After the downfall of Napoleon what intellectual ideals remained in France? With what equipment of thoughts and moral forces did she set out at the beginning of this new epoch? With no equipment that was at all adequate for solving the staggering problems set for her to solve. Just think of them! She had to deal with monarchy and a state church all over again. She had to decide between the spirit of the old règime and the spirit of '89. There was a contradiction in her past, and she had to turn her back on one or the other fascinating epoch in her history – either on Louis Quatorze and the grand siècle with all its glory of treasured acquirement, its shining names, its illustrious and venerable institutions, or on the less attractive men and measures and purposes of the Revolution; and these latter, though apparently less worthy of proud contemplation, impressed the conscience and the political sense as being the things fullest of life for the dawning future. The most loyal conservative must have felt an awkward consciousness that the things he hated would in the end prevail.
Such, then, was the intellectual condition of France in 1815 – uncertainty and division and dearth of ideals and purposes, in the face of a future full of perplexing problems. But she was strangely hopeful. She has never been otherwise. The French are the most elastic people in Europe, and no defeat has ever discouraged them. And she was in love with herself as much as ever, and as fully convinced of her right to the leading place among all nations. Indeed it did not occur to her that she had ever surrendered that right.
What have been the principal lines of movement in French literature since 1815? In order to answer this question we must not merely follow the traces of political history and say that literature changed with the government. Such a solution would be facile, but would do violence to the facts. The matter is verv indeterminate, and the best way to bring it into a clear arrangement is to ask ourselves who were the influential writers of any given period and what did they stand for. In 1815 there were three men prominent in French letters and life: Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and Lamennais. Victor Hugo was born in 1802, and by 1817 he had become a literary man, not by intention merely, but by writing. He came upon the scene, therefore, when these three men were at the height of their activity; for Chateaubriand was born in 1768, Lamartine in 1790, and Lamennais in 1782; and they, appreciating the need of leadership in France under the newly restored monarchy, had thrown themselves enthusiastically into the work of instructing the people. Let us inquire who they were and what was the nature of their activity; or, in other words, what was the first public literary atmosphere that surrounded Victor Hugo.
Chateaubriand at the age of seventeen was a captain of cavalry under Louis XVI. When the Revolution broke out he came to America on a royal commission to find the northwest passage. He brought letters of introduction to the chief personages of the new world, and was much impressed with the simple and gracious reception given him by Washington, and with his unpretentious mode of life. After the failure of his geographical researches, the young officer plunged into the forest and started alone, on foot, for the Southwest, his head full of romantic ideas about the beauty of primitive civilization, or absence of civilization, put there no doubt by Jean Jacques Rousseau, of whom he was an ardent admirer and a disciple. We are told that one evening in an Indian wigwam he discovered a torn page of an English newspaper and read of the ravages of the Revolution and the flight and arrest of Louis XVI. His loyalty was awakened, and after two years of sentimental wanderings in the forests of the Mississippi valley he returned to France and enlisted with the Royalists. They received him with suspicion, and even after his recovery, in exile, from a severe wound received in their cause, they refused him fellowship. He lived in London and Belgium and the island of Jersey, composing his first work, an «Essai sur les Révolutions», 1797, in which his ideas, both of politics and of religion, are still in a line with those of Rousseau. Shortly after its publication some inward experience of the reality of life and its dependence upon God gave him an impulsion in a new direction, and he began his great apology for the Christian faith, entitled «Le Génie du Christianisme», 1802, of which «Atala» and «René» are only episodes. At this time Napoleon was re-establishing order, and as he considered religion necessary to political security, and was just then courting the Pope, he showered favors upon the young author, to the latter's manifest harm, for they made him fickle and ambitious, and turned his natural sentimentality into the most repulsive egoism. His masterpiece was «Les Martyrs», a sort of Christian epic, which appeared in 1809; and thereafter he was regarded as the leader in a conservative reaction back to Rome and back to royalty.
Alphonse de Lamartine was a poet of greater significance, though in his early years he stood in a secondary place, owing to Chateaubriand's influence with the clerical and royalist party, and indeed with all those who longed for peace and a revival of religious faith in France. His early life was as interesting as Chateaubriand's, and, like his, its years of transition from boyhood to active manhood were spent in foreign lands. His poetry is characterized by a certain softness and sweetness peculiar to itself, reminding one somewhat of English Cowper. It is contemplative and religious; but that does not say all, for its range is wide, and Wordsworth has demonstrated to us what a world of thought and fancy there may be in meditative poetry. The chief of his works are: the volume entitled «Les Meditations», which contains that fine poem «Le Lac»; «Les Harmonies»; «Jocelyn»; «La Chute d'un Ange»; «Graziella»; «Voyage en Orient», and «L'Histoire des Girondins». Lamartine succeeded in being a guide to his people in so far as he attracted them by his beautiful verse to a more serious contemplation of themselves and the world, to a renewed interest in true religion, to an appreciation of the fact that Christianity was still alive and capable of inspiring enthusiasm. The feeling had prevailed in France that vital Christianity was incompatible with the cultivation of the fine arts. Lamartine proved this to be untrue. He failed, however, when it came to writing history or engaging in politics, because, as Lowell long ago perceived, and as people now generally acknowledge, Lamartine was a sentimentalist, that is, a man who cultivated fine sentiments because they were beautiful and not because they were right, and who performed fine actions to be seen of men; in other words, an egoist, an artist spoiled by artificiality. Apart, however, from all question of the intrinsic merit of his work, his tendency was, like that of Chateaubriand, in the direction of recognizing religion and looking back to monarchical rather than republican France for inspiration and example.
Félicité de Lamennais lived a life whose details belong as much to the history of philosophy, or to ecclesiastical history, as to that of belles-lettres. First a priest, and the most ardent Catholic in France, he afterward turned against Rome and led a movement towards religious independence. There are few more interesting figures, chiefly because great religious leaders have been so rare in modern France. At the time when Victor Hugo was beginning to write, Lamennais was ardently engaged in an effort to establish the supremacy of Rome, not only over private conscience, but over political institutions, and although from his subsequent actions he is known to the world as a liberal and a heretic, yet at that time, having published in 1817 his «Essai sur l'Indifférence en Matière de Religion», he was the most jealous conservative and the most fiery churchman in France.
Thus a superficial glance has sufficed to show that the first movement which stirred literary France after 1815 was a reaction in favor of monarchy and Rome; that its champions were Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and Lamennais; that its effort was mainly through poetry; that its honor was its high political and moral purity; that its defect was its sentimentality; that its ultimate inefficacy was due to its running counter to the tendency of the age. Into this movement Victor Hugo inevitably fell; by it he was for a long time carried;