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 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. Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism