The Origins of Romanticism: From Crisis of the Enlightenment to the Birth of a Movement

“Savage and Rousseau alike appealed to the heart against the head.” — Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, 1965

The Romantic movement did not appear suddenly. It emerged from a long series of crises in European intellectual life — crises of faith, crises of political order, crises of artistic form — that had been building for at least a century before the term “Romantic” was ever used. This page traces the origins of Romanticism from its eighteenth-century roots through the political earthquakes of the 1789–1815 era to the emergence of Romanticism as a self-conscious movement around 1800.

The Eighteenth-Century Background

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the intellectual culture of Europe was dominated by the legacy of the Enlightenment: the new science of Newton, the political philosophy of Locke, the satirical and philosophical criticism of the French philosophes, and the polite Neoclassical literature that was their natural aesthetic expression. The world of reason, order, and universal rules was the world into which the Romantics were born — and it was against that world that they rebelled.

The first major figure to articulate this rebellion was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His novel Julie, or the New Heloise (1761), his educational treatise Émile (1762), and his political work The Social Contract (1762) all argued, in different ways, that the modern individual had been corrupted by civilization and that the path to authentic human life lay in the recovery of feeling, nature, and the moral voice of the heart. Rousseau is often called the “father of Romanticism” because of the enormous influence he had on the next generation of writers across Europe.

German Sturm und Drang

In the German-speaking lands, the revolt against Neoclassicism took an especially intense form in the 1760s and 1770s, in the movement known as Sturm und Drang — “Storm and Stress.” A group of young writers, including the young Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Gottfried Herder, Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, Friedrich Maximilian Klinger, and Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg, produced plays, novels, and poems of astonishing emotional intensity. The Sturm und Drang writers filled their works with rebellious heroes, raw emotion, and a deep reverence for nature, folk culture, and the German medieval past.

The breakthrough work of the movement was Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), the story of a sensitive young artist destroyed by unrequited love. Werther became an international sensation — translated into every major European language — and it set the template for the Romantic literary hero. The Sturm und Drang writers also produced an important body of theoretical writing, including Herder’s Fragments on Recent German Literature (1766–67) and his Critical Forests (1769), which laid the foundations of the new Romantic aesthetic.

The “Storming of the Bastille”

The decisive political event in the origins of Romanticism was the French Revolution of 1789. For a brief, intoxicating moment, the rational ideals of the Enlightenment seemed about to be realized in a new society founded on liberty, equality, and fraternity. The early Romantics — Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Hölderlin, and the young German Romantics — initially greeted the Revolution with revolutionary enthusiasm. Wordsworth, in The Prelude, recalled how “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven.”

The Revolution, however, quickly descended into the Reign of Terror, the Thermidorian reaction, the rise of Napoleon, and a quarter-century of European war. The failure of political revolution turned many Romantic thinkers away from politics and toward the inner world of imagination, where freedom could still be won. The figure of the Romantic hero — solitary, defiant, often defeated — emerged in part from this disillusionment.

The Industrial Revolution

At the same time, the steady march of industrialization was transforming the landscape of Britain, France, and Germany. Cities swelled with displaced peasants, factories darkened the skies, and ancient rural ways of life disappeared. The Romantics responded with a renewed reverence for nature, pre-industrial traditions, folk culture, and the simple life. William Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills,” Wordsworth’s lament for the poor and the dispossessed in The Prelude, and Mary Shelley’s dark vision of scientific overreach in Frankenstein all expressed, in different ways, this Romantic protest against the disenchantment of the modern world.

The Napoleonic Era and After

Napoleon’s conquest of much of Europe between 1799 and 1812 brought the French Revolution’s ideas to every corner of the continent, even as it destroyed the political hopes of many early Romantics. The wars of liberation against Napoleon — the Peninsular War in Spain, the Russian campaign of 1812, the wars of liberation in Germany and Italy in 1813–15 — fed the new spirit of romantic nationalism and gave Romantic writers an urgent political subject. The Congress of Vienna (1815) tried to restore the old European order, but the ideas of the Revolution — and the Romantic ideas that had grown up with them — could not be undone.

The Self-Consciousness of Romanticism

By the 1790s, the new ideas had become self-conscious as a movement. The German term Romantik appears in literary criticism as early as 1798, when Friedrich Schlegel used it in a review of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. The English term “romantic” — long used in a more general sense — began to acquire its modern meaning around the same time. The two great founding documents of English Romantic poetry — the 1798 Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge and the 1800 preface to its second edition — were published in these years.

By the time of Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815, Romanticism had become the dominant cultural movement of the Western world, and the nineteenth century would be shaped, in every country and in every art, by the questions it had raised.

Further Reading

• Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Harvard, 1979) — for the long political aftermath of the 1789–1815 generation, with useful context for the Romantic response.
• Robert Rosen, Romanticism and the Rejection of Rationalism (Continuum, 2003) — a short, useful account of the philosophical prehistory.
• The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on “Kant” and “Rousseau” for the philosophical background.

Related Pages

• Characteristics of Romanticism
• The Romantic Hero
• Romanticism vs. the Enlightenment
• French Revolution Influence
• When Did Romanticism Begin
• Romanticism by Country
• Romantic Literature
• The Legacy of Romanticism