Romanticism in Literature and Politics

Paradoxically, given the role of the Revolution in fostering Romanticism, French Romanticism began a few years later than British and German, in part because French writers could be more directly involved in the politics than their European counterparts. Perhaps for this reason too it took a somewhat different course in the first generation; two of its main protagonists, de Staël and Constant, remained liberal, if chastened, revolutionaries. It was de Staël, in her extraordinarily influential Of Germany (1810), who brought German Romanticism to French, and wider European, notice.

But it was the young aristocrat Chateaubriand who first dazzled France with an indigenous version of Romanticism. Initially a supporter of the Revolution, he had left, disillusioned by its violence, for the United States to investigate the pristine republican virtue of the native "noble savages," acclaimed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and a generation of Enlightenment writers. It was in the wilderness, however, that he became aware of the dangers of le vague des passions, the passion for the indeterminate, which he came to believe had derailed revolutionary politics into self-deifying tyranny. In forced exile after a failed military venture in the royalist cause, he experienced a religious epiphany whose first fruits were the short stories "Atala" (1801) and "René," included in the enormously influential Genius of Christianity (1802). The stories are cautionary tales about the dangers of the quest of the infinite in its most exalted interpersonal form, sexual love. Only in religious yearning, expressed in such earthly creations as the Gothic cathedral and in the heavenly vision of the fulfillment of Christ's love in the afterlife, did passion have an adequate object that would never disappoint and the quest for which would never be destructive. Chateaubriand's Romantic religiosity, like that of his German Protestant counterpart Schleiermacher, was quite untraditional. The "genius" of religion lay not in its dogmatic claims but in its unique ability to fulfill secular yearnings for ecstasy and to inspire human creativity. The same powerful residue of revolutionary individuality can be found in Chateaubriand's later politics. A royalist out of reason, he said, he remained a republican by taste; only monarchy could preserve liberty because it was limited by divine law.

Unlike Chateaubriand, Constant's revolutionary liberalism weathered the Terror, though it was through it that he understood the dangers both of centralized political power and of "enthusiasm" in politics. But his attitude toward enthusiasm was necessarily ambiguous. A defender of the modern liberty of rights against both traditional authority and the classical republican priority of the common good, Constant was also deeply suspicious of self-interest for political as well as existential reasons. The self-interest of the private sphere not only endangered public-mindedness, it was a corrosive sentiment that drained life of meaning by drying up passion, above all the passion for the infinite. It was his onetime mistress and political mentor de Staël who had taught him its importance in politics and life. But, like Chateaubriand, Constant had learned that passion had to be directed at the proper object. Politicized in the abstractions of virtue and the common good, it could put tyrannical power in the hands of any group who claimed superior knowledge of them. It was ultimately in religion and the arts that absolute passion could most fully and safely express itself, though devotion to the transcendent ideal of liberty was its indispensably activist, public dimension.

Like Chateaubriand too, Constant believed that love was not passion's safest outlet, for love ran the same danger as politics of deifying the finite object of devotion. His novel Adolphe (1816) documented the insatiable need that continued to drive an erotic attachment that had outlived its initial frenzy, fully aware of the limitations of its object and of its own narcissistic tendency to exploit, yet unable to let go. Contemporaries and some later critics interpreted the novel as a roman à clef charting Constant's tortured relationship with de Staël (and other mistresses), but Germaine, a prolific and established novelist long before Constant, had her own Romantic agenda. More committed than Constant to the expression of enthusiasm as romantic passion, she also knew that passion was particularly problematic for women. Women love men for their individuality, but women's individuality is a hindrance to men's love. In her novels Delphine (1802) and Corinne (1807) talented women who aspire to creative achievement do not find the succor in men that men find in women; unable to hold a man's love, and no longer nurtured by it, they either die or lose their creativity.

Under Chateaubriand's influence, French Romanticism was predominantly royalist and Catholic during the Restoration, but there was a significant liberal coterie, under the leadership of Stendhal, that in the wake of aristocratic reaction in the late 1820s recruited former royalists like Hugo and Lamartine. In the preface to his play Hernani (1830), whose first production inspired an epoch-making riot in the theater between partisans of traditional neoclassical drama and the new Romantic ideas, Hugo called for a "July 14" of art and declared that liberty in art was the offspring of political liberty. Harmony, the goal of all art, could not be achieved by excluding the unique and the idiosyncratic or the ugly and grotesque. Rather the artistic challenge was to achieve formal unity and wholeness by including the infinite variety of life, and to do so not by following rigid rules but through the creative inspiration of the artist whose genius derived from being authentically him or herself. In his novels, particularly The Red and the Black (1830), Stendhal wittily explored the formidable obstacles to the Romantic ideals of authenticity and emotional sincerity in the way of an ambitious young man striving to achieve both in the post-Napoleonic era of restored authoritarian hierarchy in society and church.

The Revolution of 1830 promised at first to realize liberal Romantic hopes for extending political as well as artistic freedom, but the younger generation was severely disappointed by the political and cultural dominance of a commercial oligarchy under the "Bourgeois Monarchy." The writers of the Young France movement abandoned politics once again for art, now aiming it explicitly against the sordid materialism of bourgeois society. Proclaiming the aesthetic doctrine of "art for art's sake," they in fact posed ideals of sensuality and beauty as a counter-culture to the ugliness of everyday bourgeois life. In his novel Mlle. de Maupin (1835), Théophile Gautier extended the idea of the boundaryless Romantic personality in the first literary exploration of the realities and potentialities of human bisexuality and the need to integrate it into the personality that would be genuinely whole. Beyond art, Romanticism became a lifestyle whose declared purpose was to "shock the bourgeoisie" by flouting its norms and acting out the infinity of the self in theatrically eccentric and bizarre behavior. The "Bohemia" of the countercultural artist was a reality before it was a novel—though the novel by Henri Murger (1849) that gave it its name was an unsparingly unsentimental view of its less respectable underside.

In the final cycle of French Romanticism, the implicitly political critique of 1830s aestheticism reasserted itself directly in the 1840s as a growing protest against the selfish narrowness of the political class and the social oppression and misery that marked the beginnings of the industrial revolution in France. "Social Romanticism" idealized "the people" as the new Romantic hero, the repository of spontaneity, goodness, and unity, and demanded that their liberty be realized not only in more democratic politics but in providing the poor with the material means that were the prerequisite for full self-realization. The literature of Social Romanticism ranged from the Parisian novels of Georges Sand to the histories of Jules Michelet, the chronicler of the people's struggle for liberty. But its great moment seemed to come when its most prominent spokesman, the poet-politician Lamartine, become leader of the provisional republican government of France in the Revolution of 1848. Lamartine was by far not the first Romantic politician—a number of his European predecessors had held offices high and low—but for the first time in history, a Romantic literary figure seemed to be in a position to legislate a version of Romanticism into reality. When, however, in the tragic denouement of the June Days, Lamartine found himself directing the army to shoot down "the people" on the barricades of Paris, the vision of Social Romanticism, and with it the era of Romanticism, came to an end. Its legacy nevertheless remained not only in the revived "late Romanticism" of the fin-de-siècle but as a permanent dimension of contemporary art and of our understanding of the modern self.