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FRENCH LITERATURE - Part 5
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THE 19TH CENTURY
The romantic
tendencies implicit in the 18th century had by 1830 become a
full-fledged and triumphant movement affecting every area of French
letters--poetry, drama, the novel, history, and criticism. Poetry
completely recovered its elan, while the novel, as the most suitable
genre for registering the social upheavals brought first by the
French Revolution and Napoleonic wars and then by the expansion of
capitalism and the industrial revolution, ultimately became the
dominant mode of expression. The century-long conflicts between
reactionaries and liberals, the church and the anticlericals, and the
bourgeoisie and the proletariat provided ample scope for the literary
giants of the age--Hugo, Balzac, Michelet, and Zola, each endowed
with a prodigious productivity.
The aristocratic
Vicomte de Chateaubriand ushered in the century with an
aggressive defense of Catholicism, Le Genie du christianisme (1802;
trans. as The Beauties of Christianity, 1815), and two novels set
among the American Indians. His Memoires d'outre-tombe (Eng. trans.,
1902), composed between 1811 and 1841 in a romantic vein, is
considered a classic of French autobiographical writing. Madame de
Stael, notable chiefly as a literary critic, became the
champion of German romantic literature in her De L'Allemagne (1813;
trans. as Germany, 1913). Her influence can be seen in Benjamin
Constant's novel Adolphe (1816; Eng. trans., 1817), analyzing
the waning passion of a young man for an older woman, which suggests
many parallels with Constant and de Stael's own tortuous
relationship.
Alphonse de
Lamartine, with his Meditations poetiques (1820; Eng. trans.,
1839), brought French poetry back to its lyric roots. He was the
first in a line of great French romantic poets that included Alfred
de Vigny, who came to prominence with his Poemes antiques et
modernes (1826); Alfred de Musset, known alike for his Byronic
poetry--alternately impish and moving--and his affair with George
Sand, herself a romantic novelist and early feminist; and the
giant among them, Victor Hugo, who for 65 years would
magnificently amplify every possible poetic theme and reign as chief
spokesman and practitioner of the romantic credo.
The first break with
romanticism was made by Théophile Gautier, a onetime
enthusiast whose art-for-art's-sake credo announced the arrival of
the PARNASSIANS, a group of poets infatuated with formal perfection
and objectivity and hostile to the romantics' subjective effusions.
Led by Charles Marie Leconte de Lisle in the 1860s, the
Parnassians saw their ideals best realized in the sonnet collection
Les Trophees (1893; Eng. trans., 1897) of Jose Maria de
Heredia.
Influenced by the
Parnassians but determined to create beauty even out of the horrors
of life, Charles Baudelaire in The Flowers of Evil (1857; Eng.
trans., 1909) sounded a new note--obsessive, morbid, presenting the
poet as an accursed being--that would significantly influence all
subsequent French poetry. Arthur Rimbaud, in A Season in Hell
(1873; Eng. trans., 1932) and Illuminations (1886; Eng. trans.,
1932), reached an absolute of revolt, experimenting with mixtures of
verse and prose, with rhythms, and with the juxtaposition of
unrelated words. His older friend and lover Paul Verlaine
brought to French poetry a musical, melodic quality it had not
previously attained, seen especially in his collection Jadis et
naguere (Once Upon a Time and Not Long Ago, 1884). Stéphane
Mallarmé, whose most celebrated poem was Afternoon of a
Faun (1876; Eng. trans., 1951), which Debussy later set to music,
guided poetry toward even more abstruse paths and, as the leader of
the symbolists in the 1880s and 1890s, exercised an enormous
influence over his contemporaries that is still lively today.
The 50 years between
1830 and 1880 witnessed enormous changes in the shape of the novel as
it was molded by a succession of innovators. Madame George Sand,
exemplifying romanticism in its most individualistic form, in Lelia
(1833; Eng. trans., 1978) championed the ultimate moral claim of
passion over convention, though her novels of country life, such as
The Country Waif (1847; Eng. trans., 1976) and Fanchon the Cricket
(1848; Eng. trans., 1977), have endured better. Stendhal, who
also portrayed the dominant role of passion as a motivating force in
life, nevertheless injected into his two great novels, The Red and
the Black (1830; Eng. trans., 1916) and The Charterhouse of Parma
(1839; Eng. trans., 1901), an ironic tone and analytical power that
foreshadowed the 20th-century psychological novel. Victor Hugo, in
his evocation of medieval Parisian life, The Hunchback of Notre Dame
(1831; Eng. trans., 1833), and Alexandre Dumas père, in
a whole series of adventures covering high points of the 16th, 17th,
and 18th centuries in France, made the historical novel a genre to be
reckoned with. Hugo's later work, Les Misérables (1862; Eng.
trans., 1862), recounting the redemption of a convict emerging from
the lower depths, successfully merged high drama with questions of
social morality.
The colossus of
19th-century French novelists, however, was Honoré de
Balzac, whose prodigious, multivolume Human Comedy (1842-48;
Eng. trans., 1895-98), encompassing more than 2,000 characters drawn
from every rank and walk of life and sweeping imaginatively over 40
years of French history, brilliantly delineated a major society in
flux. His genius for realistic detail, together with his emphasis on
material gain as the engine of human behavior, directly links Balzac
with the novelistic REALISM that won the day in the second half of
the century.
This was most
triumphantly realized in Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary
(1857; Eng. trans., 1886), the story of a provincial adulteress whose
bleak life ends in tragedy--a novel as notable for its perfection of
style as for its unerring observation. A disciple of Flaubert, Guy de
Maupassant, excelled in the sparely told, realistic, often
ironic short story, as in such collections as La Maison Tellier
(1881; Eng. trans., 1910) and Mademoiselle Fifi (1882; Eng. trans.,
1917). Influenced by contemporary determinist thought, Émile
Zola sought to make the novel a more scientific reflection of
reality. His 20-volume fictional examination of every level of social
life during the Second Empire, Les Rougon-Macquart (1871-93), with
its emphasis on the sordid and the depressing, remains the
outstanding exemplar of NATURALISM whose influence as a movement it
spanned.
History and
criticism also came to maturity during the 19th century. Jules
Michelet, whose immense 17-volume History of France (1833-43,
1855-67; Eng. trans., 1882-87) vibrantly resurrected the past,
exemplified the romantic narrative tradition at its best. Alexis de
Tocqueville, in his probing Democracy in America (1835, 1840;
both trans. the same years), offered analyses of American politics
and character in large part still valid today. Charles Augustin
Sainte-Beuve, in his astute study Port-Royal (1840-59) and in
his in-depth analyses of French literary figures, gave to literary
criticism the importance it has retained since. In applying his
erudition as Hebrew scholar and philologist to religion in The
Origins of Christianity (7 vols., 1863-83; Eng. trans., 1888-89),
Ernest Renan established modern critical methods in France.
Simultaneously, the philosopher and historian Hippolyte Taine,
seeking a scientific explanation for historical and cultural
phenomena, professed to discover in the interplay of physical and
psychological factors the cause of national and individual
variations. Zola's naturalistic oeuvre was the application of this
hypothesis to literature.
The French theater
was at first dominated by the romantic dramas of Hugo, whose Hernani
(1830; Eng. trans., 1830) liberated playwrights from the confining
traditions of the past, and by those of Dumas père. These were
followed in popularity by the well-made plays of Eugène
Scribe, Victorien Sardou, and Alexandre Dumas
fils, who also defended social theses.
Jean Boorsch.
Source: The New Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia, Release #8, ©1996.
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