The Influence of the French Revolution on Romanticism
“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven.” — Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805 version), Book X, on 1789
The French Revolution of 1789 was the single most important political event in the rise of Romanticism. The Revolution provided the new movement with its founding political trauma, its great historical backdrop, and many of its central themes: freedom, the nation, the people, the hero, the betrayal of ideals, the limits of political reform, and the role of the artist in times of upheaval. The relationship between the Revolution and Romanticism is one of the most important and most contested topics in the cultural history of the modern West.
The Early Romantic Reception
The early Romantics — Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hölderlin, the young German Romantics — initially greeted the French Revolution with revolutionary enthusiasm. They saw the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, and the declaration of the new rights of man and citizen, as the beginning of a new era in human history. The early Wordsworth, in the great autobiographical passages of The Prelude (1850), recalled how “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven.” The early Coleridge wrote the revolutionary drama The Fall of Robespierre (1794) and contributed to the radical press. Blake’s early prophetic books, with their attack on the established political and religious order, are saturated with revolutionary hope.
The Disillusionment
By the mid-1790s, the early Romantic enthusiasm for the Revolution had begun to sour. The execution of Louis XVI in January 1793, the declaration of war on Britain and the other European powers, the Reign of Terror, the rise of Napoleon — all of these gave the lie to the early hopes. The early Romantics, one by one, turned away from political revolution and toward the inner world of imagination, where freedom could still be won.
Wordsworth’s political disillusionment is one of the great tragic arcs of Romantic biography. The early political poems — the “Salisbury Plain” poems, the Guilt and Sorrow poems, and especially the great autobiographical passages of The Prelude — give way, in the later work, to a more conservative, “natural piety” of rural England. Coleridge, who had flirted with Unitarianism and political radicalism, became a conservative and an establishment figure in the Church of England.
The Second-Generation Romantics
The second generation of English Romantics — Byron, Shelley, and Keats — inherited the early Romantic radicalism and gave it a new intensity. They were radical in their politics, their religion, their sexuality, and their art. The page on Poetry and Revolution treats this dimension of their work in more detail.
On the European continent, the French Revolution and its aftermath gave rise to the major political movements of the nineteenth century: Bonapartism, the Bourbon Restoration, the July Monarchy, the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, the Napoleonic Wars, the rise of the nation-state, the unification of Italy and Germany, the great national-liberation movements of the nineteenth century. All of these were, in important ways, the children of the Revolution.
The Long Influence
The French Revolution shaped Romanticism, and Romanticism shaped the political imagination of the modern West. The Romantic ideas about the nation, the people, freedom, the heroic individual, the artist’s role in society, the relation of the individual to the state, the meaning of history — all of these have their roots in the response to the Revolution. The major political movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — liberalism, nationalism, socialism, anarchism, fascism, the various national-liberation movements, the great anti-colonial struggles of the twentieth century — all drew, in different ways, on the Romantic legacy of the French Revolution.
Further Reading
- David Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire (Princeton, 1954; revised Dover, 1991) — the standard account of Blake as the most politically radical of the early English Romantics.
- Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (Oxford, 1981) — the best short account of the political fortunes of the Romantic generation.
- Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962) — the great left-wing historian’s account of the political context.