French literature of the XIXe century

the French literature of the 19th century falls under one period defined by two dates reference mark: 1798, date of the coup d'etat of Bonaparte which founds the Consulat and puts in a certain way end at the revolutionary period, and 1899, moment of resolution of the tensions of the Affaire Dreyfus and threat of the Boulangisme and where finally the values of the IIIe République are essential. Literary modernity continues in this century with the History animated with outstanding currents which touch all arts, like the Romantisme, the Réalisme, the naturalism or the symbolism. The most important creators escape a narrow labelling however and offer works multiple and still close to us, particularly in the field of the Poésie (with Lamartine, Vigny, Musset, Hugo, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé…) as in the field of the Romance (with Stendhal, Balzac, Dumas, Hugo, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant, Verne…) and to a lesser extent with the theater with the romantic Drama and its epigones (with Musset, Hugo, Edmond Rostand…).

Context

This century of the Revolutions (Restauration - Revolution of July 1830 and 1848 - Commune of Paris in 1871) sees following one another of the different political systems (First Empire - monarchy of Old Mode restored - Constitutional monarchy - transitory IIe République - Second Empire - IIIe République) which seek to answer (or to be opposed) to the new democratic aspirations and with the economic transformations which accelerate with industrialization, colonization and the conflicts between the European powers.

The changes of company are extremely important all at long century with for example the State education which ends up becoming general and which, accompanied by remarkable scientific progresses and techniques, takes part in the evolution of mentalities. The aristocracy and the Church lose little by little their strong positions and a company Laïque settles at the end of the century, also marked by the weight growing of the middle-class and the working class which clash. The République is essential finally on all and votes social laws while organizing the colonial conquests and by preparing revenge against Germany. The authors give an account of these transformation in their works and for a share of them engage in the political camps, progressists (like Lamartine, Hugo or Zola) or sometimes reactionaries like Maurice Barrès, or Leon Daudet ( the Stupid 19th century ). They however often meet for exalter the figure of the free artist against the vulgar middle-class man and materialist, by creating the myth of the Bohemian and rejected artist whom in particular the figure of the painter or the cursed poet illustrates.

In the field of arts, in France, beside a Neo-classicism official and academic (going sometimes until art fireman), one finds the large esthetic currents of the century like the romanticism with Delacroix or Berlioz and, later, the Réalisme with Courbet and, at the same period, in music Gounod and Bizet. In the last years of the Second Empire little by little the Impressionnisme is essential to which one can attach Manet, Monet or Renoir, to only quote largest. The end of the century is more varied with movements like the Pointillisme or groups it Nabis and personalities like Cézanne, Gauguin or Van Gogh, or of the sculptor Rodin, whereas Gabriel Fauré, Camille Saint-Saëns and Claude Debussy dominates the French musical composition.

Literary richness of the 19th century

The poetry of the 19th century

the Romantisme nourishes all first half of the 19th century and for poetry more precisely the years 1820 - 1850: by convention, poetic Meditations of Lamartine, in 1820, with the Contemplations of Victor Hugo in 1856. This European esthetic movement makes a place very particular to the Lyrisme and the overflowing of ego with a taste marked for the melancholy: the poets thus will express their evil of living and their emotional sufferings by contemplating on death, God, the love and the escape of time, on nature and glory, and beyond these traditional lyric topics on the function of the poet (Hugo) and on a more original perception of fantastic with Nerval, Nodier or Aloysius Bertrand.

Beyond the topics not always innovative, the romantic poets will assert an easing of the expression versified in the search of a greater musical quality and some audacities in the words and the images, at Victor Hugo in particular.

This novelty search will be also concretized by " the invention " prose poem by Aloysius Bertrand (1807 - 1841) in Gaspard of the night , published in 1842 after its death, where it inserts to us in an oneiric world, and which initiates a form that will take again later Baudelaire and Rimbaud.

Poetry of the sensitivity and a certain musical quality, the romantic Poésie is liked in rather long poems that the following generation will find heavy, oratorical, talkative and agreed (Rimbaud will speak about " the old form "), with notorious exceptions like Nerval (1808-1855) and its collection of the Dreams (1854); certain poems of this period however constitute parts of reference which still touch the reader of today.

Let us mention principal works of this romantic time marked by an abundant creation:

- Alphonse of Lamartine (1790-1869): the initiator, lyric and religious. Collection: Poetic Meditations (1820) (poems: the lake - the small valley. .) - Poetic Harmonies and Nuns (1830).

- Alfred de Musset (1810-1857) sensitive and moving: the Nights (1835-1837).

- Alfred de Vigny (1797-1863), metaphysics and sinks: the Destinies (1864) (poems: the horn - Brace - the Death of the Wolf - the House of the Shepherd .).

- Victor Hugo (1802-1885) which dominates the century with its multiform poetry, lyric, epic, satirical and committed, social, metaphysical and philosophical… Collections: Eastern the (1829) (poem: the Djinns ) - Sheets of autumn (1831) ( This century was two years old …) - Songs of the Twilight (1835) ( the Sowing ) - interior Voices (1837) ( has Eugene, Viscount H. ) - Rays and the Shades (1840) ( Fonction of the poet - Tristesse of Olympio - Oceano Nox …) - the Punishments (1853) ( O Soldiers of the year two! - To remember the night of the 4 - the atonement : " It snowed… /Waterloo") - Contemplations (1856) ( Tomorrow at dawn … - has Villequier - the Beggar - what the mouth of shade says) - the Legend of the Centuries (1859-1883) ( conscience: Caïn - Booz deadened - the eagle of the helmet - the Poor people). - Gerard de Nerval (1808 - 1855), dense and mysterious: the Dreams (1854) ( El desdichado )

the Parnassus

In reaction against overflowing egocentric person of the Romanticism, a movement is done day which wants to center poetry on the formal work of the poet and develops a theory of " art for art's sake ". This school, heiress of Théophile Gautier, is represented especially by Leconte de Lisle (1818 - 1894) with its ancient Poèmes (1852 - 1874) and its 'cruel Poems (1862 - 1878), and Theodore de Banville (1823 - 1891) ( Odelettes - Odes Funambulesques in 1857 and animation of the review of the contemporary Parnassus).

The influence of this movement is not to neglect: the density and the expressivity will be retained by the following poets and it is besides with Théophile Gautier that Baudelaire will dedicate the Flowers of the Evil and with Theodore de Banville that the young person Rimbaud will write in 1870. The late collection of the Trophées of José-Maria de Heredia in 1893 also testifies to the perenniality of the approach parnassienne, symbolized by the constraining form of the Sonnet.

Charles Baudelaire (1821 - 1867) is one of the major poets of the 19th century. Associating the formal concern of the short poems (or rather courts) and realism ( carrion - Parisian Tables …) with the expression of an existential anguish shared between the Spleen and the Ideal ( Harmony of the evening - the cracked bell - the Death of the poor , it knew to make a success of a “poetic alchemy” exemplary by extracting the Flowers from the evil in its collection published in 1857 (condemned partially for insult to the moralities) which contains it worms revealing: “You gave me your mud and I made gold of it”. Poet of the real-world and the beauty, happiness and the suffering, morbidity and the sin, it mainly founded the type of the poet tormented and unsuited to the world. Baudelaire also gave to the prose poem its notoriety with its Petits prose poems ( the port - a hemisphere in a hair …).

poets of the end of the century

- The figures of Verlaine (1844 - 1896) and of Rimbaud (1854 - 1891) prolong the type of the poet cursed by their lives out of the social norms. If Arthur Rimbaud ( One season in hell - Illuminations ) remains like the “robber of fire”, the indicator and the transitory adventurer of poetry with his fulgurances and its revolts, Paul Verlaine, with a longer work, is associated with the musical quality, lyricism melancholic person and a kind of Impressionnisme with its art of the nuance, “Without anything in him which weighs or which poses”. ( Poems saturniens - gallant Festivals - Wisdom …). One can associate Lautréamont to them (1846 - 1870) which leaves unfinished the Songs of Maldoror , blazing prose of revolt against God and the company that the Surrealist ones will discover. - Mallarmé (1842 - 1898) research as for him refinement and sometimes hermetic concision in a rare work ( the Afternoon of a fauna - Poésies , posthumous regrouping) which will influence Paul Valéry.

- Years 1880 see to continue currents with dubious contours like the Décadentisme and the symbolism which in common have the bursting of the poetic form with the free use of the verse and the refusal of prosaicness for the benefit of the suggestion with a taste for refinement and the irrational one. One can quote the names of Jean Moréas, Henri de Régnier, Albert Samain, Georges Rodenbach… Notons also for their imagination Charles Cros and Jules Laforgue, which is sometimes not so far from the songs of Aristide Bruant, itself remote successor of Béranger.

The theater of the 19th century

The Théâtre becomes an entertainment for all the social layers during the 19th century with a large variety of rooms and kinds, not all very literary besides. It is also the time of the extraordinary celebrity of the actors like Talma, Frédérick Lemaître (cf the film of Marcel Carné Children of the Paradise ), Marie Dorval, Rachel and later Sarah Bernhardt. The text of theater however knows a new breath with the romantic Drame which is essential during one decade of 1830-1840 while asserting, like Victor Hugo in the Préface of Cromwell in 1827, an esthetics of the sensitivity, freedom and truth with the rejection of the traditional rules and the distinction of the kinds and of tons, the research of the local color with subjects borrowed from the history of the 16th-17th centuries and the use of prose or, for Victor Hugo, of the released alexandrine. Principal works of this period are: Hernani (1830) and Ruy Blas (1838) of Victor Hugo, One badine not with the love (1834) and Lorenzaccio (1834 - not represented) of Musset, Adhesive tape (1835) of Vigny, Kean (1831) and the Tower of Nesles (1832) of Alexandre Dumas father; and a little later, in a difficult categorization, the Lady with the camellias of Alexandre Dumas wire (adapted into 1852 of its own novel; what will make also Zola with Renee adapted the Quarry ).

The Théâtre romantic, complex to represent and last mode, will yield then the place to the melodrama with the effects forced with bounces and victory of the goods over the malicious ones which will make of it a popular kind with great success, but that hardly retains the literary history.

The other shapes of theater will cohabit in the continuation of the century, for example the Light comedies with the light comedy which associates entertainment and conventional satire and that illustrate Labiche, Courteline or Feydeau. The musical theater will also settle him in second half of the century with the Opérette and the comic Opéra which works of Offenbach represent well.

The literary history has the memory of attempts at renewal at the end of the century like the Théâtre naturalist and his dark glance on the contemporary world (Henry Becque: the Corbels - 1882, Octave Mirbeau: the Businesses are the businesses - 1903) or the Théâtre Symbolist with his force of suggestion and its correspondences poetic ( Pelléas and Mélisande of Maeterlinck in 1892 which will put in music Debussy).

One also retains some other original aspects of the period like the burlesque theater of provocation of Alfred Jarry ( Ubu King - 1888), at the same time lyric and epic theater, of Edmond Rostand with his blazing alexandrines ( Cyrano of Bergerac -1899, the Eaglet - 1900) or the first patriotic works, catholics and, of Charles Péguy ( Jeanne d' Arc - 1897).

Novels of the 19th century

The Romance will become the kind dominating by its massive diffusion maintained by the increasing state education and the development the press and the serials in second half of the century. The majority of the novelists result from the middle-class and live from now on of their feather (sometimes very well like Hugo, Maupassant or Zola…). The novel becomes a kind catch-all around a base minimum: account in prose, a relatively important length, comprising a share of imaginary and sticking to moments of life of the characters. Typology is obviously discussed but some broad outlines of force are well defined.

the novel of ego: neighbor of the Autobiographie which illustrates imposing it Mémoires of in addition to-falls from Chateaubriand (1848), the autobiographical novel with the first nobody marks the beginning of the century with the taste for the intimate confession hidden behind a figurehead, by associating lyricism and narcissism to explore the evil of living of a generation. He constitutes one of the important contributions of the Romantisme to the literature with personal works like Rene (Chateaubriand -1802), Corinne (Madam de Staël -1807), Adolphe (Benjamin Constant -1816) or the Confession of a child of the century (Musset - 1836).

the Historical novel: under the influence of Walter Scott, the authors cultivate nostalgia and picturesque with a preoccupation of documentation (sometimes heavy) and a re-creation of passed by mingling characters and facts imagined with historical characters and actions. Some exemplary titles: Chouans (Balzac - 1829), Five-March (Vigny - 1828), Notre-Dame de Paris (Hugo - 1831), the Three Musketeers (Alexandre Dumas father - 1844), Uneven the (Paul Féval - 1858). The kind is prolonged throughout the century with some notable works like the Novel of the mummy (Gautier - 1857), Salammbô (Flaubert - 1862), Quatrevingt-treize (Hugo - 1874)… It is however competed with by the kind close to the serialized story which makes the fortune of the press and the happiness of the prosateurs like Eugene Sue with his Mystères of Paris (1842-1843) and its picturesque fresco and moralist of the company of time.

the realistic Romance : Categorization is prone to discussion but one can retain an esthetic objective clearly: it is a question of producing a “effect of reality” while painting with a constant worry of the detail and probability the decorations, the characters and the facts. The expressions of Stendhal (Romance = mirror) or of Balzac (novelist = historian of the present) show in first half of the century a way which Flaubert and Maupassant will look further into (foreword of Pierre and Jean ), then Zola and its naturalism. The novel of the 19th century will in parallel make a broad place with the novel of training, by accompanying the beginnings in the social life by the characters.

- Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) is a creator of exception, author of an immense work which it will entitle tardily the Human Comedy by classifying in three groups the 95 novels written between 1829 and 1847. The most important group (by far) is the studies of manners cut out in " scenes of the private life " ( the Father Goriot , the Colonel Chabert …), " scenes of the life of province " ( Eugenie Grandet , the Lily in the valley , lost Illusions ), " scenes of Parisian life " ( César Birotteau , the cousin White beet …), " scenes of the political life " ( a mysterious business …), " scenes of the military life " ( Chouans …) and " scenes of the life of countryside " ( the Country doctor …). One finds then the studies philosophical ( the Shagreen , Louis Lambert , the unknown Chief of work …) and analytical studies ( the Physiology of the Marriage ).

- Stendhal (1783-1842), as for him, left us important novels with emblematic figures of young people like Julien Sorel or Fabrice del Dongo in the Red and the Black (1830) and Chartreuse of Parma (1839) by leaving unfinished Lucien Leuwen (1835).

- Beside these works headlights of first half of the 19th century, the novel social (and pastoral sometimes) finds its place in the literature with the texts of George Sand ( Consuelo - 1842, the Pond with the devil -1846, Small Fadette - 1849) and, a little later, with the large humanistic fresco of Victor Hugo, the Poor wretches (1862).

- The following generation will amplify this realistic approach with Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) which one must mention at least two masterpieces where appear also its concern of the perfection of the style and its irony pessimism: Mrs Bovary (1857) and sentimental Education (1869). Its “disciple”, Guy of Maupassant (1850-1893), uncontested Master of the news, also tested himself with the novel by looking further into the psychological and sociological observations as in Pierre and Jean (1888), a Life (1883) and especially Bel Friend (1885).

- Emile Zola (1840-1902) is the last very large novelist of the century: it theorizes in the experimental Roman (1880) the naturalism and gives to extreme realism, beyond even proprieties and by taking of account physiology, a scientific ambition while wanting to show the influence of the mediums on the individuals. Its work, Rougon-Macquart (subtitled Natural history and social of a family under the Second Empire ) is a romantic sum of 20 volumes presenting through five successive generations the consequences of the physiological and social determinism and the various demonstrations of an initial tare. Its powerful, often dramatic and sometimes epic novels, show a critical table of the company of the Second Empire with the denunciation of the immoralism of secured as in the Quarry (1872), Nana (1879), the Money (1891)… and its compassion for the people and his individual and collective sufferings, for example Gervaise in the Pole-axe (1877), the peasants in the Earth (1887), the minors in Germinal (1885), the soldiers in the rout (1892)…

- Many less important novelists also take part in realistic romantic creation in second half of the century: the brothers Goncourt (Edmond and Jules) with their descriptive meticulousness and their writing “artist” ( Germinie Lacerteux - 1865), Jules Verne who inaugurate his novels of adventure and anticipation with Five weeks in balloon in 1863 or Alphonse Daudet ( Small the Thing - 1868) and Jules Vallès ( the Child - 1879) which takes as a starting point their own life…

the end of the century is marked however by a reaction against this too judged realism “low” and by an “idealistic” attitude associated with a return to the religious prospect with Huysmans ( has Wrong way - 1884), Leon Bloy ( Desperate the - 1886) or Maurice Barrès ( Uprooted the -1897). Other openings seem exoticism, impressionist and realistic at the same time, of Pierre Loti ( Pêcheur of Iceland - 1886) and the birth of the novel of analysis " pre-proustien" with Paul Le Bourget ( the Disciple - 1889) or Anatole France ( the Red Lily - 1894)…

the narrative kind is also, throughout the century, largely represented by the Nouvelle which exploits as well the realistic approach as the fantastic vein: the large novelists test themselves there (Stendhal - Balzac - Flaubert…) and certain prosateurs make of it their favorite field of expression like Gautier ( Tale of fantasies ), Mérimée ( Venus of Ile , Colomba ), Daudet ( Letters of my mill ), Maupassant ( tales of the woodcock , Horla ), Barbey d' Aurevilly ( Diabolic the ), Villiers of Isle-Adam ( cruel Contes )…

Conclusion

Very rich century with works still close to us, the 19th century remains for the French literature a golden age of poetry and novel, with very many masterpieces which let perceive, beyond the literary currents which follow one another, of the creators to the artistic strong personalities.

External bonds

literature with the {{S|XIX|E}} on the Gallica site.
http://www.etudes-litteraires.com/histoire-litteraire.php

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