The Romantic Revolution: A History (Modern Library Chronicles) - Hardcover

Blanning, Tim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679643591 ISBN 13: 9780679643593

Publisher: Modern Library, 2011

Synopsis

From the preeminent historian of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries comes a superb, concise account of a cultural upheaval that still shapes sensibilities today. Long overshadowed by the contemporaneous American, French, and Industrial revolutions, the Romantic Revolution finally receives its due in Tim Blanning’s bold and brilliant work.

A rebellion against the rationality of the Enlightenment, a rejection of “the Academy” in favor of public opinion, Romanticism was a profound shift in expression that altered the arts and ushered in modernity, even as it championed a return to the intuitive and the primitive. Blanning describes its beginnings in Rousseau’s novel La Nouvelle Héloïse, the biggest bestseller of the eighteenth century, a work that placed the creator—and not the created—at the center of aesthetic activity and led to the virtual worship of creative geniuses by the general public.

Blanning reveals the glamorizing of artistic madness and suicide in Goethe’s novel The Sufferings of Young Werther and the ballet Giselle; the role of sex as a psychological force in Friedrich Schlegel’s novel Lucinde; the importance of mind-altering drugs to the fictional protagonist of Confessions of an English Opium Eater and to the composer Hector Berlioz in his Symphonie fantastique; and the use of naïve, dreamlike imagery in Goya’s paintings of monsters, devils, and witches.

Whether it was the new notion of “sex appeal” in the fames of Paganini, Liszt, and Byron, or the celebration of accessible storytelling in the novels of Walter Scott (the most popular writer of the day), The Romantic Revolution unearths the origins of ideas now commonplace in our culture. It is the best introduction to an essential time whose influence would far outlast the mechanistic “age of the railway” that, in the mid-nineteenth century, replaced it.

About this title

About the Author:

Until his retirement in 2009, Tim Blanning was Professor of Modern European History at the University of Cambridge and remains a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College and of the British Academy. He is general editor of The Oxford History of Modern Europe and the Short Oxford History of Europe series and the author of The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture, which won a prestigious German prize and was short-listed for the British Academy Book Prize, The Pursuit of Glory, and The Triumph of Music. In 2000 he was awarded a Pilkington Prize for teaching by the University of Cambridge.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter 1

The Crisis of the

Age of Reason

Rousseau on the Road to Vincennes

On June 28, 1751, the first volume of the Encyclopedia, or a systematic dictionary of the sciences, arts, and crafts (better known in its abbreviated French form as the Encyclopédie), edited by Jean le Rond d'Alembert and Denis Diderot, was published in Paris. Originally intended to be nothing more than a translation of Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopædia of 1728, the project soon expanded to ten volumes and kept on growing. By the time it reached completion with a two-volume index in 1780 it covered thirty-five volumes containing more than twenty million words. This was much more than a reference work: It was underpinned by a mission to modernize. Once all knowledge had been assembled and its fundamental principles identified, the way would be clear for further progress. It was a process that necessarily involved casting a critical eye at existing institutions, customs, and values. As Diderot put it in his article on Encyclopedia: "All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone's feelings. . . . We must ride roughshod over all these ancient puerilities, overturn the barriers that reason never erected, and give back to the arts and the sciences the liberty that is so precious to them." Although the sharp eye of the censor compelled discretion, chief among those "ancient puerilities" that Diderot had his eye on was the Catholic Church.

The impact of the Encyclopédie was immediate and lasting. An instant bestseller right across Europe, it had sold more than twenty-five thousand complete sets by 1789, more than half of them outside France. Anyone who contributed to it automatically became a celebrity: "In the past," wrote Voltaire, "men of letters were not admitted into polite society, they have now become a necessary part of it." Fierce opposition from the conservative press and intermittent persecution by the authorities, culminating in an outright ban by both king and pope in 1759, helped to promote a sense of solidarity among both contributors and sympathizers, so that encyclopédiste entered the language to denote a progressive intellectual. But by the time they were forced underground, Diderot and d'Alembert had succeeded in their mission of creating an institutional center for their project of Enlightenment. Also in 1759 d'Alembert claimed in his treatise Elements of Philosophy: "A most remarkable change has taken place in our ideas, a change which by its rapidity, seems to promise us a greater one yet. . . . Our century has called itself supremely the century of philosophy."

This triumphalism derived in part from the knowledge that the Encyclopédie was only one of many major works of enlightened philosophy to have been published around the middle of the century, including Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws in 1748, the first volume of Buffon's Natural History in 1749, Condillac's Treatise on Systems, also in 1749, and Voltaire's The Age of Louis XIV in 1751. Yet at the very moment that the tide seemed to be running irresistibly in their favor, a mighty splash announced the appearance of an intrepid opponent determined to swim against the current. This was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who in July 1749 had a conversion experience while on his way to see his friend Diderot in prison at Vincennes, just outside Paris. Unable to afford a carriage, Rousseau went on foot, whiling away the time by reading the Mercure de France. His eye was struck by an advertisement for a prize essay competition staged by the Academy of Dijon. The topic was: "Has the progress of the sciences and arts done more to corrupt morals or improve them?" In his autobiography Confessions, published posthumously in 1782, Rousseau recalled: "The moment I read this I beheld another universe and became another man." In another account he went into more detail about the extreme nature of his reaction: "I felt my mind dazzled by a thousand lights. . . . I felt my head seized by a dizziness that resembled intoxication." Slumping to the ground, he spent the next hour in a kind of trance, sobbing so passionately that when he came to his senses he found his coat drenched with tears.

The reason for this effusion was Rousseau's sudden insight that the Dijon Academy's question was not rhetorical. Collecting his wits, he set about articulating his epiphany in A Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences, which won the prize and was published the following year. With all the zeal of the convert, he proclaimed that, contrary to expectation, the civilizing process was leading not to liberation but to enslavement, as it has flung "garlands of flowers over the chains which weigh us down," so that "our minds have been corrupted in proportion as the arts and sciences have improved." All the various branches of the natural sciences, he observed, have their origins in a vice: astronomy in superstition, mathematics in greed, mechanics in ambition, physics in idle curiosity. Even printing had proved to be a false friend, for it had allowed the dissemination of impious tracts, such as those of Hobbes and Spinoza. Rousseau ended his diatribe with the prediction that eventually men would become so alienated from the modern world that they would beg God to give them back their "ignorance, innocence, and poverty, the only goods that can make for our happiness and that are precious in your sight."

This was to turn the agenda of the Enlightenment on its head with a vengeance. Throwing caution to the winds, Rousseau went out of his way to distance himself from his former friends, accusing them of subverting the traditional values of patriotism and religion in pursuit of "the destruction and degradation of everything sacred among men." It took a long time for the philosophes to realize just how extreme was Rousseau's apostasy. They chose to see his Discourse as "a paradox rather than a conviction." Complacently believing that history was on their side, they moved from bewilderment to irritation to hostility, even hatred in the case of Diderot or Voltaire. Yet although they might dismiss him as a "lunatic," as Voltaire did, they could not help but notice that Rousseau's antimodernism had struck a responsive chord in many readers. What made him more dangerous was his total lack of any connection with the establishment. On the contrary, he had proved his credentials as a sea green incorruptible by ostentatiously turning his back on the offer of a royal pension in 1752. His rejection of the Enlightenment had made him more radical.

Rousseau's Lovers: From a Mimetic to an Expressive Aesthetic

Even the least perceptive of the philosophes had to wake up to the threat when in 1761 Rousseau published an epistolary novel. The title of the very first edition was Letters from two lovers living in a small town at the foot of the Alps, but it soon became known as Julie, or The New Héloïse. Voltaire's reaction that he would rather kill himself than read such "a stupid, bourgeois, impudent and boring" book all the way through was not shared by the European reading public. By the end of the century it had gone through more than seventy editions, becoming the biggest bestseller of the century in the process. When the printing presses proved unable to keep up with demand, enterprising Parisian booksellers resorted to renting out copies by the day or even hour. Rousseau was already famous: La Nouvelle Héloïse turned him into a cult. The fan mail that poured in-and which he carefully preserved-was remarkable as much for its intensity as for its bulk. Typical was an effusion from the cavalry captain Jean-Louis Le Cointe, which began with the apologetic exclamation: "Yet another letter from someone unknown to you!" Yet, he went on, so full was his heart that he had to overcome his reluctance to disturb the most amiable philosopher of all time. Not only had Rousseau's book made a case for morality more effectively than any sermon, he wrote, it had also shown men how they could achieve earthly happiness.

By pretending to be only the editor of a collection of letters he had stumbled on, Rousseau sought to give the novel the kind of immediacy achieved today by the better television soap operas. His success with only the written word at his disposal says a great deal for his literary skills, for he was required to assume the guise of several different characters-Julie, the long-suffering and ultimately doomed heroine; her lover, the sensitive Saint-Preux; Lord Edward Bomston, an English nobleman as warmhearted as he is rich; Wolmar, the noble atheist; and so on. Many of Rousseau's correspondents took him at his word, insisting that the events depicted had really happened and demanding to know what had happened after the end of the book. Not at all untypical was the Marquise de Polignac's anguished letter describing her reaction to Julie's death: "I dare not tell you the effect it made on me. My heart was crushed. Julie dying was no longer an unknown person. I believed I was her sister, her Claire. My seizure became so strong that if I had not put the book away I would have been as ill as those who attended that virtuous woman in her last moments."

This was not the first time that the tear ducts of eighteenth-century readers had opened their floodgates. The sentimental novels of Samuel Richardson, for example, had achieved a similar response in the 1740s. What raised Rousseau's emotional appeal above the ruck was its autobiographical dimension. As he himself observed:

What won me the women's favour was their belief that I had written my own story and that I was myself the hero of my novel. The belief was so firmly established that Mme de Polignac wrote to Mme de Verdelin, begging her to persuade me to let her see Julie's portrait. Everybody was convinced that it was impossible to express feelings so vividly unless one had felt them, or so to depict the raptures of love except with one's own heart as model. In that they were right, and it

is true that I wrot...

About this edition

• Publisher: Modern Library
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0679643591
• ISBN 13: 9780679643593
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272