A History of Modern French Literature

by Christopher Prendergast

  Similarly, the long hair and poorly cut beards of the Romantics are certainly intended to convey the defiance of youth against the thinning hair of seniors who now wear wigs, whose obsolete appearance, outdated and misplaced in the ongoing century, the Romantics will be all too happy to point out. Without being much mistaken, one could boil Romanticism down to a question of hairstyle, contrasting the fashion of the wigs of the ancien régime with the vivid and natural colors of the Romantics, which would change during the following generation into the artificial colors embraced by dandies like Baudelaire, who dyed his hair green or red in order to shock the bourgeoisie. But the length of the Romantics’ hair is also important insofar as it points to a revival of Roman and medieval culture, while dismissing the dominance of the classical centuries. To have long hair in the Paris of 1830 and to dress in bright colors somehow was to declare sensationally, in the manner of Walter Scott, that one is in love with the culture of the Middle Ages—slightly barbaric but alive, and whose true story we only begin to understand with Romanticism—and that one has become attached to ruins, as was made fashionable by Volney in his work, Les ruines ou méditations sur la révolution des empires (1791). For this reason, subjects drawn from medieval history would be popular throughout the Romantic era, whether they concerned the resurrection of medieval tales, such as that of Tristan et Iseut (an object of increasingly intense research throughout the century, culminating in Joseph Bédier’s version of 1900), or simply made-up legends, such as Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), or reworked historical events drawn from chronicles, such as the one George Sand (Aurore Dudevant) titled Une conspiration en 1537, which she excerpts from Benedetto Varchi’s Storia fiorentina to give to her lover Alfred de Musset, who in turn used it as the basis of his play Lorenzaccio (1834).

  Much more than a mere fight among rivals for literary recognition, as a key moment of the artistic history of the nineteenth century, the battle of Hernani is a literary and political watershed, as much between one generation and the next as between the First Romanticism (the era of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Mme de Staël, Benjamin Constant, Senancour, Joseph Joubert, and some others) and the Second Romanticism, which literary history often labels Romanticism as such, starting with Alphonse de Lamartine’s Méditations poétiques in 1820 and ending with the failure of Hugo’s Burgraves in 1843. Of course, Hernani is first and foremost an esthetic and dramatic confrontation following the “quarrels” of the ancien régime (the most famous of which remains that between the ancients and the moderns), and preceding by a few decades the “struggles” of the twentieth-century avant-garde (surrealism, cubism, and so forth).

  In the Romantic age, literary confrontations readily assumed an epic shape and are preferably called “battles,” given the aura of Napoleonic symbolism still ubiquitous, despite the emperor’s exile and death on Saint Helena in 1821. Emmanuel de Las Cases’s account of Napoleon’s death fascinated the entire Romantic generation, which read Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène (1822) avidly. Such is the case with Julien Sorel, the protagonist of Le rouge et le noir, who keeps with him hidden under his pillow a copy of this veritable Romantic vade mecum, even when he succeeds in entering the house of the noble Mme de Reynal. Several Romantic authors take Bonaparte as a model—an inimitable one to be sure, and one whose epic had truly ended with the Restoration. But they believe he can be resurrected in another field, at once literary and political. Take, for example, the symbolic Napoleonic pose of certain authors like Balzac, or the hand-in-waistcoat pose that Hugo also adopts on occasion, as in 1879, when he was portrayed by Léon Bonnat, a painter who is today unfairly ignored. These Romantics, who reached adulthood in 1830, are thus either sons of Bonaparte’s soldiers, like Hugo himself, or they simply have nostalgia for the Grande Armée, about which they had been lulled with legends since their childhood, which was nurtured by the Bulletins of the Grande Armée, as would be the case with Musset in La confession d’un enfant du siècle (Confession of a Child of the Century, 1836).

  These reports of battles and of deeds and actions at the military front, drafted and published for the benefit of civilians, were devised through Bonaparte’s genius of propaganda, which greatly altered reality to his advantage. We may think, for example, of his success in passing off as a victory the Battle of Eylau, which was disastrous in all respects, notably because of the number of dead, which was in the tens of thousands. The full apocalyptic extent of this disaster is given by Balzac in Colonel Chabert (1832), which tells of the fictitious life of an Empire colonel who had miraculously survived the mass grave of Eylau to come back and haunt his wife, now remarried to a Peer of France under the Restoration. As one may note, compared with the lives of their fathers, the existences of the authors of the Romantic generation seem quite pale and orderly, almost bourgeois (to use an insult of the time, which enflamed the passions of artists who sought adamantly to distinguish themselves from those whom Rimbaud called, a few decades later, “those who sit”). In the nineteenth century, art conceived itself as opposed to society, or at least opposed to the bourgeois world of finance and commerce. According to the legend, Guizot, who became minister under the July Monarchy, supposedly said, “Get rich!”—to which Baudelaire responds in one of his prose poems from Le spleen de Paris (1869), “Get drunk!”

  Thus, during the first months of 1830, the Romantic mob kept this military imagery in mind, which must be taken into account in order to understand the Romantics’ agitation when they attacked the Comédie-Française, then simply called the “Française,” as opposed to the “Boulevard.” The latter was the theater at the Porte-Saint-Martin, where, for the most part, the performances were melodrama, a genre derived from mime and crime scenes, hence the nickname of “Boulevard du Crime.” (The filmmaker Marcel Carné depicts this theater with great detail, care, and poetry in his masterpiece, Les enfants du paradis [The Children of Paradise, 1945], scripted by the poet Jacques Prévert.) For the Romantics, attacking the Comédie-Française somehow amounts to replaying in their own way the storming of the Bastille (which their fathers actually experienced), but this time as an artistic and dramatic imitation. In many respects, French Romanticism transposes the military energy of the previous generation into the conquest of artistic freedom and of new genres such as the drama and the novel, but also poetry: “J’ai mis un bonnet rouge au vieux dictionnaire” (I put a red cap on the old dictionary), claims Hugo in Les contemplations (“Reply to an Act of Impeachment”), in reference to the famous Phrygian cap adopted by the revolutionaries of 1789 as a symbol of the new order.

  But despite the legend invented by Théophile Gautier, the bold formal novelties were not so shocking to the bourgeois and neoclassical audience, already used to the flexibility of the bourgeois drama from the eighteenth century (Nivelle de la Chaussée, Beaumarchais, Diderot), because enjambment—the romantic versification device par excellence—was already almost inaudible to the audience, which no longer appreciated the quality of the verse and diction, unlike under the ancien régime when the audience went to the theater to listen to verse. Rather, what shocked the audience was the absence of periphrasis and use of the proper term, such as the famous “handkerchief” that the actress Mlle Mars refused to pronounce in view of all the impertinent suggestions that the word induces, and that she ultimately would say only reluctantly and at the insistence of Hugo himself.

  The presence of characters from the middle or low social classes also shocked the audience, because this contrasted greatly with the classical rules inherited from Aristotle in the second chapter of the Poetics, where he explains, “Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy better than in actual life.” The third chapter adds a second criterion of differentiation—the formal dimension: “For the medium being the same, and the objects the same, the poet may imitate by narration … or he may present all his characters as living and moving before us.” The Aristotelian typology is derived from these two criteria. The typology divides literary forms into two categ
ories, namely, noble and base imitation, which can be narrated or acted; in combination, these criteria identify comedy as a base and acted imitation, tragedy as a noble and acted imitation, epic as a noble and narrated imitation, and finally historical prose as a base and narrated imitation. This zone of anomie, located at the double crossroads of the noble and the base, of the narrated and the acted, and, according to Aristotle, of verse and prose, gave rise to Corneille’s tragicomedy, then to the bourgeois drama, and finally to the Romantic drama, which finishes the dislocation of the Aristotelian system by presenting, for instance, the story of a queen in love with a servant as a topic of comic and even tragic drama, as in Hugo’s masterpiece, Ruy Blas (1838). What is more, the neoclassical audience perceived as a blunt attack the introduction of elements that were claimed by modern theater as early as 1827 in the preface of Hugo’s Cromwell, namely, the juxtaposition of opposites such as the sublime and the grotesque within the same play, which literally deconstructs the ancient contrasts inherited from Aristotle.

  Behind these revolutions is hidden a profound transformation of artistic and social mores that is revealed especially in the story of the censorship of the play. It was Baron Taylor, royal commissioner of the Comédie-Française in 1830—himself well disposed toward Romanticism—who allowed Hugo to present his play there. But the preliminary censorship inherited from the ancien régime, based as it was on the system of royal privilege that grants the right to print to those above, while refusing distribution to those below, still retained some control over the agenda of the theaters and bookstores. Charles Briffaut was fairly well known in literary history for being ridiculed for censuring Hugo’s play Marion Delorme two years earlier, and, facing the new threat posed by Hernani, he did not want to repeat the same mistake; so he decided rather to let the public assess the aberration it represents. The censor Briffaut therefore predicted, and literally planned the battle of Hernani, even before its performance, thus making the play the occasion of a strange transfer of powers of which his contemporaries seem to have been only half aware. The battle fought in the auditorium symbolizes what was at stake in all of French society at the time: the revolt of youth in conflict with the gerontocracy of the Restoration, which does not realize that a profound change of mores is already in progress. Thus, on March 3, 1830, the sculptor Auguste Préault shouted at the old men before him in the hall: “À la guillotine, les genoux!” By recalling that the play of Hernani itself tells the story of the condemnation of the pure love of two young people by an old man, Préault uses baldness (the head is smooth as a knee) to refer to the old age of the adversaries of Romanticism, the neoclassics, who are frightened by the impropriety of recalling revolutionary imagery, which was often painful for the survivors of the Revolution and of the Empire. The survivors often had a family member, a close friend, or at least an acquaintance who had gone through what was called “the black widow,” namely, the guillotine.

  Several years before Hernani, Stendhal had already set the stage for this confrontation when the watchword “Romanticism” had then been in use only a few years. In 1824, for example, in Racine et Shakespeare, Stendhal still speaks of romanticisme, a term he translates directly from English. Indeed, Stendhal notes the generational divide when he declares that “never before in human history has a people experienced, in its manners and pleasures, a change more rapid and complete than during the period of 1780 to 1823; and yet we are told that we should always have the same literature!” The revolutionary split results, among other things, in a passing from an aesthetic of habit (“to be able still to read in one’s own heart so that the veil of habit can be torn apart”) to one of experience, culminating in the lively forces of the youth (“to be able to put ourselves in the experience for the moments of perfect illusion of which we speak, one’s soul must be capable of vivid impressions; one cannot be forty”). Experience pierces the fabric of the experience that comes with age; it makes it obsolete. It is thus not only a question of age (although it is also one), but especially of historic and aesthetic regime change.

  In his properly historical conception of laughter, Stendhal challenges, for instance, the notion of classical imitation with which he contrasts imagination: “All the subjects of Louis XIV prided themselves on imitating a certain model in order to be elegant and fash ionable, and Louis XIV himself was the god of this religion. … A man, in comedy or in real life, who took to following the impulses of a wild imagination freely without considering anything else, rather than amuse the society of 1670, would have passed for a madman!” So, the habit of imitation on the one hand, and the experience of imagination on the other: (neo)classical aesthetics (or rather, what Stendhal acknowledged as such for the sake of polemics, without regard to the discussion of the idea of imitation by the classics themselves, particularly in the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns) versus a vision of things referred to as “Romanticism” in the Racine et Shakespeare of 1825. One way to understand this term would be as a rejection of the mediation of prior models, benchmarks, preunderstanding, and prejudice.

  At least this is what Stendhal declares, but of course many passages of his works show the contrary, namely, a passionate attachment to a form of tradition—for instance, that of medieval Italy, the myth of which develops as early as Histoire de la peinture en Italie (The History of Painting in Italy, 1817), and also the paradox of a plagiaristic rewriting that extols the tradition of freedom stemming from the Italian republics of the Middle Ages. This is where the most tenuous strands of Stendhal’s thought and of Romanticism are formed. These strands nonetheless make a knot of such strength that the avant-gardes of the following decades were only able to repeat its manner of distinguishing, quite skillfully, within the Romantic present, what pertains to the current and the contemporary: “Romanticism is the art of presenting to the nations the literary works which, in the current state of their habits and of their beliefs, are susceptible to giving them the most pleasure.” A question of habits and beliefs, of mores, of nascent anthropology and history, the Romanticism that is still looking for its name has nevertheless found its formula: it is the work that coincides with the public’s horizon of expectation, that touches the heart of the collective concerns of the author and the readers.

  But by no means does it strive to be current, in the sense of the political present, for example—Stendhal is very clear on this point: “The newspapers, bearing witness to what happened in the elections of 1824, exclaimed over and over again, ‘What lovelier subject for comedy than the candidate!’ Hey! No, gentlemen, he is worthless. …” A “gunshot in the middle of a concert,” the current breaks the frame of the work and misses the contemporaneity that is aimed for. In his desire to “give his contemporaries precisely the kind of tragedy they need,” Stendhal is not trying to overtake the present, but rather to find the foundation of his time, to excavate its archeology, because the contemporary, as the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben emphasizes, is the archaic: “Contemporaneity is in fact inscribed within the present, marking it primarily as archaic; only he who sees the indications or the signature of archaism in the most modern and recent things can be a contemporary. Archaic means close to the archē, which is to say the origin. … It is in this sense that we can say that the route of access to the present necessarily takes the shape of an archeology.” The pleasure evoked by Stendhal, whose requirement of compatibility between a work and the needs of an era is only the occasion, then becomes the sign of a much more intense ripple than the simple laughter of courtiers: it reveals the agreement between obscure powers or secret movements of the soul, and what takes place on stage or in the broad theater of desire that is the true foundation of Romanticism.

  The seismic shock of Hernani is thus not an isolated event without consequence: it was prepared for by numerous other factors and resulted in a wide movement that took into account—in Paris as well as in European society in general—the promotion of the present that Stendhal describes and that could in itself summarize
what Romanticism is. Studying this Romantic breakdown of the times, the historian François Hartog distinguishes three levels of historicity: the ancient (turned toward the past), the modern (turned toward the future), and that of the last decades of the twentieth century (turned toward the present), which he calls “presentism.” Relying especially on the works of Chateaubriand and Tocqueville, Hartog considers the Romantic moment to be that of the separation of the times that came before and the times that came after the event at which the semantics necessary for the implementation of the notion of progress was put in place. Or, at the very least, it is the idea according to which time, that great sculptor, gives shape to its substance by means of the future, and no longer the past, as Chateaubriand’s René puts it so eloquently: “But what had I learned so far with so much effort? Nothing certain among the ancients, nothing beautiful among the moderns. The past and present are two unfinished statues: the one has been withdrawn all mutilated from the ruins of the ages, while the other has not yet received its perfection from the future.”