Transposing Art into Texts in French Romantic Literature

Focusing on the Paris book world of this period, Allen reveals how the rise of a new popular literature—jolly chansonniers, the roman-feuilletons or serial novels, melodramas, gothic and sentimental novels, dramatic nationalistic histories—by such authors as Dumas, Sand, Lamennais, Ancelot, Desnoyer, and de Kock coincided with remarkable developments in the production, distribution, and consumption of books. Allen's research ranges from a survey of the then-popular romantic titles and authors and the trade catalogs of booksellers and lending libraries, to the police records of their activities, diaries and journals of working people, and military conscript records and ministerial literacy statistics. The result is a remarkable picture of the exchange between elite and popular culture, the interaction between ideas and their material reality, and the relationship between the literature and the history of France in the romantic period.

An interdisciplinary examination of nineteenth-century French art pertaining to religion, exile, and the nation’s demise as a world power, this study concerns the consequences for visual culture of a series of national crises—from the assault on Catholicism and the flight of émigrés during the Revolution of 1789, to the collapse of the Empire and the dashing of hope raised by the Revolution of 1830. The central claim is that imaginative response to these politically charged experiences of loss constitutes a major shaping force in French Romantic art, and that pursuit of this theme in light of parallel developments in literature and political debate reveals a pattern of disenchantment transmuted into cultural capital. Focusing on imagery that spoke to loss through visual and verbal idioms particular to France in the aftermath of the Revolution and Empire, the book illuminates canonical works by major figures such as Eugène Delacroix, Théodore Chassériau, and Camille Corot, as well as long-forgotten images freighted with significance for nineteenth-century viewers. A study in national bereavement—an urgent theme in the present moment—the book provides a new lens through which to view the coincidence of imagination and strife at the heart of French Romanticism. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, French literature, French history, French politics, and religious studies.

Introduction: Mechanical Romanticism -- DEVICES OF COSMIC UNITY -- Ampère's Experiments: Contours of a Cosmic Cubstance -- Humboldt's Instruments: Even the Tools Will Be Free -- Arago's Daguerreotype: The Labor Theory of Knowledge -- SPECTACLES OF CREATION AND METAMORPHOSIS -- The Devil's Opera: Fantastic Physiospiritualism -- Monsters, Machine-Men, Magicians: The Automaton in the Garden -- ENGINEERS OF ARTIFICIAL PARADISES -- Saint-Simonian Engines: Love and Conversions -- Leroux's Pianotype: The Organogenesis of Humanity -- Comte's Calendar: From Infinite Universe to Closed World -- Conclusion: Afterlives of the Romantic Machine.

A pioneering overview of the travel books produced by fourteen French Romantic writers - including Chateaubriand, Staël, Stendhal, Hugo, Nerval, Sand, Mérimée, Dumas, and Tristan - whose journeys ranged from Peru to Russia and from North America to North Africa and the Near East.

The French Revolution had a profound influence on perceptions of the past as well as setting the agenda for modern political culture. This book examines the ways in which the past was rediscovered, retrieved and represented in post-revolutionary France, concentrating upon the Restoration and the July Monarchy, the period which witnessed the promotion of history as a grand discourse of legitimation.