Romanticism and the Novel

French Literature

Course 1 · Chapter 6 · Romanticism and the Novel

After the Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, French writers turned from the rules of the Grand Siècle to feeling, the individual and the past. Romanticism, as the movement is called, rejected the classical unities, praised genius and passion, and found its largest audience not in the theatre but in the novel. Newspapers began to publish fiction in instalments, and a mass readership appeared. This chapter follows the Romantic generation: the poets, the dramatist who started a theatre riot, the novelist who spent eighteen years in exile, the creator of the musketeers, and a woman who wrote under a man's name. Names, dates and attributions are given from general knowledge and flagged where they should be checked.

What Romanticism Meant

Feeling over rules

Writers valued emotion, imagination and originality above the strict forms of classical drama.

The past

Medieval and historical settings, from cathedrals to chivalry, were fashionable, partly in reaction against the Enlightenment and the Revolution.

Nature and the self

Landscape, solitude and personal suffering were central themes, especially in poetry.

A wider audience

Cheaper printing and the daily newspaper created readers who had never been to a salon.

The Poets

Alphonse de Lamartine, Alfred de Vigny and Alfred de Musset are among the main Romantic poets, along with Hugo himself (check the names). Their verse often turns on lost love, melancholy and the contrast between the poet and a society that does not understand him. It remains widely taught, and many French people can still recite lines from school.

Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo (1802 to 1885) was the towering figure of the century and wrote poetry, plays and novels on a huge scale (check the dates). His play Hernani, staged in 1830, is said to have provoked a riot between supporters of the classical rules and the young Romantics who came to defend it, in what is remembered as the "battle of Hernani" (check this carefully, since the story is much repeated and the details are probably exaggerated). His novel Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), known in English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, brought the medieval cathedral back into popular imagination, and is sometimes credited with helping to start a movement to restore it (check the claim). Les Misérables (1862) follows a former convict through nineteenth-century France and is among the best-known novels in the world.

The exile Hugo opposed the coup by which Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte made himself emperor in 1851, and went into exile on the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey, where he stayed for about eighteen years and wrote some of his greatest work (check the dates and places). He returned to France after the fall of the Second Empire in 1870. When he died in 1885, he was given a state funeral and buried in the Panthéon (check). Chapter 10 follows the thread of the writer as public conscience through this exile.

Dumas and the Serial Novel

In the 1830s French newspapers began publishing novels in daily instalments, called romans-feuilletons, a format that drew in huge audiences and made writers rich (check the details). The master of the form was Alexandre Dumas (1802 to 1870), author of Les Trois Mousquetaires and Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, both published in the mid-1840s (check the dates). His fast-moving adventures were written with the help of collaborators, notably Auguste Maquet, and the extent of that help has been debated (check). Dumas's grandmother was an enslaved woman in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, and his father, a general in the Revolutionary armies, was of mixed ancestry (check the details). Dumas himself faced racist mockery in his lifetime, and his remains were moved to the Panthéon in 2002 (check).

Stendhal and George Sand

Writer	Known for	Note
Stendhal (Henri Beyle, 1783 to 1842)	Le Rouge et le Noir (1830), La Chartreuse de Parme (1839)	Cool, ironic analysis of ambition and love; often called a bridge between Romanticism and Realism (check the dates)
George Sand (Aurore Dupin, 1804 to 1876)	Indiana, La Mare au diable and dozens of other novels	Wrote under a male pen name, wore men's clothes in public at times, and was involved in the politics of 1848; her relationships with Musset and Chopin are much discussed (check)

The pen name Sand's choice of a male name was partly practical, since female novelists faced prejudice, and partly an act of self-invention. It was not unusual for women writers of the century. When you meet a famous pen name, ask what it made possible for the person using it.

Check the details The riot at Hernani, the effect of Hugo's novel on the restoration of Notre-Dame and the extent of Dumas's collaborators are all stories where the legend outruns the record. Confirm dates and claims in a scholarly source before repeating them.

Exercises

Exercise 1

Describe three features of French Romanticism and explain how each differed from classical writing.

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Exercise 2

Explain what a roman-feuilleton was and how it changed the relationship between writers and readers.

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Exercise 3

Describe Hugo's exile and explain why it matters to the idea of the writer as public conscience.

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Quick Reference

Romanticism: feeling over rules, the past, nature and self, a wider audience
Poets: Lamartine, Vigny, Musset, Hugo
Hugo: Hernani (1830), Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), Les Misérables (1862); exile from 1851
Dumas: the serial novel; Les Trois Mousquetaires, Monte-Cristo
Stendhal: Le Rouge et le Noir; a bridge to Realism
George Sand: pen name; many novels and a public life
Check: the Hernani riot, collaborator claims, dates

Next chapter: Realism & Naturalism, which covers Balzac, Flaubert, Zola and the Dreyfus affair.