Sentimental Education (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Free

Romanticism (a word borrowed from the German that initially designated a literature inspired by chivalric times) had dominated the scene, first in its aristocratic, nostalgic, and Catholic incarnation, best represented by François de Chateaubriand and Alfred de Vigny, and then with a liberal and humanitarian leaning, exemplified by the bourgeois Victor Hugo and George Sand and the historian Jules Michelet. In 1848, faithful to their ideas, a large number of the Romantic writers took to the streets, or at least to their pens. The ensuing ferocious repression contributed to their withdrawal into the ivory tower of “Art for Art’s Sake,” while Realism, which was to flourish in the second half of the century with the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Émile Zola, and Guy de Maupassant, started to assert itself.
    A reaction against Old Regime Classicism, Romanticism celebrated nature in its picturesque or sublime aspects; exalted the sensibility, passions, and genius of the ego; explored history as the struggle of major forces incarnated by heroes and led by Providence; and, in its later tendency, glorified “the people” and “woman” as the regenerating forces of humanity. Romanticism favored imagination and cultivated poetry, drama, and even the epic. Realism retrieved the inheritance of Enlightenment—rationality, materialism, anticlericalism, and a critical spirit—but gave it a more pessimistic spin. After 1848 the dominant classes seemed to have lost the ascendant and dynamic spirit of the decades following the Great Revolution, and the individual lost the confidence he had derived from the recognition of his new rights and his new dignity. Linked to the consolidation of capitalism, of urbanism, and of middle-class values, Realism held a more sober conception of the ego and led to a cynical reevaluation of history; it explored the people as repulsive masses, and woman as a biological and psychological case. To do so, Realism chose the novel, a form it was to bring to perfection.
    Midway between the noble genres of tragedy, poetry, and epic, and low genres like farce, satire, and pamphlet, the novel proved the most appropriate tool to describe the predicaments of the class situated between the nobility and the people, the bourgeoisie. Just as the bourgeoisie depends on private property, private interests, and domesticity to ensure the proper functioning of public life, the novel seeks, by concentrating on private matters, to illuminate the public sphere. Devoid of any aristocratic legitimacy, the novel is free of the canons that govern high literature as well as of the archetypes that constrain popular literature, and it has the same diversity and openness as the bourgeoisie. A genre still considered minor when first taken up by Honoré de Balzac, and primarily conceived as the reading matter of women and persons of leisure, the novel was to become—thanks to technological improvements in the printing process, the serialization of novels in periodicals, and increased literacy and the broadening of readership—the dominant form in Zola’s time.
    Under the July Monarchy, the precursors of Realism, Stendhal and Balzac, were still suffused with Romanticism. Balzac, who gave himself the mission of representing, explaining, and even modifying contemporary history, expressed the post-revolutionary rapport between the ego, a society in mutation, and the universe at large in terms of action; whether successful or not, his characters, impressed by the Napoleonic myth, take action and try to change the world while advancing their careers or their destinies. Similarly, Stendhal’s heroes, male or female, are defined by their energy. While highly dramatic, as the title of Balzac’s series, La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy), suggests, Stendhal’s and Balzac’s novels also lay claim to the seriousness of the emergent social sciences, and their authors do not refrain from offering an authoritative or challenging