France

ROMANTIC PERIOD

IMPORTANT EVENTS
Romanticism was relatively late in developing in French literature, even more so than in the visual arts. The 18th century precursor to Romanticism, the cult of sensibility, had become associated with the Ancien regime, and the French Revolution had been more of an inspiration to foreign writers than those experiencing it at first hand. The first major figure was FranoisRen de Chateaubriand, a minor aristocrat who had remained a royalist throughout the Revolution, and returned to France from exile in England and America under Napoleon, with whose regime he had an uneasy relationship. After the Bourbon Restoration, French Romanticism developed in the lively world of Parisian theatre, with productions of Shakespeare, Schiller (in France a key Romantic author), and adaptations of Scott and Byron alongside French authors, several of whom began to write in the late 1820s. His writings, all in prose, included some fiction, such as his influential novella of exile Ren (1802), which anticipated Byron in its alienated hero, but mostly contemporary history and politics, his travels, a defence of religion and the medieval spirit (Gnie du christianisme 1802), and finally in the 1830s and 1840s his enormous autobiography Mmoires d'OutreTombe ("Memoirs from beyond the grave").

DIFFERENT ARTFORMS AND ARTISTS

The French painter Delacroix used his paintbrush to win support for the Greek struggle for independence against the Turkish Empire. His painting The Massacre at Chios broadcast the terrible price the Greeks were paying in their struggle for liberty

(in 1822, the Turks massacred 42,000 inhabitants of the island of Chios and sold about 50,000 as slaves in North Africa), moving many Europeans to sympathize with the Greek cause. The British Romantic poet Lord Byron put down his pen to help out. He died in Greece from a fever in 1824. Today, Byron is a Greek national hero. Alexandre Dumas began as a dramatist, with a series of successes beginning with Henri III et sa cour (1829) before turning to novels that were mostly historical adventures somewhat in the manner of Scott, most famously The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, both of 1844. Victor Hugo published as a poet in the 1820s before achieving success on the stage with Hernani, a historical drama in a quasi-Shakespearian style which had famously riotous performances, themselves as much a spectacle as the play, on its first run in 1830.[48] Like Dumas, he is best known for his novels, and was already writing The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831), one of the best known works of his long career. The preface to his unperformed play "Cromwell" gives an important manifesto of French Romanticism, stating that "there are no rules, or models". The career of Prosper Mrimefollowed a similar pattern; he is now best known as the originator of the story of Carmen, with his novella of 1845. Alfred de Vigny remains best known as a dramatist, with his play on the life of the English poet Chatterton (1835) perhaps his best work.

French Romantic poets of the 1830s to 1850s include Alfred de Musset, Grard de Nerval, Alphonse de Lamartine and the flamboyant Thophile Gautier, whose prolific output in various forms continued until his death in 1872. George Sand took over from Germaine de Stal as the leading female writer, and was a central figure of the Parisian literary scene, famous both for

her novels and criticism and her affairs with Chopin and several others.[49] Stendhal is today probably the most highly regarded French novelist of the period, but he stands in a complex relation with Romanticism, and is notable for his penetrating psychological insight into his characters and his realism, qualities rarely prominent in Romantic fiction. As a survivor of the French retreat from Moscow in 1812, fantasies of heroism and adventure had little appeal for him, and like Goya he is often seen as a forerunner of Realism. His most important works are Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black, 1830) and La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839).

WORKS OF ART

The "battle of Hernani" was fought nightly at the theatre in 1830

French Revolution 1830

The three musketeers by Maurice Leloir,1894

Hunchback of Notre-dame 1831

VARIETY OF ART OBJECTS IN HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXT

The most famous Romantic works of art are not paintings, poems, or symphonies, but three novels:The Hunchback of NotreDame and Les Misrables, both by the French writer Victor Hugo, andFrankenstein, by 18-year-old British writer Mary Shelley. All three works are outcries against man's inhumanity to man. To drive home the point, the writers magnify the inhumanity so we can see it better. They do this by directing it against outcasts: a hunchback, an exconvict, and a manmade monster. The more of an outsider someone is, the more people abuse that person.

HOW CULTURE INFLUENCES HUMANS EMOTIONAL REACTIONS TO WORKS OF ART

The Romantic period was the first time in history that art focused on teaching people to care about each other. In this sense, Romanticism was "art with a heart." Romantic artists were also concerned with promoting individual liberty, ending slavery, and supporting democratic and independence movements, like the Greek war for independence from Turkey and the nationalism movement in Italy. To promote democracy in England, the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (husband of Mary) said to his countrymen in "Song to the Men of England": The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature. . . . A man, to be greatly good . . . must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of the species must become his own. Many Romantics believed that there was a basic goodness in man buried under layers of socialization. The idea was largely born in the brain of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In his influential book The Social Contract, he wrote, "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains."