pierrot [Pedrolino in Italian] from the commedia
dell’arte). Laforgue’s fluid verse form, shaped by
rhythmic patterns and assonance, is the first
important example of free verse in French poetry.
Joris-Karl Huysmans

original
name Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans
born Feb.
5, 1848, Paris, France
died May 12, 1907, Paris
French writer whose major novels epitomize
successive phases of the aesthetic,
spiritual, and intellectual life of late
19th-century France.
Huysmans was the only son of a French mother
and a Dutch father. At 20 he began a long
career in the Ministry of the Interior,
writing many of his novels on official time
(and notepaper). His early work, influenced
by contemporary naturalist novelists,
include a novel, Marthe, histoire d’une
fille (1876; Marthe), about his liaison with
a soubrette, and a novella, Sac au dos
(1880; “Pack on Back”), based on his
experience in the Franco-German War. The
latter was published in Les Soirées de Médan
(1881), war stories written by members of
Émile Zola’s “Médan” group of naturalist
writers. Huysmans soon broke with the group,
however, publishing a series of novels too
decadent in content and violent in style to
be considered examples of naturalism.
The first
was À vau-l’eau (1882; Down Stream), a
tragicomic account of the misfortunes,
largely sexual, of a humble civil servant,
Folantin. À rebours (1884; Against the
Grain), Huysmans’s best-known novel, relates
the experiments in aesthetic decadence
undertaken by the bored survivor of a noble
line. The ambitious and controversial Là-bas
(1891; Down There) tells of the occultist
revival that occurred in France in the
1880s. A tale of 19th-century Satanists
interwoven with a life of the medieval
Satanist Gilles de Rais, the book introduced
what was clearly an autobiographical
protagonist, Durtal, who reappeared in
Huysmans’s last three novels: En route
(1895), an account of Huysmans-Durtal’s
religious retreat in the Trappist monastery
of Notre-Dame d’Igny and his return to Roman
Catholicism; La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), basically a study of Nôtre-Dame
de Chartres with a thin story attached; and
L’Oblat (1903; The Oblate), set in the
Benedictine abbey of Ligugé, near Poitiers,
in the neighbourhood in which Huysmans lived
in 1899–1901 as an oblate (lay monk).
The chief
fascination of Huysmans’s work lies in its
autobiographical content. Together his
novels tell the story of a protracted
spiritual odyssey. In each the hero tries to
find happiness in some kind of spiritual and
physical escapism; each ends on a note of
disappointment and revolt until, in L’Oblat,
Huysmans and his hero acknowledge that
escapism is not only futile but wrong.
Huysmans exemplified his hard-won belief in
the value of suffering in his courageous
bearing during the months of pain that
preceded his death from cancer.
Also a
perceptive art critic, Huysmans helped win
public recognition of the Impressionist
painters (L’Art moderne, 1883; Certains,
1889). He was the first president of the
Goncourt Academy, which annually awards a
prestigious French literary prize.
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Jules Barbey

born Nov.
2, 1808, Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte, France
died April 23, 1889, Paris
French
novelist and influential critic who in his
day was influential in matters of social
fashion and literary taste. A member of the
minor nobility of Normandy, he remained
throughout his life proudly Norman in spirit
and style, a royalist opposed to democracy
and materialism and an ardent but unorthodox
Roman Catholic.
After study at the Stanislas College in
Paris (1827–29) and, in law, at Caen
(1829–33), Barbey d’Aurevilly established
himself in Paris in 1837 and began to earn a
precarious living by writing for
periodicals. Despite his evident poverty, he
went to great lengths to establish himself
as a dandy, and his costumes and magnificent
attitudes became legendary.
Barbey
d’Aurevilly was appointed, in 1868, to
alternate with Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve
as literary critic for Le Constitutionnel,
and on Sainte-Beuve’s death in 1869 he
became sole critic. His reputation grew, and
he came to be known as le Connétable des
Lettres (“The Constable of Literature”).
Though he was often arbitrary, vehement, and
intensely personal in his criticism,
especially of Émile Zola and the Naturalist
school, many of his verdicts have stood the
test of time; he recognized the attainments
of Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal, and Charles
Baudelaire when they were far from being
fully appreciated.
His own
novels are set in Normandy, and most of them
are tales of terror in which morbid passions
are acted out in bizarre crimes. Two of his
best works are set against a background of
the French Revolution: Le Chevalier des
Touches (1864), dealing with the rebellion
of the Chouans (bands of Norman outlaws)
against the French Republic, and Un Prêtre
marié (1865; “A Married Priest”), dealing
with the sufferings of a priest under the
new regime. Les Diaboliques (1874; Weird
Women), a collection of six short stories,
is often considered his masterpiece.
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Octave Mirbeau

in full
Octave-Henri-Marie Mirbeau
born Feb. 16, 1850, Trévières, France
died Feb. 16, 1917, Paris
French journalist and writer of novels and
plays who unsparingly satirized the clergy
and social conditions of his time and was
one of the 10 original members of the
Académie Goncourt, founded in 1903.
His first work was as a journalist for
Bonapartist and Royalist newspapers. He made
his reputation as a storyteller with tales
of the Norman peasantry, Lettres de ma
chaumière (1886; “Letters from My Cottage”)
and Le Calvaire (1887; “The Calvary”), a
chapter of which, on the French defeat of
1870, aroused much rancour. In 1888 he wrote
the story of a mad priest, L’Abbé Jules
(“The Priest Jules”), and, in 1890,
Sébastien Roch, a merciless picture of the
Jesuit school he had attended. All his
novels, from Le Jardin des supplices (1899;
“The Garden of Torture”) and Le Journal
d’une femme de chambre (1900; “Journal of a
Lady’s Maid”) to La 628-E8 (1907) and Dingo
(1913), were bitter social satires.
His
dramatic work was of high quality, and Les
Mauvais Bergers (1897; “The Bad Shepherds”)
was compared to the work of Henry Becque.
His greatest success as a playwright was
achieved with Les Affaires sont les affaires
(1903; “Business Is Business”).
Although
his early works show evidence of
anti-Semitism, Mirbeau in the 1890s became
an outspoken supporter of French army
officer Alfred Dreyfus during the Dreyfus
Affair.
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Paul Verlaine
"Poems"

born March
30, 1844, Metz, France
died January 8, 1896, Paris
French
lyric poet first associated with the
Parnassians and later known as a leader of
the Symbolists. With Stéphane Mallarmé and
Charles Baudelaire he formed the so-called
Decadents.
Life.
Verlaine was the only child of an army
officer in comfortable circumstances. He was
undoubtedly spoiled by his mother. At the
Lycée Bonaparte (now Condorcet) in Paris, he
showed both ability and indolence and at 14
sent his first extant poem (“La Mort”) to
the “master” poet Victor Hugo. Obtaining the
baccalauréat in 1862, with distinction in
translation from Latin, he became a clerk in
an insurance company, then in the Paris city
hall. All the while he was writing verse and
frequenting literary cafés and drawing
rooms, where he met the leading poets of the
Parnassian group and other talented
contemporaries, among them Mallarmé,
Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, and Anatole France.
His poems began to appear in their literary
reviews; the first, “Monsieur Prudhomme,” in
1863. Three years later the first series of
Le Parnasse contemporain, a collection of
pieces by contemporary poets (hence the term
Parnassian), contained eight contributions
by Verlaine.
The same
year, his first volume of poetry appeared.
Besides virtuoso imitations of Baudelaire
and Leconte de Lisle, Poèmes saturniens
included poignant expressions of love and
melancholy supposedly centred on his cousin
Élisa, who married another and died in 1867
(she had paid for this book to be
published). In Fêtes galantes personal
sentiment is masked by delicately clever
evocations of scenes and characters from the
Italian commedia dell’arte and from the
sophisticated pastorals of 18th-century
painters, such as Watteau and Nicolas
Lancret, and perhaps also from the
contemporary mood-evoking paintings of
Adolphe Monticelli. In June 1869 Verlaine
fell in love with Mathilde Mauté, aged 16,
and they married in August 1870. In the
delicious poems written during their
engagement (La Bonne Chanson), he fervently
sees her as his long hoped-for saviour from
erring ways. When insurrectionists seized
power and set up the Paris Commune, Verlaine
served as press officer under their council.
His fear of resultant reprisals from the
Third Republic was one factor in his later
bohemianism. Incompatibility in his marriage
was soon aggravated by his infatuation for
the younger poet Arthur Rimbaud, who came to
stay with the Verlaines in September 1871.
Verlaine
abandoned his wife and infant son, Georges,
in July 1872, to wander with Rimbaud in
northern France and Belgium and write
“impressionist” sketches for his next
collection, Romances sans paroles (“Songs
Without Words”). The pair reached London in
September and found, besides exiled
Communard friends, plenty of interest and
amusement and also inspiration: Verlaine
completed the Romances, whose opening pages,
especially, attain a pure musicality rarely
surpassed in French literature and embody
some of his most advanced prosodic
experiments; the subjects are mostly
landscape or regret or vituperation of his
estranged wife. The collection was published
in 1874 by his friend Edmond Lepelletier;
the author himself was then serving a
two-year sentence at Mons for wounding
Rimbaud with a revolver during an emotional
storm in Brussels on July 10, 1873.
Contrition,
prison abstinence, and pious reading (some
in English, along with admiring study of
Shakespeare and Dickens) seem to have
produced a sincere return to Roman
Catholicism in the summer of 1874, after his
wife had obtained a separation. Leaving
prison in January 1875, he tried a Trappist
retreat, then hurried to Stuttgart to meet
Rimbaud, who apparently repulsed him with
violence. He took refuge in England and, for
over a year, taught French and drawing at
Stickney and Boston in Lincolnshire, then at
Bournemouth, Hampshire, impressing all by
his dignity and piety and gaining an
appreciation of English authors as diverse
as Tennyson, Swinburne, and the Anglican
hymn writers. In 1877 he returned to France.
From this
period (1873–78) date most of the poems in
Sagesse (“Wisdom”), which was published in
October 1880 at the author’s expense (as
were his previous books). They include
outstanding poetical expressions of simple
Catholic Christianity as well as of his
emotional odyssey. Literary recognition now
began. In 1882 his famous “Art poétique”
(probably composed in prison eight years
earlier) was enthusiastically adopted by the
young Symbolists. He later disavowed the
Symbolists, however, chiefly because they
went further than he in abandoning
traditional forms: rhyme, for example,
seemed to him an unavoidable necessity in
French verse.
In 1880
Verlaine made an unsuccessful essay at
farming with his favourite pupil, Lucien
Létinois, and the boy’s parents. Lucien’s
death in April 1883, as well as that of the
poet’s mother (to whom he was tenderly
attached) in January 1886, and the failure
of all attempts at reconciliation with his
wife broke down whatever will to
“respectability” remained, and he relapsed
into drink and debauchery. Now both famous
and notorious, he was still writing in an
attempt to earn a living but seldom with the
old inspiration.
Jadis et
naguère (“Yesteryear and Yesterday”)
consists mostly of pieces like “Art poétique,”
written years before but not fitting into
previous carefully grouped collections.
Similarly, Parallèlement comprises bohemian
and erotic pieces often contemporary with,
and technically equal to, his “respectable”
ones. Verlaine frankly acknowledged the
parallel nature of both his makeup and his
muse. In Amour new poems still show the old
magic, notably passages of his lament for
Lucien Létinois, no doubt intended to
emulate Tennyson’s In Memoriam, but lacking
its depth. Prose works such as Les Poètes
maudits, short biographical studies of six
poets, among them Mallarmé and Rimbaud; Les
Hommes d’aujourd’hui, brief biographies of
contemporary writers, most of which appeared
in 1886; Mes Hôpitaux, accounts of
Verlaine’s stays in hospitals; Mes Prisons,
accounts of his incarcerations, including
the story of his “conversion” in 1874; and
Confessions, notes autobiographiques helped
attract notice to ill-recognized
contemporaries as well as to himself (he was
instrumental in publishing Rimbaud’s
Illuminations in 1886 and making him
famous). There is little of lasting value,
however, in the rest of the verse and prose
that Verlaine turned out in an unsuccessful
effort to keep the wolf from a door shared
usually with aging prostitutes such as
Philomène Boudin and Eugénie Krantz,
prominent among the muses of his decadence.
During frequent spells in hospitals, doctors
gave him devoted care and friendship. He was
feted in London, Oxford, and Manchester by
young sympathizers, among them the critic
Arthur Symons, who arranged a lecture tour
in England in November 1893. Frank Harris
and Cranmer Byng published articles and
poems by Verlaine in The Fortnightly Review
and The Senate. Relief pensions from
admirers (1894) and the state (1895) were
also recognition, however tardy or
insufficient, of the esteem he attracted as
a poet and a friend. He died in Eugénie
Krantz’s lodgings in January 1896.
Assessment.
One of the most purely lyrical of French
poets, Verlaine was an initiator of modern
word-music and marks a transition between
the Romantic poets and the Symbolists. His
best poetry broke with the sonorous rhetoric
of most of his predecessors and showed that
the French language, everyday clichés
included, could communicate new shades of
human feeling by suggestion and tremulous
vagueness that capture the reader by
disarming his intellect; words could be used
merely for their sound to make a subtler
music, an incantatory spell more potent than
their everyday meaning. Explicit
intellectual or philosophical content is
absent from his best work. His discovery of
the intimate musicality of the French
language was doubtless instinctive, but,
during his most creative years, he was a
conscious artist constantly seeking to
develop his unique gift and “reform” his
nation’s poetic expression.
Vernon Philip Underwood
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Jules Laforgue

born Aug.
16, 1860, Montevideo, Uruguay
died Aug. 20, 1887, Paris
French Symbolist poet, a master of lyrical
irony and one of the inventors of vers libre
(“free verse”). The impact of his work was
felt by several 20th-century American poets,
including T.S. Eliot, and he also influenced
the work of the Surrealists. His critical
essays, though somewhat neglected, are also
notable.
Laforgue was brought up by relatives at
Tarbes, Fr., from 1866 to 1876, when he
joined his family in Paris. After finishing
his schooling at the Lycée Fontanes, he
attended the lectures of the literary critic
and historian Hippolyte Taine at the École
des Beaux-Arts. Through the writer Paul
Bourget he became secretary to Charles
Ephrussi, an art collector and editor of the
Gazette des Beaux-Arts, who introduced him
to Impressionist painting. In November 1881
he was appointed reader to the Empress
Augusta in Berlin and remained in Germany
for almost five years, during which time he
wrote most of his works. He married an
English woman, Leah Lee, in London on Dec.
31, 1886, and they returned to Paris, where,
poverty-stricken, Laforgue died of
tuberculosis the following year.
In the
verse of Les Complaintes (1885), L’Imitation
de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886; “The Imitation
of Our Lady the Moon”), and Le Concile
féerique (1886; “The Fairy Council”),
Laforgue gave ironical expression to his
obsession with death, his loneliness, and
his boredom with daily routine. He was
attracted by Buddhism and by German
philosophy, especially by Arthur
Schopenhauer’s pessimism and Edward von
Hartmann’s theory of the unconscious.
Inspired by the example of Tristan Corbière
and Arthur Rimbaud, he forged new words,
experimented with common speech, and
combined popular songs and music-hall tags
with philosophic and scientific terms to
create an imagery that appears surprisingly
modern. His search for new rhythms
culminated in the vers libre that he and his
friend Gustave Kahn invented almost
simultaneously. He reinterpreted William
Shakespeare, Richard Wagner, Gustave
Flaubert, and Stéphane Mallarmé in a
collection of short stories, Moralités
légendaires (1887; Six Moral Tales From
Jules Laforgue). His art criticism,
published in the Symbolist reviews and
subsequently in Mélanges posthumes (1923),
testifies to his remarkable understanding of
the Impressionist vision.
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Stéphane Mallarmé

French poet
born , March 18, 1842, Paris
died Sept. 9, 1898, Valvins, near Fontainebleau, Fr.
Main
French poet, an originator (with Paul Verlaine) and a leader of the
Symbolist movement in poetry.
Mallarmé enjoyed the sheltered security of family life for only five
brief years, until the early death of his mother in August 1847. This
traumatic experience was echoed 10 years later by the death of his
younger sister Maria, in August 1857, and by that of his father in 1863.
These tragic events would seem to explain much of the longing Mallarmé
expressed, from the very beginning of his poetic career, to turn away
from the harsh world of reality in search of another world; and the fact
that this remained the enduring theme of his poetry may be explained by
the comparative harshness with which adult life continued to treat him.
After spending the latter part of 1862 and the early months of 1863 in
London so as to acquire a knowledge of English, he began a lifelong
career as a schoolteacher, first in provincial schools (Tournon,
Besançon, and Avignon) and later in Paris. He was not naturally gifted
in this profession, however, and found the work decidedly uncongenial.
Furthermore, his financial situation was by no means comfortable,
particularly after his marriage in 1863 and after the birth of his
children, Geneviève (in 1864) and Anatole (in 1871). To try to improve
matters he engaged in part-time activities, such as editing a magazine
for a few months at the end of 1874, writing a school textbook in 1877,
and translating another textbook in 1880. In October 1879, after a
six-month illness, his son Anatole died.
Despite these trials and tribulations, Mallarmé made steady progress
with his parallel career as a poet. His early poems, which he began
contributing to magazines in 1862, were influenced by Charles
Baudelaire, whose recently published collection Les Fleurs du mal (“The
Flowers of Evil”) was largely concerned with the theme of escape from
reality, a theme by which Mallarmé was already becoming obsessed. But
Baudelaire’s escapism had been of an essentially emotional and sensual
kind—a vague dream of tropical islands and peaceful landscapes where all
would be “luxe, calme et volupté” (“luxury, calm, and voluptuousness”).
Mallarmé was of a much more intellectual bent, and his determination to
analyze the nature of the ideal world and its relationship with reality
is reflected in the two dramatic poems he began to write in 1864 and
1865, respectively, Hérodiade (“Herodias”) and L’Après-midi d’un faune
(“The Afternoon of a Faun”), the latter being the work that inspired
Claude Debussy to compose his celebrated Prélude a quarter of a century
later.
By 1868 Mallarmé had come to the conclusion that, although nothing
lies beyond reality, within this nothingness lie the essences of perfect
forms. The poet’s task is to perceive and crystallize these essences. In
so doing, the poet becomes more than a mere descriptive versifier,
transposing into poetic form an already existent reality; he becomes a
veritable God, creating something from nothing, conjuring up for the
reader, as Mallarmé himself put it, “l’absente de tous bouquets”—the
ideal flower that is absent from all real bouquets. But to crystallize
essences in this way, to create the notion of floweriness, rather than
to describe an actual flower, demands an extremely subtle and complex
use of all the resources of language, and Mallarmé devoted himself
during the rest of his life to putting his theories into practice in
what he called his Grand Oeuvre (“Great Work”), or Le Livre (“The
Book”). He never came near to completing this work, however, and the few
preparatory notes that have survived give little or no idea of what the
end result might have been.
On the other hand, Mallarmé did complete a number of poems related to
his projected Grand Oeuvre, both in their themes and in their extremely
evocative use of language. Among these are several elegies—the principal
ones being to Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, Richard Wagner,
Théophile Gautier, and Paul Verlaine—that Mallarmé was commissioned to
write at various times in his career. He no doubt agreed to do them
because the traditional theme of the elegy—the man is dead but he lives
on in his work—is clearly linked to the poet’s own belief that, although
beyond reality there is nothing, poetry has the power to transcend this
annihilation. In a second group of poems, Mallarmé wrote about poetry
itself, reflecting evocatively on his aims and achievements.
In addition to these two categories of poems, he also wrote some
poems that run counter to his obsession with the ideal world, though
they, too, display that magical use of language of which Mallarmé had
made himself such a master. These are the dozen or so sonnets he
addressed to his mistress, Méry Laurent, between 1884 and 1890, in which
he expressed his supreme satisfaction with reality. At that time, life
was becoming much happier for him, not only because his liaison was
agreeable but also because a review of him in the series of articles
entitled Les Poètes maudits (“The Accursed Poets”) published by Verlaine
in 1883 and the praise lavished on him by J.-K. Huysmans in his novel À
rebours (“The Wrong Way”) in 1884 led to his wide recognition as the
most eminent French poet of the day. A series of celebrated Tuesday
evening meetings at his tiny flat in Paris were attended by well-known
writers, painters, and musicians of the time. All this perhaps decreased
his need to seek refuge in an ideal world, and in Un Coup de dés jamais
n’abolira le hasard, poème (“A Throw of Dice Will Never Abolish the
Hazard, Poem”), the work that appeared in 1897, the year before his
death, he found consolation in the thought that he had met with some
measure of success in giving poetry a truly creative function.
Mallarmé died in 1898, at his cottage at Valvins, a village on the
Seine near Fontainebleau, his main residence after retirement.
Charles Chadwick
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The Symbolists
The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is
slight and, in poetry at least, is frequently as
much one of allegiances to different networks as one
of differences of thematic content or formal
practices. At its simplest and most reductive, the
opposition is between the Decadents’ perception that
the material world, and the galling limits of the
present, is all there is and the Symbolists’ concept
of the meaningful universe of signifying forms and
ideal, absolute meanings that it is the artist’s
task to evoke, or suggest, using the tokens of the
material world: images, which can be linked by the
poetic imagination into meaningful
symbolizations.
The narrowness of the distinction is
well illustrated by the case of
Arthur Rimbaud.
Rimbaud wrote all his poetry before the age of 21,
beginning in 1869 at the age of 15, out of a deep
frustration with an existence of marginalization and
repression. His poetic creed is contained in two
letters of May 13 and 15, 1871, in which he
prescribes for the poet the need to explore his own
desires and sensations, break free of conventional
perceptions and rationalist categories, and
constitute himself as a visionary. The fiercely
ironic view of contemporary society that emerges
from his early poems reveals in him an element of
the political revolutionary; he supported the
Commune, the failed workers’ insurrection of May
1871. The poem Le Bateau ivre (The Drunken Boat)
evokes the poet’s fantasy journey from the bounds of
conventional subjectivity and common sense through a
sequence of increasingly surreal decors, ending in
the sea of ecstasy in which all fixed references are
gone, the categories of all sense experience blur,
and poetry and the poet are caught up together in
boundless metamorphosis. The cycle of fragmentary
prose poems, Une Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in
Hell, published together with Illuminations [1974]),
reworks his imprisonment, his cultural bondage, and
his frustrating struggles to create a form of poetry
that could transform his captivity. The aesthetic
revolution is taken still further in Illuminations
(written during the period 1871–75 and published
posthumously in 1886): snatches of poetry and prose,
outbursts of destruction, revolt, elation,
liberation, and frustration—glimpses into the tumult
of revolt and despair that for him is the only
honest expression of the modern unconscious.
Stéphane Mallarmé
brought to poetry a very
different temperament and intellectual background.
An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1866–68 led
to a loss of religious faith and a loss of faith in
the absolute relation of words to reality: the poet
must acknowledge his inability not only to write a
poem that could communicate the truth of its object
but also to communicate his own response to the
object. In
Mallarmé’s hands, the writing of poetry
progressively became a matter of finding ways to
release words from their conventional task of
communicating functional meanings and of finding
instead syntactic patterns and rhythms that could
bring images into new constellations and allow
assonance and alliteration to suggest new
connections—to model, in short, the creative
movement of poetic language.
As early as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876; “The
Afternoon of a Faun”; Eng. trans. L’Après-midi d’un
faune; later interpreted musically by Claude
Debussy), he concentrated on multiplicity of
meaning: the poem is simultaneously the dream
evocation of the faun’s erotic desires and a
meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract
level. His later poems are studies in the
possibilities of language, in which, as in music,
recurrent images and antithetical patterns
reverberate together. Un Coup de dés jamais
n’abolira le hasard (1897; Dice Thrown Never Will
Annul Chance),
Mallarmé’s formal tour de force,
co-opts typography to the presentation of
proliferating meanings. The material world may be a
desperate chaos of significations, ruled by chance,
but human authorship can still be asserted within
it, by creating constellations of forms, one of
which is the form of chance itself, the constantly
changing hazard of inspiration.
Symbolism derived its name from an article by
Jean Moréas, who produced the first manifesto of the
movement in 1886. It made its way in Europe through
the journal and publishing house of the Mercure de
France, cofounded by Alfred Vallette and Remy de
Gourmont. Gourmont was a critic, essayist, poet,
novelist, and short-story writer. Among his works in
various genres are Sixtine, roman de la vie
cérébrale (1890; Very Woman (Sixtine): A Cerebral
Novel), Histoires magiques (1894; “Magical Tales”),
and Le Problème du style (1902; “The Problem of
Style”). Gourmont had a major influence both on the
founding of the Symbolist movement in France and,
subsequently, on Anglophone modernism. Symbolism
continued to mark the 1880s and ’90s, producing
charming poems, characterized by musicality, myth,
mysticism, and melancholia, but no further major
poets. Among those whose works have survived in
anthologies are Henri de Régnier and Francis
Viélé-Griffin and the Belgian poets Georges
Rodenbach and
Émile Verhaeren.
Arthur Rimbaud
"Poems"

French poet
in full Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud
born Oct. 20, 1854, Charleville, France
died Nov. 10, 1891, Marseille
Main
French poet and adventurer who won renown among the Symbolist movement
and markedly influenced modern poetry.
Childhood.
Rimbaud grew up at Charleville in the Ardennes region of northeastern
France. He was the second son of an army captain and a local farmer’s
daughter. The father spent little time with the family and eventually
abandoned the children to the sole care of their mother, a
strong-willed, bigoted woman who pinned all her ambitions on her younger
son, Arthur. Outwardly pious and obedient, he was a child prodigy and a
model pupil who astonished the teachers at the Collège de Charleville by
his brilliance in all subjects, especially literature. Rimbaud was a
voracious reader who soon familiarized himself with the major French
writers of both the past and present. He had a particular talent for
Latin verse, and in August 1870 he won the first prize for a Latin poem
at the Concours Académique. (His first published poem had appeared in
January 1870 in La Revue pour Tous.) Rimbaud seemed obsessed with
poetry, spending hours juggling with rhyme. This firm grounding in the
craft of versification gave him a complete, even arrogant confidence and
an ambition to be acknowledged by the currently fashionable Parnassian
poets, of whom he was soon producing virtuoso pastiches.
In his 16th year Rimbaud found his own distinctive voice in poems
whose sentiments swing between two extremes: revolt against a repressive
hometown environment, and a passionate desire for freedom and adventure.
All of the unhappy adolescent’s loathing and longing are in these poems,
which are already remarkable works. They express his disgust with the
constraints of small-town life, its hypocrisies, its self-satisfaction
and apathy. The cliches of sentimentality, and, increasingly, religion
itself become the targets of fierce cynicism. Equally ringing is the
lyrical language that voices Rimbaud’s yearning for freedom and
transcendence. Based on exquisitely perceived sense impressions, the
imagery in these poems expresses a longing for sensual union with the
natural world. These early poems are characteristically Rimbaldian in
their directness and power.
Rimbaud had begun taking a keen interest in politics by the time the
Franco-German War began in July 1870. Upon the war’s outbreak the school
in Charleville closed, an event that marked the end of his formal
education. The war served to intensify Rimbaud’s rebelliousness; the
elements of blasphemy and scatology in his poetry grew more intense, the
tone more strident, and the images more grotesque and even
hallucinatory. Reading widely in the town library, Rimbaud soon became
involved with revolutionary socialist theory. In an impulsive attempt to
put his hopes for revolution into practice, he ran away to Paris that
August but was arrested at the station for traveling without a ticket.
After a brief spell in prison, he wandered through northern France and
Belgium for several months. His mother had him brought back to
Charleville by the police, but in February 1871 he again ran off to
Paris as a volunteer in the forces of the Paris Commune, which was then
under siege by regular French troops. After a frustrating three weeks
there, he returned home just before the Paris Commune was mercilessly
suppressed.
The collapse of his passionately felt political ideals seems to have
been a turning point for Rimbaud. From now on, he declares in two
important letters (May 13 and 15, 1871), he has given up the idea of
“work” (i.e., action) and, having acknowledged his true vocation, will
devote himself with all his energy to his role as a poet.
Poetic vision.
Rimbaud wanted to serve as a prophet, a visionary, or, as he put it, a
voyant (“seer”). He had come to believe in a universal life force that
informs or underlies all matter. This spiritual force, which Rimbaud
referred to simply as “l’inconnu” (“the unknown”), can be sensed only by
a chosen few. Rimbaud set himself the task of striving to “see” this
spiritual unknown and allowing his individual consciousness to be taken
over and used by it as a mere instrument. He should then be able to
transmit (by means of poetry) this music of the universe to his fellow
men, awakening them spiritually and leading them forward to social
progress. Rimbaud had not given up his social ideals, but now intended
to realize them through poetry. First, though, he had to qualify himself
for the task, and he coined a now-famous phrase to describe his method:
“le dérèglement de tous les sens” (“the derangement of all the senses”).
Rimbaud intended to systematically undermine the normal functioning of
his senses so that he could attain visions of the “unknown.” In a
voluntary martyrdom he would subject himself to fasting and pain, imbibe
alcohol and drugs, and even cultivate hallucination and madness in order
to expand his consciousness.
In his attempts to communicate his visions to the reader, Rimbaud
became one of the first modern poets to shatter the constraints of
traditional metric forms and those rules of versification that he had
already mastered so brilliantly. He decided to let his visions determine
the form of his poems, and if the visions were formless, then the poems
would be too. He began allowing images and their associations to
determine the structure of his new poems, such as the mysterious sonnet
“Voyelles” (“Vowels”).
Major works.
At the end of August 1871, on the advice of a literary friend in
Charleville, Rimbaud sent to the poet Paul Verlaine samples of his new
poetry. Verlaine, impressed by their brilliance, summoned Rimbaud to
Paris and sent the money for his fare. In a burst of self-confidence,
Rimbaud composed “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”). This is perhaps
his finest poem, and one that clearly demonstrates what his method could
achieve. Ostensibly, “Le Bateau ivre” describes the journey of the
voyant in a tipsy boat that has been freed from all constraints and
launched headlong into a world of sea and sky that is heaving with the
erotic rhythms of a universal dynamic force. The voyant himself is on an
ecstatic search for some unnamed ideal that he seems to glimpse through
the aquatic tumult. But monsters threaten, the dream breaks up in
universal cataclysm, weariness and self pity take over, and both boat
and voyant capitulate. Here Rimbaud succeeded in his aim of matching
form to vision. A pounding rhythm drives the poem forward through
enjambment across the verses, with internal rhymes and excited
repetitions mounting on alliteration as with the swell of the envisioned
sea. Images of startling vividness flash by and melt unexpectedly into
each other with the fleeting clarity of hallucinations, and the poetic
evocation of colours, movement, and the feel of the waters pull directly
at the reader’s senses.
Rimbaud was already a marvelous poet, but his behaviour in Paris was
atrocious. He arrived there in September 1871, stayed for three months
with Verlaine and his wife, and met most of the well-known poets of the
day, but he antagonized them all—except Verlaine himself—by his
rudeness, arrogance, and obscenity. Embarking upon a life of drink and
debauchery, he became involved in a homosexual relationship with
Verlaine that gave rise to scandal. The two men were soon being seen in
public as lovers, and Rimbaud was blamed for breaking up Verlaine’s
marriage. In March 1872, while tormented by violent passion, jealousy,
and guilt and in a state of physical dissolution, Rimbaud returned to
Charleville so that Verlaine could attempt a reconciliation with his
wife.
Rimbaud would later suggest that he was near death at this time, and
the group of delicate, tenuous poems he then wrote—now known as Derniers
Vers (“Last Verses”)—express his yearning for purification through all
this suffering. Still trying to match form to vision, he expresses his
longing for spiritual regeneration in pared-down verse forms that are
almost abstract patterns of musical and symbolic allusiveness. These
poems clearly show the influence of Verlaine. About this time Rimbaud
also composed the work that Verlaine called his masterpiece, “La Chasse
spirituelle” (“The Spiritual Hunt”), the manuscript of which disappeared
when the two poets went to England. Rimbaud now virtually abandoned
verse composition; henceforth most of his literary production would
consist of prose poems.
In May 1872 Rimbaud was recalled to Paris by Verlaine, who said that
he could not live without him. That July Verlaine abandoned his wife and
child and fled with Rimbaud to London, where they spent the following
winter. During this winter Rimbaud composed a series of 40 prose poems
to which he gave the title Illuminations. These are his most ambitious
attempt to develop new poetic forms from the content of his visions. The
Illuminations consist of a series of theatrical tableaux in which
Rimbaud creates a primitive fantasy world, an imaginary universe
complete with its own mythology, its own quasi-divine beings, its own
cities, all depicted in kaleidoscopic images that have the vividness of
hallucinations. Within this framework the drama of the different stages
of Rimbaud’s own life is played out. He sees himself formulating his
dreams; his discovery of hashish as a method of inducing visions is
hailed; his ensuing nightmare anguish is relived in swirling images and
convoluted syntax; and his love affair with Verlaine is recalled in
cryptic images and symbols.
In the Illuminations Rimbaud reached the height of his originality
and found the form best suited to his elliptical and esoteric style. He
stripped the prose poem of its anecdotal, narrative, and descriptive
content and used words for their evocative and associative power,
divesting them of their logical or dictionary meaning. The hypnotic
rhythms, the dense musical patterns, and the visual pyrotechnics of the
poems work in counterpoint with Rimbaud’s playful mastery of juggled
syntax, ambiguity, etymological and literary references, and bilingual
puns. A unique achievement, the Illuminations’ innovative use of
language greatly influenced the subsequent development of French poetry.
In real life the two poets’ relationship was growing so tense and
violent that Verlaine became physically ill and mentally disturbed. In
April 1873 Rimbaud left him to return to his family, and it was at their
farm at Roche, near Charleville, that he began to apply himself to
another major work, Une Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell). A
month later Verlaine persuaded Rimbaud to accompany him to London.
Rimbaud treated Verlaine with sadistic cruelty, and after more
wanderings and quarrels, he rejoined Verlaine in Brussels only to make a
last farewell. As he was leaving Verlaine shot him, wounding him in the
wrist. Rimbaud was hospitalized, and Verlaine was arrested and sentenced
to two years’ imprisonment. Rimbaud soon returned to Roche, where he
finished Une Saison en enfer.
Une Saison en enfer, which consists of nine fragments of prose and
verse, is a remarkable work of self-confession and psychological
examination. It is quite different from the Illuminations and in fact
repudiates the aesthetic they represent. Rimbaud was going through a
spiritual and moral crisis, and in Une Saison en enfer he
retrospectively examines the hells he had entered in search of
experience, his guilt-ridden and unhappy passion for Verlaine, and the
failure of his own overambitious aesthetic. The poem consists of a
series of scenes in which the narrator acts out various roles, seemingly
a necessary therapy for a young man still searching for some authentic,
unified identity. Within these scenes a switching of moods follows a
dialectical pattern, pushing forward through opposite tendencies toward
a third term that marks another step toward liberation. Each step is
presented in highly dramatic form and is treated with detachment and a
characteristic, cutting irony. The irony culminates in Rimbaud’s account
of his excessively idealistic literary efforts. Once these follies have
been relived, the remaining sections explore different possible routes
toward moral salvation. The cultivation of the mind, religious
conversion, and other routes are each tried but then dismissed. In the
book’s final section, “Adieu” (“Goodbye”), Rimbaud takes a nostalgic
backward look at his past life and then moves on, declaring that his
spiritual battle has been won. He contemplates a future in which he can
“possess the truth in a soul and a body.” The enigmatic ambiguity of
this concluding statement is characteristic of Rimbaud. Perhaps it
implies both a saner, more realistic stance towards life and a healing
of the split between body and soul that had so plagued him.
“Adieu” has sometimes been read as Rimbaud’s farewell to creative
writing. It was certainly a farewell to the visionary, apocalyptic
writing of the voyant. In February 1874 Rimbaud returned to London in
the company of Germain Nouveau, a fellow poet. There they copied out
some of the Illuminations. Rimbaud returned home for Christmas and spent
his time there studying mathematics and languages. His last encounter
with Verlaine, early in 1875, ended in a violent quarrel, but it was at
this time that he gave Verlaine the manuscript of the Illuminations.
Later life.
The rest of Rimbaud’s life, from the literary point of view, was
silence. In 1875 he set out to see the world, and by 1879 he had crossed
the Alps on foot, joined and deserted the Dutch colonial army in the
East Indies, visited Egypt, and worked as a labourer in Cyprus, in every
instance suffering illness or other hardships. In 1880 he found
employment in the service of a coffee trader at Aden (now in Yemen), who
sent him to Hārer (now in Ethiopia). He became the first white man to
journey into the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, and his report of this
expedition was published by France’s National Society of Geography in
1884.
In time Rimbaud set up as an explorer and trader in Ethiopia,
traveling in the interior and at one point selling arms to Menilek II,
king of Shewa (Shoa), who became that country’s emperor in 1889.
Rimbaud’s gift for languages and his humane treatment of the Ethiopians
made him popular with them. He kept in touch with his family by frequent
letters in which he constantly complained about the hard conditions of
his daily life. All trace of his amazing literary gift had disappeared;
his ambition now was simply to amass as much money as possible and then
return home to live at leisure.
During this period of expatriation, Rimbaud had become known as a
poet in France. Verlaine had written about him in Les Poètes maudits
(1884) and had published a selection of his poems. These had been
enthusiastically received, and in 1886, unable to discover where Rimbaud
was or to get an answer from him, Verlaine published the prose poems,
under the title Illuminations, and further verse poems, in the Symbolist
periodical La Vogue, as the work of “the late Arthur Rimbaud.” It is not
known whether Rimbaud ever saw these publications. But he certainly knew
of his rising fame after the appearance of Les Poètes maudits, for in
1885 he received a letter from an old schoolmate, Paul Bourde, who told
him of the vogue of his poems among avant-garde poets.
Rimbaud did make a considerable fortune in Ethiopia, but in February
1891 he developed a tumour on his knee. He was sent back to France, and
shortly after he arrived at Marseille his right leg had to be amputated.
In July he returned to the family farm at Roche, where his health grew
steadily worse. In August 1891 he set out on a nightmarish journey to
Marseille, where his disease was diagnosed as cancer. He endured
agonizing treatment at the hospital there and died, according to his
sister Isabelle, after having made his confession to a priest.
Assessment.
Rimbaud’s extraordinary life, with its precocious triumphs, its reckless
scandals, its unexplained break with literature, and its mercenary
adventures in exotic African locales, continues to excite the popular
imagination. Critics have variously endowed his character with the
qualities of a martyr-saint, an archetypal rebel, and a disreputable
hooligan. What is incontrovertible is the extent of Rimbaud’s
contribution to modern French literature. Many 20th-century poets were
influenced by the Dionysian power of his verse and his liberation of
language from the constraints of form. Rimbaud’s visionary ideals also
proved attractive; his “unknown,” somewhat domesticated in the form of
the individual unconscious, became the hunting ground of the
Surrealists, and his techniques of free association and language play,
which they exploited so freely, became widely used. Rimbaud, the child
prodigy who was so prodigal of his genius, turned out to be one of the
founding fathers of modernism.
Margaret C. Davies-Mitchell
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Jean Moréas

pseudonym of Yánnis Papadiamantópoulos
born April 15, 1856, Athens, Greece
died March 31, 1910, Paris, France
Greek-born poet who played a leading part in
the French Symbolist movement.
Early inspired by a French governess who
instilled in him a passion for French
poetry, Moréas moved to Paris in 1879,
becoming a familiar figure in the literary
circles frequenting the cafés and in the
literary pages of newspapers and reviews. He
published two manifestos, one in XIXe Siècle
(Aug. 11, 1885) and one in the literary
supplement of Le Figaro (Sept. 18, 1886),
that helped establish the name Symbolism for
the movement that was growing out of and
replacing Decadence. In 1886, with Gustave
Kahn and Paul Adam, he founded the
periodical Le Symboliste.
Before Moréas immigrated to France, he
published one volume of verse, Tourterelles
et vipères (1878; “Turtledoves and Vipers”),
in Greek and French. His first wholly French
volumes, Les Syrtes (1884) and Les
Cantilènes (1886), were firmly embedded in
the Decadent and Symbolist aesthetics. In
the preface to Le Pèlerin passioné (1891;
“The Passionate Pilgrim”), however, Moréas
began to forsake Symbolism; there he called
for a return to the spirit of classicism.
Moréas founded the école romane (“Roman
school”) and, with his disciples Raymond de
la Tailhède, Maurice du Plessys, Ernest
Raynaud, and Charles Maurras, reverted to
classical forms and subject matter; free
verse was abandoned and classical sources of
inspiration were used. Énone au clair visage
(1893) and Eriphyle (1894) are
representative of Moréas’ work during this
period; along with other poems, they were
later collected as Poèmes et sylves,
1886–1896 (1907; “Poems and Forests”).
Moréas wrote a verse play, Iphigénie à
Aulide (1903), which was closely inspired by
Euripides and which met with considerable
success when presented in the théâtre
antique of Orange and subsequently on the
stage of the Odéon in Paris. In Moréas’ last
work, Les Stances (1899–1920; “The
Stanzas”), his intellectual development is
chronicled with a vigorous yet melancholy
classicism.
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The novel later in the century
Neither Decadence
(with the exception of Huysmans’s Against Nature and
Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden) nor Symbolism
generated novels of lasting significance. Within the
new vogue for the short story, fostered by the
demands of the popular press, there was a
recrudescence of the conte fantastique, which found
its foremost exponent in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam
(Contes cruels [1883]; Cruel Tales). Rachilde, Jean
Lorrain (pseudonym of Paul Duval), and Mirbeau all
contributed to this genre. But the major trends in
the novel were connected with the revival of Roman
Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the
aftermath of the Franco-German War. The religious
spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans’s La
Cathédrale (1898; The Cathedral), sometimes dogmatic
and visionary, as in Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré (1886;
“The Desperate Man”) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The
Woman Who Was Poor). But the combination of Roman
Catholic doctrine and right-wing politics in the
novels of Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple
(1889), gives the clearest image of the spirit of
the times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views
of Bourget were similar to those found in Maurice
Barrès and other nationalist writers. Barrès moved
from decadent self-absorption to become the advocate
for an extreme form of historical determinism, which
saw the individual as part of a collective inherited
unconscious defined by “race.” His trilogy Le Roman
de l’énergie nationale (“The Book of National
Energy”), particularly Les Déracinés (1897; “The
Rootless” or “Men Without Roots”), is an important
document for an understanding of the attitudes of
the French right during the Dreyfus Affair and
between the world wars.
The only novelist of note who stood outside all
these trends and yet was a typical offspring of the
age that produced them, achieving the double
distinction of winning the Nobel Prize for
Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was
Anatole France (pen name of Jacques-Anatole-François
Thibault).
France made his initial reputation as a
literary critic and author of psychological novels,
but he rapidly became the personification of the
pessimism fashionable after Germany’s victory over
France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in
the detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in
La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; At the
Sign of the Reine Pédauque). But in Monsieur
Bergeret à Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris),
France’s commitment to the pro-Dreyfus faction in
the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter
note to his satire and an express commitment to
humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards, he
was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the
Affair, a response typified by his extended satire
of French society through the ages in L’Île des
Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island) and his
condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the
French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The
Gods Are Athirst). For Anglophone readers right up
to the end of World War II, he spoke for that
Voltairean liberal humanism, reason, and justice of
which France became the symbol in a Europe twice
overrun by German imperial ambitions.
Christopher Robinson Jennifer Birkett
Anatole France

pseudonym
of Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault
born April
16, 1844, Paris, France
died Oct. 12, 1924, Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire
writer and ironic, skeptical, and urbane
critic who was considered in his day the
ideal French man of letters. He was elected
to the French Academy in 1896 and was
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1921.
The son of
a bookseller, he spent most of his life
around books. At school he received the
foundations of a solid humanist culture and
decided to devote his life to literature.
His first poems were influenced by the
Parnassian revival of classical tradition,
and, though scarcely original, they revealed
a sensitive stylist who was already cynical
about human institutions.
This
ideological skepticism appeared in his early
stories: Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard
(1881), a novel about a philologist in love
with his books and bewildered by everyday
life; La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque
(1893; At the Sign of the Reine Pédauque),
which discreetly mocks belief in the occult;
and Les Opinions de Jérome Coignard (1893),
in which an ironic and perspicacious critic
examines the great institutions of the
state. His personal life underwent
considerable turmoil. His marriage in 1877
to Marie-Valérie Guérin de Sauville ended in
divorce in 1893. He had met Madame Arman de
Caillavet in 1888, and their liaison
inspired his novels Thaïs (1890), a tale set
in Egypt of a courtesan who becomes a saint,
and Le Lys rouge (1894; The Red Lily), a
love story set in Florence.
A marked
change in France’s work first appears in
four volumes collected under the title
L’Histoire contemporaine (1897–1901). The
first three volumes—L’Orme du mail (1897;
The Elm-Tree on the Mall), Le Mannequin
d’osier (1897; The Wicker Work Woman), and
L’Anneau d’améthyste (1899; The Amethyst
Ring)—depict the intrigues of a provincial
town. The last volume, Monsieur Bergeret à
Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris),
concerns the participation of the hero, who
had formerly held himself aloof from
political strife, in the Alfred Dreyfus
affair. This work is the story of Anatole
France himself, who was diverted from his
role of an armchair philosopher and detached
observer of life by his commitment to
support Dreyfus. After 1900 he introduced
his social preoccupations into most of his
stories. Crainquebille (1903), a comedy in
three acts adapted by France from an earlier
short story, dramatizes the unjust treatment
of a small tradesman and proclaims the
hostility toward the bourgeois order that
led France eventually to embrace socialism.
Toward the end of his life, his sympathies
were drawn to communism. However, Les Dieux
ont soif (1912; The Gods are Athirst) and
L’Île des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Island)
show little belief in the ultimate arrival
of a fraternal society. World War I
reinforced his profound pessimism and led
him to seek refuge from his times in
childhood reminiscences. Le Petit Pierre
(1918; Little Pierre) and La Vie en fleur
(1922; The Bloom of Life) complete the cycle
started in Le Livre de mon ami (1885; My
Friend’s Book).
France has
been faulted for the thinness of his plots
and for his lack of a vital creative
imagination. His works are, however,
considered remarkable for their wide-ranging
erudition, their wit and irony, their
passion for social justice, and their
classical clarity, qualities that mark
France as an heir to the tradition of Denis
Diderot and Voltaire.
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APPENDIX
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Jules Verne
"Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea."
Illustrations by Alphonse de Neuville and Édouard Riou
"The Children of Captain
Grant"
Illustrations by Édouard Riou
"The Mysterious Island"
Illustrations by Jules Ferat

French author
born Feb. 8, 1828, Nantes, France died March 24, 1905, Amiens
Main prolific French author whose writings laid much of the foundation of
modern science fiction.
Verne’s father, intending that Jules follow in his footsteps as an
attorney, sent him to Paris to study law. But the young Verne fell in
love with literature, especially theatre. He wrote several plays, worked
as secretary of the Théâtre Lyrique (1852–54), and published short
stories and scientific essays in the periodical Musée des familles. In
1857 Verne married and for several years worked as a broker at the Paris
Stock Market. During this period he continued to write, to do research
at the Bibliothèque Nationale (National Library), and to dream of a new
kind of novel—one that would combine scientific fact with adventure
fiction. In September 1862 Verne met Pierre-Jules Hetzel, who agreed to
publish the first of Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires (“Extraordinary
Journeys”)—Cinq semaines en balloon (1863; Five Weeks in a Balloon).
Initially serialized in Hetzel’s Le Magasin d’éducation et de
récréation, the novel became an international best seller, and Hetzel
offered Verne a long-term contract to produce many more works of
“scientific fiction.” Verne subsequently quit his job at the stock
market to become a full-time writer and began what would prove to be a
highly successful author-publisher collaboration that lasted for more
than 40 years and resulted in more than 60 works in the popular series
Voyages extraordinaires.
Verne’s works can be divided into three distinct phases. The first,
from 1862 to 1886, might be termed his positivist period. After his
dystopian second novel Paris au XXe siècle (1994; Paris in the 20th
Century) was rejected by Hetzel in 1863, Verne learned his lesson, and
for more than two decades he churned out many successful
science-adventure novels, including Voyage au centre de la terre (1863,
expanded 1867; Journey to the Centre of the Earth), De la terre à la
lune (1865; From the Earth to the Moon), Autour de la lune (1870; Trip
Around the Moon), Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1870; Twenty
Thousand Leagues Under the Sea), and Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts
jours (1873; Around the World in Eighty Days). During these years Verne
settled with his family in Amiens and made a brief trip to the United
States to visit New York City and Niagara Falls. During this period he
also purchased several yachts and sailed to many European countries,
collaborated on theatre adaptations of several of his novels, and gained
both worldwide fame and a modest fortune.
The second phase, from 1886 until his death in 1905, might be
considered Verne’s pessimist period. Throughout these years the
ideological tone of his Voyages extraordinaires began to change.
Increasingly Verne turned away from pro-science tales of exploration and
discovery in favour of exploring the dangers of technology wrought by
hubris-filled scientists in novels such as Sans dessus dessous (1889;
Topsy-Turvy), L’Île à hélice (1895; Floating Island), Face au drapeau
(1896; For the Flag), and Maître du monde (1904; Master of the World).
This change of focus also paralleled certain adversities in the author’s
personal life: growing problems with his rebellious son, Michel;
financial difficulties that forced him to sell his yacht; the successive
deaths of his mother and his mentor Hetzel; and an attack by a mentally
disturbed nephew who shot him in the lower leg, rendering him partially
crippled. When Verne died he left a drawerful of nearly completed
manuscripts in his desk.
The third and final phase of the Jules Verne story, from 1905 to
1919, might be considered the Verne fils period, when his posthumous
works were published—after being substantially revamped—by his son,
Michel. They include Le Volcan d’or (1906; The Golden Volcano), L’Agence
Thompson and Co. (1907; The Thompson Travel Agency), La Chasse au
météore (1908; The Chase of the Golden Meteor), Le Pilote du Danube
(1908; The Danube Pilot), Les Naufragés du Jonathan (1909; The Survivors
of the Jonathan), Le Secret de Wilhelm Storitz (1910; The Secret of
Wilhelm Storitz), Hier et demain (1910; Yesterday and Tomorrow, a
collection of short stories), and L’Étonnante aventure de la mission
Barsac (1919; The Barsac Mission). Comparing Verne’s original
manuscripts with the versions published after his death, modern
researchers discovered that Michel Verne did much more than merely edit
them. In most cases he entirely rewrote them—among other changes, he
recast plots, added fictional characters, and made their style more
melodramatic. Scholarly reaction to these discoveries has been mixed.
Some critics condemn these posthumous works as contaminated; others view
them as a legitimate part of the Verne père et fils collaboration. The
debate continues.
With Michel Verne’s death in 1925, the final chapter of Jules Verne’s
literary legacy was more or less complete. The following year American
publisher Hugo Gernsback used a representation of Verne’s tomb as a logo
for his Amazing Stories, the first literary magazine featuring tales of
“scientifiction.” As the term scientifiction evolved into science
fiction, the new genre began to flourish as never before, and Verne
became universally recognized as its patron saint.
During the 20th century, Verne’s works were translated into more than
140 languages, making him one of the world’s most translated authors. A
number of successful motion pictures were made from Verne novels,
starting in 1916 with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (remade in 1954 by
Walt Disney) and including The Mysterious Island (1929 and 1961), From
the Earth to the Moon (1958), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959),
and, perhaps the most popular, Around the World in 80 Days (1956).
Verne’s influence extends beyond literature and film into the world
of science and technology, where he inspired generations of scientists,
inventors, and explorers. In 1954 the United States Navy launched the
world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, named for Verne’s Nautilus. And
for more than 130 years, adventurers such as Nellie Bly (1890), Wiley
Post (1933), and Steve Fossett (2005) have followed in the footsteps of
Verne’s fictional hero Phileas Fogg by attempting to circumnavigate the
globe in record-breaking times. Verne and his enduringly popular Voyages
extraordinaires continue to remind us that “What one man can imagine,
another will someday be able to achieve.”
Arthur B. Evans
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Edmond
Rostand
"Cyrano De
Bergerac"

born April 1, 1868, Marseille,
France
died Dec. 2, 1918, Paris
French dramatist of the period
just before World War I whose plays provide a final, very
belated example of Romantic drama in France.
Rostand’s name is indissolubly linked with that of his most
popular and enduring play, Cyrano de Bergerac. First performed
in Paris in 1897, with the famous actor Constant Coquelin
playing the lead, Cyrano made a great impression in France and
all over Europe and the United States. The plot revolves around
the emotional problems of Cyrano, who, despite his many gifts,
feels that no woman can ever love him because he has an enormous
nose. The connection between the Cyrano of the play and the
17th-century nobleman and writer of the same name is purely
nominal. But Rostand’s stirring and colourful historical play,
with its dazzling versification, skillful blend of comedy and
pathos, and fast-moving plot, provided welcome relief from the
grim dramas that emerged from the naturalist and Symbolist
movements.
Rostand wrote a good deal for
the theatre, but the only other play of his that is still
remembered is L’Aiglon (1900). This highly emotional patriotic
tragedy in six acts centres on the Duke of Reichstadt, who never
ruled but died of tuberculosis as a virtual prisoner in Austria.
Rostand always took pains to write fine parts for his stars, and
L’Aiglon afforded Sarah Bernhardt one of her greatest triumphs.
Rostand’s son Jean Rostand
(1894–1977) was a noted biologist, moralist, and writer.
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Alphonse Daudet
"Tartarin de Tarascon"

born May 13, 1840,
Nîmes, France
died Dec. 16, 1897, Paris?
French short-story writer and novelist, now
remembered chiefly as the author of sentimental
tales of provincial life in the south of France.
Life.
Daudet was the son of a silk manufacturer. In 1849
his father had to sell his factory and move to Lyon.
Alphonse wrote his first poems and his first novel
at age 14. In 1857 his parents lost all their money,
and Daudet had to give up his hopes of
matriculating. His work as an usher at a school at
Alès for six unhappy months culminated in his
dismissal but later furnished the theme, with
embellishments and omissions, for his
semiautobiographical novel Le Petit Chose (1868;
“The Little Thing”). At the end of the year he
joined his elder brother, Ernest, in Paris.
Daudet now threw
himself into writing and began to frequent literary
circles, both Bohemian and fashionable. A handsome
young man, he formed a liaison with a model, Marie
Rieu, to whom he dedicated his only book of poems,
Les Amoureuses (1858; “The Lovers”). His long and
troubled relationship with her was to be reflected,
much later, in his novel Sapho (1884). He also
contributed articles to the newspapers, in
particular to Figaro. In 1860 he met Frédéric
Mistral, the leader of the 19th-century revival of
Provençal language and literature, who awakened his
enthusiasm for the life of the south of France,
which was regarded as inherently passionate,
artistic, and sensuous as opposed to the moral and
intellectual rigour of the north. In the same year,
he obtained a secretarial post under the Duke de
Morny.
His health
undermined by poverty and by the venereal disease
that was eventually to cost him his life, Daudet
spent the winter of 1861–62 in Algeria. One of the
fruits of this visit was Chapatin le tueur de lions
(1863; “Chapatin the Killer of Lions”), whose
lion-hunter hero can be seen as the first sketch of
the author’s future Tartarin. Daudet’s first play,
La Dernière Idole (“The Last Idol”), made a great
impact when it was produced at the Odéon Theatre in
Paris in 1862. His winter in Corsica at the end of
1862 is recalled in passages of his Lettres de mon
moulin (1869; “Letters from My Mill”). His full
social life over the years 1863–65 (until Morny’s
death) provided him with the material that he
analyzed mercilessly in Le Nabab (1877; “The
Nabob”). In January 1867 he married Julia Allard,
herself a writer of talent, with whom he was deeply
in love and who gave him great help in his
subsequent work. They had two sons, Léon and Lucien,
and a daughter, Edmée.
In the
Franco-German War, which had a profound effect on
his writing (as can be judged from his second volume
of short stories, Les Contes du lundi, 1873; “Monday
Tales”), Daudet enlisted in the army, but he fled
from Paris during the terrors of the Commune of
1871. His novel Les Aventures prodigieuses de
Tartarin de Tarascon (1872; “The Prodigious
Adventures of Tartarin de Tarascon”) was not well
received, though its adventurous hero is now
celebrated as a caricature of naïveté and
boastfulness. His play L’Arlésienne was also a
failure (although its 1885 revival was acclaimed).
His next novel, Fromont jeune et Risler aîné (1874;
“Fromont the Younger and Risler the Elder”), which
won an award from the French Academy, was a success,
and for a few years he enjoyed prosperity and
fame—though not without some hostile criticism.
In his last years
Daudet suffered from an agonizing ailment of the
spinal cord caused by his venereal disease. La
Doulou (not published until 1931) represents his
attempt to alleviate his pain by investigating it.
With admirable self-control he continued to write
books of all sorts and to entertain Parisian
literary and musical society. He was a kindly patron
of younger writers—for instance, of Marcel Proust.
In 1895 he visited London and Venice. He died
suddenly.
Assessment.
Psychologically, Daudet represents a synthesis of
conflicting elements, and his actual experience of
life at every social level and in the course of
travels helped to develop his natural gifts. A true
man of the south of France, he combined an
understanding of passion with a view of the world
illuminated by Mediterranean sunlight and allowed
himself unfettered flights of the imagination
without ever relaxing his attention to the detail of
human behaviour. All his life he recorded his
observations of other people in little notebooks,
which he used as a reservoir of inspiration: a
novel, he held, should be “the history of people who
will never have any history.” Yet there was nothing
unfeeling in his approach (he has even been accused
of sentimentality), and he was free from
preconceived ideas: unlike his fellow naturalists,
he believed that the world in its diversity was
misrepresented by novelists who concentrated only on
its uglier aspects.
At the same time,
his objective interest in external detail went hand
in hand with the expression of an extraordinarily
compassionate personality and a reverence for the
mystery of things and of individuals. Everything in
his world had an inner reality that he reproduced no
less faithfully than he did its material phenomena.
Finally, he saw passion as endowed with something
like the force of destiny, and this conception,
which bore fruit in many of his writings, tempers
his satire with pity and brings him into kinship
with Charles Dickens as well as with Guy de
Maupassant.
Daudet’s work as a
whole reveals not so much a continuous evolution as
an episodic process in which various literary
tendencies found expression successively. Even so,
the antiromantic irony of Tartarin de Tarascon gave
place to a realism akin to that of the Pointillist
and Impressionist painters in Lettres de mon moulin,
which was followed by the tragic tone of
L’Arlésienne as a corrective to his earlier mockery
of southern characteristics; also there is more
sympathy and anxiety than irony in Le Petit Chose
and Contes du lundi. As he grew older Daudet became
more and more preoccupied with the great conflicts
in human relationship, as is evident in his later
novels: Jack (1876) presents a woman torn between
physical and maternal love; Numa Roumestan (1881),
the antagonism between the northern and the southern
character in man and woman; L’Évangéliste (1883),
filial affection struggling against religious
fanaticism; and La Petite Paroisse (1895), the
contrarieties of jealousy. In Sapho (1884),
underlying the moral issue, there is Daudet’s
evaluation of a whole generation of young men,
together with a statement of the age-old dilemma of
the lover who must choose between freedom and pity
for the girl he leaves. Le Trésor d’Arlatan (1897),
Notes sur la vie (1899), and Nouvelles notes show
Daudet as a bold psychologist, anticipating Sigmund
Freud in his analysis of complexes. Truth and
fantasy, merciless delineation and poetry,
clear-sighted seriousness and a sense of humour,
irony and compassion, all the contrasting elements
of which man’s dignity is made up are to be found
harmonized in Daudet’s best work.
Jacques-Henry
Bornecque
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