In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain, with a particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of revolutionary turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very particular time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of history and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle (literally “child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for his autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of 1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness, loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often in the form of frustrated dynamism.

Foreign influences

When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France, they brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon, was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and revenge tales.

The poetry of the Romantics

The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one of the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830, there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.

The early poetry of Hugo

It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In his first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman Catholic legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous quality of Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there are already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic, prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.