Table Of Content

M L C ODERN IBRARY HRONICLES Currently Available K A on Islam AREN RMSTRONG D B on mathematics AVID ERLINSKI R B on Nazi Germany ICHARD ESSEL T B on romanticism IM LANNING I B on modern Japan AN URUMA P C on the Reformation ATRICK OLLINSON B C on the Korean War RUCE UMINGS F F -A on the Americas ELIPE ERNÁNDEZ RMESTO L M. F on law in America AWRENCE RIEDMAN P F on World War II in Europe AUL USSELL F. G -C on the history of medicine ONZÁLEZ RUSSI P G on the Hellenistic Age ETER REEN A H on the age of Napoleon LISTAIR ORNE P J on the Renaissance AUL OHNSON F K on the age of Shakespeare RANK ERMODE J K on the city OEL OTKIN S K on the fall of Communism TEPHEN OTKIN H K on the Catholic Church ANS ÜNG M K on nonviolence ARK URLANSKY E J. L on the theory of evolution DWARD ARSON M M M on the uses and abuses of history ARGARET AC ILLAN M M on the history of Christianity ARTIN ARTY M M on the Balkans ARK AZOWER J M and A OHN ICKLETHWAIT DRIAN W on the company OOLDRIDGE A P on peoples and empires NTHONY AGDEN R P on Communism ICHARD IPES C R on prehistory OLIN ENFREW K S on California EVIN TARR M S on the German Empire ICHAEL TÜRMER G V on baseball EORGE ECSEY M V on the Middle East ILTON IORST A. N. W on London ILSON R S. W on the Holocaust OBERT ISTRICH G S. W on the American Revolution ORDON OOD Forthcoming A B on the Great Depression LAN RINKLEY J G on the Ottoman Empire ASON OODWIN B L on the Holy Land ERNARD EWIS P M on the rise of modern India ANKAJ ISHRA O S on modern China RVILLE CHELL 2011 Modern Library Edition Copyright © 2010 by Tim Blanning All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. Originally published in hardcover in the United Kingdom by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, a division of Orion Publishing Group, Ltd., in 2010. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Blanning, T.C.W. The romantic revolution: a history / Tim Blanning. p. cm. eISBN: 978-0-67960500-3 1. Romanticism—Europe. 2. Europe—Civilization—19th century. 3. Europe—Intellectual life— 19th century. I. Title. PN751.B53 2011 700.9′033—dc22 2011004269 Jacket design: Christopher Sergio Jacket painting: Rudolf Friedrich August Henneberg, The Fortune Hunter, c. 1868 (detail) (Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin/Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, N.Y./Klaus Goeken) www.modernlibrary.com v3.1 C ONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright Introduction 1 T C of A of R HE RISIS THE GE EASON ROUSSEAU ON THE ROAD TO VINCENNES ROUSSEAU’S LOVERS: FROM A MIMETIC TO AN EXPRESSIVE AESTHETIC NATURE AND NATURE’S LAWS THE CULT OF GENIUS THE ELEVATION OF THE ARTIST AND THE SACRALIZATION OF ART THE PHILISTINE PUBLIC 2 T D S M HE ARK IDE OF THE OON DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES THE WONDER-WORLD OF THE NIGHT THE SLEEP OF REASON THE OPIATE OF THE ARTISTS GREAT WITS ARE SURE TO MADNESS NEAR ALLIED ROMANTIC HEROES AND HEROINES 3 L , H M ANGUAGE ISTORY, AND YTH THE LANGUAGE OF THE PEOPLE THE HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE MEDIEVALISM LANDSCAPE AND MYTH CONSERVATIVES AND REVOLUTIONARIES C D T ONCLUSION: EATH AND RANSFIGURATION Photo Insert Notes Suggestions for Further Reading Other Books by This Author About the Author I NTRODUCTION Between the middle of the eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth centuries, Europe changed so rapidly and radically that one can reasonably speak of a watershed in world history. Those who lived through it were constantly using the word revolution to express their awareness that they were living in exciting times, as in “the American Revolution,” “the French Revolution,” or “the Industrial Revolution.” To these, historians have added several others, notably “the agrarian revolution,” “the commercial revolution,” “the communications revolution,” and “the consumer revolution.” Contemporary astonishment at the pace and variety of change was indeed acute. In 1818, for example, the German publisher Friedrich Perthes exclaimed that “in the three generations alive today our own age has combined what cannot be combined. No sense of continuity informs the tremendous contrast inherent in the years 1750, 1789 and 1815. To people alive now, they simply do not appear as a sequence of events.”1 Twenty years later, the Belgian music critic François Fétis, born in 1784, wrote that during his lifetime the world had changed in more ways than during all of previous human history.2 It was not only the material world that was affected. Those who lived to see the world of Voltaire, Reynolds, and Haydn make way for the world of Hugo, Turner, and Wagner could appreciate that a great cultural revolution had also occurred. This was “the romantic revolution,” which deserves to be accorded the same status as the other revolutions. If it had no starting point as clear-cut as the Declaration of Independence or the fall of the Bastille, contemporaries were well aware that a monumental upheaval in the cultural world was under way. Even those chary of acknowledging their own affiliation had to admit that they had been affected. Delacroix, for example, wrote: “If by romanticism one understands the free manifestation of my personal impressions, my aversion to models copied in the schools, and my loathing for academic formula, I must confess that not only am I romantic, but I was so at the age of fifteen.”3 In just two or three generations, the rule book of the classical past was torn up. In its place came not another set of rules, but a radically different approach to artistic creation that has provided the aesthetic axioms of the modern world, even if a definition of romanticism has proved elusive. In December 1923 Arthur Lovejoy, professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, gave a lecture to the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association of America titled “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms.”4 He entertained his audience by listing some of the candidates previously nominated for the title “father of romanticism,” ranging from Plato to St. Paul to Francis Bacon to Reverend Joseph Warton to Rousseau and Kant, to name just a few. After reviewing the various types of romanticism and their manifold incongruities, he concluded wearily: “Any attempt at a general appraisal even of a single chronologically determinate Romanticism—still more, of ‘Romanticism’ as a whole—is a fatuity.”5 This was a verdict repeated with varying degrees of vehemence throughout the twentieth century. In an influential book on England, for example, Marilyn Butler used the word romantic in her title but then announced on the first page that it was “anachronistic” and would not have been recognized by the poets to whom it was applied.6 Equally various have been the starting points identified. They include Piranesi’s Roman Antiquities of the Time of the First Republic of 1748 (Michel Florisoone); the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 (Kenneth Clark); Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse of 1761 (Maurice Cranston); Herder’s journey to France in 1769 (Rüdiger Safranski); Blake’s Songs of Innocence of 1789 (Maurice Bowra); and Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck’s Heartfelt Effusions of an Art-Loving Monk of 1797 (Hans- Joachim Schoeps).7 Other popular runners are Rousseau’s conversion experience on the road to Vincennes in 1749; Horace Walpole’s nightmare that led to the writing of his Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto in 1764; and Goethe’s enthusiastic response to Strasbourg Cathedral in 1770. Much scholarly energy has also been devoted to establishing when the

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From the preeminent historian of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries comes a superb, concise account of a cultural upheaval that still shapes sensibilities today. Long overshadowed by the contemporaneous American, French, and Industrial revolutions, the Romantic Revolution finally rece