TERM PAPER CC11

Romanticism in Europe
(18th-19th Century)

Submitted by Barnali Ray

3rd Year, Semester 5
History Department
Loreto College, Kolkata

DATE: 04-01-2022

ROLL NUMBER: 192032-11-0096

REGISTRATION NUMBER: 032-1211-0096-19
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 ABSTRACT

Romanticism was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe
toward the end of the 18th century and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate
period from 1800 to 1850. Partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, it was also a revolt
against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction
against the scientific rationalization of nature. It was embodied most strongly in the visual
arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography, education and the
natural sciences. Its effect on politics was considerable and complex; while for much of the
peak Romantic period it was associated with liberalism and radicalism, in the long term its
effect on the growth of nationalism was probably more significant.

In this paper we will explore Romanticism in various aspects such as in terms of literature,
visual art and music. In the course of the paper, we will also analyse how romanticism
evolved from early 18th century to 19th century along with several movements during the age
of Revolutionary Europe.

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 INTRODUCTION

Romanticism emerged as one of the most influential and powerful current across much of
Europe from late 18th through the mid-19th century. Romanticism emphasised imagination
and emotion personal development, which left profound impact on the literary, artistic and
musical movements of the age. Romantic artists and poets generally criticised the
glorification of reason and science and stressed on emotions, intuition and mystical feelings.
Their effort was to create shared collective heritage, a common cultural past, as the basis of
nation. In the political aspect, romantic temperament manifested itself in strikingly different
ways in diverse political ideologies like conservatism and nationalism.

According to Birdsall S. Viault, romanticism was a complex and diverse phenomenon,

romantic thinkers, writers, artists, and composers were united in reaction against what they
regarded as the Enlightenment’s excessive emphasis on the supremacy of reason in human
affairs1. Instead, the romantics emphasized feelings and emotions, faith and intuition, and
imagination and spontaneity. Many of the romantics rejected the Enlightenment’s optimistic
belief in the perfectibility of human beings and human society, although they continued to
emphasize the importance and value of the individual and to promote individual freedom.

In their literary and artistic activity, the romantics rebelled against the formulism of
eighteenth-century classicism and the rigid rules that classicism applied to the creative
process. The romantics also manifested a reverence for the past and an awareness of the
emotional ties which joined the present with the past and gave a sense of order and stability
to society and its institutions. In particular, many romantics had a fascination for the culture
of the Middle Ages, an age of faith, which stood in contrast to the eighteenth-century age of
reason.

While it has been observed that Romantic tendencies mostly focussed on emotions against
the cold rationalism of Enlightenment. However, according to Albert S. Lindemann, in terms
of political ideology, matters were less clear.

On the one hand, Burke’s veneration of tradition was Romantic in

tendency, but, on the other, romanticism and liberalism were natural allies in
their yearning for liberation (and especially “romantic” were liberty’s assumed

1
Birdsall S. Viault, “Romanticism”, Modern European History, USA, McGraw Hill, Inc.,1989, Pg.No.-219.
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 links to creativity and spontaneity). Yet the yearnings for freedom of many
liberals were distinct from those of most socialists; activists drawn into the
revolutionary mystique were different types from those liberals who looked to
respectability, a stable society of property, family, and free enterprise – a
decidedly circumscribed version of freedom2.

Further complicating the issue, some conservatives glorified the “romantic” chivalry of the
Middle Ages or the selfless and heroic virtues of the Crusaders. Many Romantics were drawn
to Napoleon; other Romantics saw him as Satan’s spawn. Feminism was linked with the
rationalist left, but some of its theorists tended to elevate characteristically feminine emotions
as superior to male rationality. Thus, the essence of Romanticism varies according to various
interpretations and the personality of the individuals.

Early Romanticism

To John Merriman, romanticism first contributed to the conservative revival3. After initially
being intrigued by the French Revolution’s apparent victory over the strictures of the Old
Regime, the early romantic writers had become disillusioned by its violent turn. Coleridge
had been among the first to sing the praises of the Revolution, but turned against it when
French armies began pouring across the frontiers more as conquerors than as liberators.

Early Romantic writers tend to reject rational Enlightenment as they were

people of religious faith. For instance, “I wept and I believed,” wrote the French writer
Frangois-Rene de Chateaubriand (1768-1848), relating his re-conversion to Catholicism
after the turmoil of the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. Disillusionment with the French
Revolution helped German romantic writers discover in nationalism a means of individual
fulfilment. Nationalism, too, marked a reaction against Enlightenment rational tradition. This
was how the canons of Romanticism were first formulated in Germany in the end of the 18th
century. As early as 1770 and 1780 representatives of Sturm und Drang, a movement both
literary and political, meaning literally ‘storm and stress’, were rebelling against the
Enlightenment and its values. Johann Gottfried von Herder, the leader of this movement,

2
Albert S. Lindemann, “The seedtime of Ideology: A century of questions”, A History of Modern Europe: From
1815 to the present, UK, A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Publication,2013, pp-69-70.
3
John Merriman, “Liberal Challenges to Restoration Europe”, A History of Modern Europe: From Renaissance
to the Present, USA, W. W. Norton & Company,3rd edition,2010, Pg No.-582.

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argued that argued that it was through the passionate identification with the nation that the
individual reached his or her highest stage of development. All Germans would be bound
together by an awareness of and identity in a common history, culture, and above all,
language as part of a Volk, or living and evolving “national community.” Herder thus helped
invent the idea of a national culture. At the same time as John Merriman argues, his
insistence on the existence of different racial types, shaped by climate, history, and cultural
traditions, would influence the evolution of racism later in the century4. In Central; and
Eastern Europe, which was constituted in many areas by a patchwork of nationalities,
romanticism celebrated the historical authenticity of the cultural traditions and languages of
ethnic peoples. From there it would be a short step to argue that nationalities should have
their own independent state.

Romantic literature and painting

Romantic writers of early Romanticism were conservative and religious temperament. For
instance, Sir Walter Scott in Britain revived, in his great series of Waverley novels, an
interest in the Middle Ages and so in traditionalism, and was an ardent Tory. David
Thompson further added that his novels were widely read in Europe, and the tsar Nicholas I
of Russia read them aloud to his Prussian wife5. The Lake poets, William Wordsworth,
Robert Southey, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, had all in their day been enthusiastic in
support of the French Revolution; by 1815 they were all supporters of conservatism,
traditionalism, and religion. French novelist and poet, Rene Chateaubriand was a
conservative writer. He supported the restoration of the Boyirbons; he represented Louis
XVIII at the Congress of Verona, and even served as minister of foreign affairs. His Genie du
Christianisme of 1802 was a glorification of ultramontane Roman Catholicism. His royalism
was tempered by a desire for constitutional monarchy, and under Charles X of France he
joined the opposition to the absolutist policies of that monarch. But he remained ultramontane
in belief, and never became republican. His influence on French literature was almost
supreme in his generation, and it was in general a conservative influence, says David

4
John Merriman, “Liberal Challenges to Restoration Europe”, A History of Modern Europe: From Renaissance
to the Present, USA, W. W. Norton & Company,3rd edition,2010, Pg No.-582-583.

5
David Thompson, “The Age of Revolution, 1815-1850”, Europe Since Napoleon, London. Lowe and Brydone
(Printers) Ltd.,1923, Pg. No.-121.
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Thompson6. In Germany, as says Léon Rosenthal, Friedrich von Schiller and Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe were amongst the followers of Sturm und Drang, who made a religion
of individualism and nature as advocated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the middle of the
eighteenth century7. Further they followed the spiritual and political lines of English Lake
Poets. They launched severe attack on the rationalism and enlightenment of the 18th century
and defended authoritarian and paternalist government and romanticised the hierarchical
society of the Middle Ages.
Romantic painters sought to convey feeling through the depiction of the
helplessness of the individual confronted by the power of nature—gathering storms, surging
seas, and immense, dark forests, portrayed with deep, rich colours as said by John Merriman8.
In France, Theodore Gericault (1791-1824) reached the public eye with his Officer of the
Chasseurs Commanding a Charge (1812), an almost worshipful painting of a Napoleonic
officer in the heat of battle. Gericault became obsessed with shipwrecks, a subject that
reflected his volatile personality. He sought out real-life survivors of such tragedies in order
to paint his powerful The Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819), depicting a shipwreck off the
West African coast.
Despite the extent to which all these romantic writers of the decade after 1815
shared in the conservative and clericalist trends of the times, the romantic movement as a
whole corroded the cosmopolitan and non-nationalist outlook on which absolutism had
prospered. Even when their works did not directly spread liberal ideas, the romantic writers
did promote nationalist sentiments. As the Germany of Goethe, Novalis, and Schlegel
replaced France as the focus of cultural and intellectual interests, so emphasis shifted to pride
in nationalism and Volksgeist, the particular genius of a people, and away from rationalism
and cosmopolitanism. The romantic movement, by its very traditionalism, it appealed to
sentiments of separatism: it reminded men of all that was special, individual, and personal.
By its emphasis on creative and 'original genius, it made human personality seem more
important than society and implicitly condemned restrictions on individual freedom of
expression; and in its search for the creative genius of an age or of a people it nourished

6
David Thompson, “The Age of Revolution, 1815-1850”, Europe Since Napoleon, London. Lowe and Brydone
(Printers) Ltd.,1923, Pg. No.-121.

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Léon Rosenthal, Translated by Bérengère Mauduit “The Precursors of Romanticism”, Romanticism, USA,
Parsktone Press International, Pg. No- 7.
8
John Merriman, “Liberal Challenges to Restoration Europe”, A History of Modern Europe: From Renaissance
to the Present, USA, W. W. Norton & Company,3rd edition,2010, Pg No.-583.
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belief in the supreme value of popular traditions and national development. It made it easy to
abandon rationalism for nationalism.
The Romantic temperament underwent a change with the advent of the
younger generations of romantic artists and writers who took the stage after about 1820 had
more affinities with liberalism and democracy than with conservatism. For a time, the
greatest figures in European romanticism were again French and English rather than German.
Victor Hugo, Alphonse de Lamartine, Prosper Merimee, Honors de Balzac, Percy
Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and Lord Byron began to dominate the scene. This new
generation saw romanticism as the literature of emancipation, and were not averse to allying
their artistic revolt with political revolution.
Byron and Shelley were ardent advocates of political liberty, and Byron
died in Greece, where he had gone to help the Greek fight for independence. Perhaps the
most popular of England’s romantic poets, Byron is best known for Childe Haro1d”s
Pilgrimage (1812- 1818), The Prisoner of Chillon (1816)’ and his masterpiece, Don Juan
(1819-1824).
One of Shelley’s most important works, Prometheus Unbound (1820), was inspired
by Prometheus Bound, by the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus. In Shelley’s poem,
Prometheus, who represents what is good in life, is locked in struggle with Jupiter, the
symbol of tyranny and evil. Keats wrote some of the most beautiful romantic poetry in the
English language, including “The Eve of St. Agnes,” the “Ode to a Nightingale,” and the
“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” all published in 1820.
In France, Balzac, Dumas, and Hugo emerged as major figures in
romantic literature. Balzac’s early novels reflected his interest in the Middle Ages, but he
soon turned his attention to his own time, writing in a more realistic fashion about the French
bourgeoisie. His almost one hundred novels and stories, known collectively as The Human
Comedy, present a broad analysis of the human character. Dumas wrote exciting romantic
tales, such as The Three Musketeers (1844) and The Count of Monte Cristo (1845), while
Hugo is known for his novel Notre Dame de Paris (183 l), set in the late Middle Ages in the
time of King Louis XI. Hugo later turned to realism, writing Les Miserables (1862), a
powerful story of the suffering human masses.
In Russia the poet and dramatist, Alexander Pushkin, wrote his two greatest works, Boris
Godunov and Eugeti Onegin, in the 1820’s; and in Poland the young liberal Adam
Mickiewicz produced his great epic of the Polish nation, Conrad Wallenrod, in 1828. Both

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showed the impact of Byronic themes and spirit. Among the Austrian subjects of the
Balkans appeared Czech, Magyar, and Serbian poets to revive popular interest in the folk
legends and wistful memories of past glories. In the Scandinavian lands collections were
made of legends and folk songs.
According to David Thompson, the strongest link between the revolutionaries and the
romantic movement was the movement of Philhellenism, formed by all throughout the
continent who sympathized with the long Homeric struggle of the Greeks against their
Turkish rulers9. Several romantic writers and artists like Chateaubriand and Hugo in France,
above all Shelley and Byron in England, sponsored the cause. “We are all Greeks,”
exclaimed Shelley, 'and the young Lord Byron, dying in Greece in 1824, became the symbol
of the new spirit. Philhellenism created a new current of European opinion-a great flow of
opinion in favour of nationalism and liberalism—running counter to the policies and practices
of most existing governments. It won its greatest triumph when it compelled the governments
of Britain, France, and Russia to intervene on behalf of the Greeks in 1827.

Romantic Painting and Music

During the first years of the nineteenth century, classicism continued to dominate European
painting. Jacques-Louis David (1748- 1825), who had gained prominence during the era of
the French Revolution and Napoleon, remained the foremost classical painter. Gradually,
however, romanticism began to take hold among Europe’s artists.

The French painter Delacroix used colour and light to achieve dramatic effects.
His flamboyant paintings manifested his rejection of classicism’s insistence on restraint and
order. In The Massacre of Scio, Delacroix depicted Turkish violence during the Greek war
for independence, while in Liberty Leading the People, he painted a romantic celebration of
the French revolution of 1830.

The romantic artists also focussed on Landscape paintings. For instance.in France, Camille
Corot (1796-1875) and other members of the Barbizon school, which flourished from about
1830 to 1870, painted romantic landscapes.

English romantic artists, including John Constable (1776-1837) and J. M. W.

Turner (1775-1851) also became famous for their landscapes. Besides, the Spanish artist

9
David Thompson, “The Age of Revolution, 1815-1850”, Europe Since Napoleon, London. Lowe and Brydone
(Printers) Ltd.,1923, pp- 122-123.

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Goya gained recognition both for his revealing portraits of the decadent Spanish Bourbons
and for his powerful portrayals of the brutal French repression of the Spanish rebels against
Napoleon in 1808. Paintings such as The Third of May 1808 stand as powerful
condemnations of war’s cruelty.

Furthermore, the romantics as says John Merriman, also believed that music, like painting,
was poetry capable of releasing torrents of emotion in listeners.

…………… Whereas romantic literature sought and achieved a

sharp break with the rules of classical literature, romantic musical
compositions built on the traditions of the eighteenth-century masters, helping
the public rediscover them10.

Historians of music claims that the 18th was the period of classism in music and romanticism
dominated the world of music in the 19th century. But there remained a continuity between
the two periods, and the classical forms, developed by Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven- the sonata, the string quarter and the symphony-
continued even in the Romantic Era. The composition of Beethoven (1770-1827) formed a
bridge between classical and romantic periods. Beethoven excelled in evoking an emotional
response, which was key to his romantic approach to music.

Following Beethoven, Germany produced a host of romantic composers. Car1

Maria von Weber (1786-1826), a pianist and composer, is recognized as the creator of the
German romantic opera. Of his ten operas, Der Freischutz (1821) and Oberon (1826) are the
best known. Franz Schubert (1797-1828) joined piano and voice in over 600 Lieder (poems
set to music). Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) composed works for piano and violin, as well
as chamber music and choral music. Of his five symphonies, the best known are the Scottish
(1830-1842), the Italian (1833), and the Reformation (1830-1832). Robert Schumann
(1810-1856) composed a wide variety of romantic music, including symphonies and piano
concertos.

German romantic music reached its culmination in the operas of Wagner, an ardent
German nationalist who found inspiration in the epics of the Germanic past. The four operas
known collectively as The Ring of the Nibelung-Das Rheingold, Die Walkiire (“The

10
John Merriman, “Liberal Challenges to Restoration Europe”, A History of Modern Europe: From Renaissance
to the Present, USA, W. W. Norton & Company,3rd edition,2010, Pg No.-584.

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Valkyries”), Siegfried, and Gotterdammerung (“The Twilight of the Gods”)-had their first
performance in Bayreuth in 1876.

Influences of Folk Music

Franz Liszt (18 1 1-1886) was regarded by his contemporaries as Europe’s greatest concert
pianist. He composed a host of works for the piano, many of them inspired by the folk music
of his native Hungary. Traditional folk music also inspired the compositions of Mikhail
Glinka (1804-1857) and Frederic Chopin (1810-1849). The first of the Russian nationalist
school of composers, Glinka is best known for two operas, A Life for the Tsar (1836) and
Russlan and Ludrnilla (1842). The latter was based on a poem by Pushkin. A Polish
composer, Chopin wrote graceful works for the piano, including the concertos in E minor
(1833) and F minor (1 836).

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 CONCLUSION

Thus, Romanticism or Romantic Movement against the extreme rationalism of the

Enlightenment had an enduring impact on European culture. The romantics' love of nature
and their willingness to break the bonds of artistic convention helped give birth to the
movement of impressionism in painting later in the nineteenth century. Their emphasis on
national traditions encouraged the growth of nationalism, the most powerful ideology to
develop in Europe during the nineteenth century.

Revival and reinterpretation of ancient myths, customs and traditions by Romantic

poets and painters helped to distinguish their indigenous cultures from those of the dominant
nations and crystallise the mythography of Romantic nationalism. Patriotism, nationalism,
revolution and armed struggle for independence also became popular themes in the arts of
this period such as the Greek War for Independence.

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 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lindemann. Albert S, A History of Modern Europe: From 1815 to the present,

UK, A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Publication,2013.

Merriman. John, A History of Modern Europe: From Renaissance to the Present,

USA, W. W. Norton & Company,3rd edition,2010.

Rosenthal. Léon,Translated by Bérengère Mauduit , Romanticism, USA,

Parsktone Press International.

Thompson. David, Europe Since Napoleon, London. Lowe and Brydone

(Printers) Ltd.,1923.

Viault. Birdsall S, Modern European History, USA, McGraw Hill, Inc.,1989.

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