French Poets and British Reviewers, 1814–30

Abstract

In mainstream studies of French literary history, the Bourbon Restoration of 1814 is often viewed as a pivotal event which encouraged the burgeoning of French Romanticism. The familiar narrative is that, while (with a few notable exceptions) poetry largely stagnated during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, it flourished again after 1814 with the emergence of writers such as Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Alphonse de Lamartine, Alfred de Vigny, Pierre-Jean de Beranger, Pierre-Antoine Lebrun, Victor Hugo, and others. By the 1840s, it was commonly asserted (in Britain and elsewhere) that ‘[w]ith the restoration of the Bourbons in 1815, the French romantic school of literature was ushered into existence’, and this interpretative stance has remained surprisingly constant ever since. There are differences of detail, of course. For some, the appearance of Desbordes-Valmore’s Elegies et Romances in 1819 inaugurated a discernable shift in poetics, while for others, this did not occur until the publication of Lamartine’s Meditations poetiques in 1820. Nonetheless, Rosemary Lloyd has recently (re)affirmed that Lamartine introduced ‘a new poetic sensibility’, and literary critics and cultural historians alike have routinely argued that, by comparison with similar developments in Britain and Germany, French Romanticism was ‘a belated literary phenomenon’. Despite the broad consensus about these matters, there have been few detailed assessments of the way in which British writers and critics evaluated French poetry (both ancient or modern) during the period 1814 to 1830. Predictably, the main critical focus has repeatedly fallen upon the pervasive scepticism concerning French neoclassical poetry from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and particularly its (apparently) deleterious influence on English literature. Keats’s caustic lambasting of the Augustans in ‘Sleep and Poetry’ (1817) is too well-known to require extensive quotation, but the following lines are especially pertinent here: