Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays from that time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the period to be the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging audiences, provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism. Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such battle, and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in the pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a contemporary public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play Cromwell (1827; Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—which he saw as appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could transcend Classical categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited from the production in Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a sustained and triumphal season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic local colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young Romantics eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a dramatic spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a similar vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the mingling of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic drama. The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre. Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most famous play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic estrangement. Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of his plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued to be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—almost charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather in the manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying disillusionment. The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one indisputable masterpiece of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with clear links to the disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological study of a once pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted youth and lost illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a prose that at times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of Romantic melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and crowds of which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison with Shakespeare. The novel from Constant to Balzac
The novel was the most rapidly developing literary form in postrevolutionary France, its enormous range allowing authors great flexibility in examining the changing relationships of the individual to society. The Romantic undergrowth encouraged the flourishing of such subspecies as the Gothic novel and the terrifying or the fantastic tale—the latter influenced in many cases by the translation from German of the works of E.T.A. Hoffmann—works that, when they are not simply ridiculous, seem to be straining to provide a fictional equivalent for the subconscious or an intuition of the mystical.
Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe (1816; Eng. trans. Adolphe), presented as a fictional autobiography, belongs to an important strand in the tradition of the French novel—namely, the novel of concentrated psychological analysis of an individual—which runs from the 17th century to the present day. In that tradition, Adolphe has about it a Classical intensity and simplicity of line. However, in its moral ambiguity, the hesitations of the hero and his confessions of weakness, lies its modernity, responding to the contemporary sense of moral sickness. In spite of the difference of style, there is a clear link with the themes of Chateaubriand’s René and Étienne Pivert de Senancour’s Oberman (1804; Eng. trans. Obermann). The historical novel
The acute consciousness of a changed world after the Revolution and hence of difference between historical periods led novelists to a new interest in re-creating the specificity of the past or, more accurately, reconstituting it in the light of their own present preoccupations, with a distinct preference for the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Until about 1820 the Middle Ages had generally been regarded as a period of barbarism between Classical antiquity and the neoclassical 17th and 18th centuries. Chateaubriand’s lyrical evocation of Gothic ruins—the relics of the age of religious faith—and young royalist writers’ attraction to a certain vision of feudalism provided a different evaluation of the period. The vogue for historical novels was at its strongest in the 1820s and was given impetus by the immense influence of the French translations of Sir Walter Scott (though Madame de Genlis claimed strenuously that her own historical novels had established the vogue long before). The best example of the picturesque historical novel is Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831; The Hunchback of Notre Dame). In it Hugo re-created an atmosphere of vivid, colourful, and intense 15th-century life, associating with it a plea for the preservation of Gothic architecture as the bearer, before the coming of the book, of the cultural heritage and sensibilities of the nation.
A deeper reading of Scott’s novels is implicit in some of Honoré de Balzac’s works. Balzac’s writing not only evoked the surface or the atmosphere of a precise period but also examined the processes of historical, social, and political transformation. Scott’s studies of the aftereffects of the Jacobite rising can be paralleled by Balzac’s analysis of the Breton counterrevolution in Les Chouans (1829; “The Screech Owls,” a name given to any of a number of bands of peasants [see Chouan]). The historical novel ultimately became the staple of the popular novel, as in Les Trois Mousquetaires (1844; The Three Musketeers) by Alexandre Dumas père. Stendhal