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De Lamartine, Alphonse - A00026
"To love for the sake of being loved is human, but to love for the sake of loving is angelic."
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Alphonse de Lamartine (b. October 21, 1790, Mâcon, France — d. February 28, 1869, Paris, France) was a French poet, historian, and statesman who achieved renown for his lyrics in Méditations poétiques (1820), which established him as one of the key figures in the Romantic movement in French literature. In 1847 his Histoire des Girondins became widely popular, and he rose to considerable political prominence in early 1848, when he led the Second Republic for a short time.
Early life and Méditations poétiques
His father, an aristocrat, was imprisoned during the culminating phase of the French Revolution known as the Reign of Terror but was fortunate enough to escape the guillotine. Lamartine was educated at the college at Belley, which was maintained by the Jesuits though they were suppressed in France at this time.
Lamartine had wanted to enter the army or the diplomatic corps, but, because France was ruled by Napoleon, whom his faithful royalist parents regarded as the usurper, they would not allow him to serve. Thus, he remained idle until the Bourbon monarchy was restored in 1814, when he served in Louis XVIII’s bodyguard. The following year, however, Napoleon returned from exile and attempted to rebuild his empire during the Hundred Days. Lamartine emigrated to Switzerland. After Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo and the second Bourbon Restoration, he abandoned the military profession.
Attracted to literature, he wrote some tragedies in verse and a few elegies. By this time his health was not good, and he left for the spa of Aix-les-Bains, where, in October of 1816, on the shore of Lake Bourget, he met the brilliant but desperately ill Julie Charles. Early in 1812 Lamartine had fallen deeply in love with a young working girl named Antoniella. In 1815 he had learned of her death, and later he was to recast her as Graziella in his prose “anecdote” of that name. He now became passionately attached to Charles, who, because of her vast connections in Paris, was able to help him find a position. After her death in December 1817, Lamartine, who had already dedicated many strophes to her (notably “Le Lac”), devoted new verses to her memory (particularly “Le Crucifix”).
In 1820 Lamartine married Maria Ann Birch, a young Englishwoman connected by marriage to the Churchills, and he finally joined the diplomatic corps, as secretary to the French embassy at Naples. That same year he published his first collection of poetry, Méditations poétiques, which became immensely successful because of its new romantic tone and sincerity of feeling. It brought to French poetry a new music; the themes were at the same time intimate and religious. If the vocabulary remained that of the somewhat faded rhetoric of the preceding century, the resonance of the sentences, the power of the rhythm, and the passion for life sharply contrasted with the often-withered poetry of the 18th century. The book was so successful that Lamartine attempted to extend it two years later with his Nouvelles méditations poétiques and his Mort de Socrates, in which his preoccupation with metaphysics first became evident. Le Dernier Chant du pèlerinage d’Harold, published in 1825, revealed the charm that the English poet Lord Byron exerted over him. Lamartine was elected to the French Academy in 1829, and the following year he published the two volumes of Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, a sort of alleluia, filled with deist—and even occasionally Christian (“L’Hymne au Christ”)—enthusiasm.
Political career
In 1830, when Louis-Philippe acceded to the throne as constitutional monarch after the July Revolution, Lamartine abandoned his diplomatic career to enter politics. He refused to commit himself to the July Monarchy, however, and, preserving his independence, he set out to draw attention to social problems. After two unsuccessful attempts he was elected deputy in 1833. Yet he still wanted to write a poem, Les Visions, that he had been thinking about since 1821 and that he had conceived of as an “epic of the soul.” The symbolic theme was that of a fallen angel cast out of heaven for having chosen the love of a woman and condemned to successive reincarnations until the day on which he realized that he “preferred God.” Lamartine wrote the last fragment of this immense adventure first, and it appeared in 1836 as Jocelyn. It is the story of a young man who intended to take up the religious life but instead, when cast out of the seminary by the Revolution, falls in love with a young girl; recalled to the order by his dying bishop, he renounces his love and becomes a “man of God,” a parish priest, consecrating his life to the service of his fellow men. In 1838 Lamartine published the first fragment of this vast metaphysical poem under the appropriate title La Chute d’un ange (“The Fall of an Angel”). In 1832–33 he travelled to Lebanon, Syria, and the Holy Land. He had by then definitively lost the Catholic faith he had tried to recover in 1820; a further blow was the death in Beirut, on December 7, 1832, of his only remaining child, Julia. A son born in Rome in 1821 had not survived infancy.
After a collection published in 1839 under the title Recueillements poétiques (“Poetic Meditations”), Lamartine interrupted his literary endeavours to become more active as a politician. He was convinced that the social question, which he himself called “the question of the proletariat,” was the principal issue of his time. He deplored the inhumanity of the worker’s plight; he denounced the trusts and their dominant influence on governmental politics, directing against them two discourses, one in 1838 and another in 1846; and he held that a working-class revolution was inevitable and did not hesitate to hasten the hour, promising the authorities, in July 1847, a “revolution of scorn.” In the same year he published his Histoire des Girondins, a history of the right, or moderate, Girondins during and after the French Revolution, which earned him immense popularity with the left-wing parties.
After the revolution of February 24, 1848, the Second Republic was proclaimed in Paris, and Lamartine became, in effect, head of the provisional government. Among the reforms passed during the early months of the Second Republic were the adoption of universal male suffrage and the abolition of slavery in French territories. The propertied classes, who were at first startled by this new government, pretended to accept the new circumstances, but they were unable to tolerate the fact that the working class possessed arms with which to defend themselves. In April 1848 Lamartine was elected to the National Assembly by 10 départements. The bourgeoisie, represented by the right-wing parties, thought they had elected in Lamartine a clever manipulator who could placate the proletariat while military forces capable of establishing order, such as they conceived of it, were being reconstituted. The bourgeoisie was enraged to discover, however, that Lamartine was, indeed, as he had proclaimed himself to be, the spokesman of the working class. On June 24, 1848, he was thrown out of office and the revolt crushed. He was a candidate in the presidential election of December 1848 and finished last, with little support.
Later life
A broken man, Lamartine entered the twilight of his life. He was 60 years old in 1850, and his debts were enormous, not because he had been personally extravagant but because of the allowances he gave his sisters to compensate for the total property inheritance he had received as the only male in the Lamartine family. For 20 years he struggled desperately, though in vain, against bankruptcy, publishing book after book: Raphaël, a transposed account of his love for Julie Charles; Les Confidences and Nouvelles Confidences, wherein he intermingled real and imaginary elements (Graziella is a fragment of it); the novels Geneviève (1851), Antoniella (1867), Mémoires politiques (1863), the last work being of great historical interest; a periodical titled Cours familiers de littérature (1856–1868/69), in which he published such poems as “La Vigne et la maison” and “Le Désert”; some historical works that remained unequaled, including Histoire des Constituants (1854), Histoire de la Restauration (1851–52), Histoire de la Russie (1855), and Histoire de la Turquie (1854–55). He died nearly forgotten by his contemporaries.
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Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine (French: [alfɔ̃s maʁi lwi dəpʁa də lamaʁtin]; 21 October 1790 – 28 February 1869)[2] was a French author, poet, and statesman who was instrumental in the foundation of the Second Republic and the continuation of the tricolore as the flag of France.
Biography
[edit]Early years
[edit]Born in Mâcon, Burgundy, on 21 October 1790,[3] into a family of the French provincial nobility, Lamartine spent his youth at the family estate. In his youth he read Fénelon, Voltaire, Parny, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Racine, Tasso, Dante, Petrarch, Mme de Staël, Shakespeare, Chateaubriand, and Ossian.[4]
Lamartine made his entrance into the field of poetry with a masterpiece, Les Méditations Poétiques (1820) and awoke to find himself famous.[5] One of the notable poems in this collection was his partly autobiographical poem Le Lac ("The Lake"), which he dedicated to Julie Charles, the wife of a celebrated physician.[6] In it he describes in retrospect the fervent love shared by a couple from the point of view of the bereaved man.
He was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1825. He worked for the French embassy in Italy from 1825 to 1828. In 1829, he was elected a member of the Académie française. He was elected as a member of the Chamber of Deputies in 1833. In 1835 he published the Voyage en Orient, a brilliant and bold account of the journey he had just made, in royal luxury, to the countries of the Orient, and in the course of which he had lost his only daughter. Lamartine was masterly in his use of French poetic forms but from then on he confined himself to prose. Raised a devout Catholic, Lamartine became a pantheist, writing Jocelyn and La Chute d'un ange and in 1847, Histoire des Girondins, in praise of the Girondists. In his older years Lamartine returned to the Church.[7]
Political career
[edit]July Monarchy
[edit]
Initially a monarchist, Lamartine came to embrace democratic ideals and opposed militaristic nationalism.[8] Around 1830, Lamartine's opinions shifted in the direction of liberalism.[1] When elected in 1833 to the Chamber of Deputies, he was asked what side of the chamber he was going to sit on, he responded "on the ceiling".[9] He quickly founded his own "Social Party" with some influence from Saint-Simonian ideas and established himself as a prominent critic of the July Monarchy, becoming more and more of a republican in the monarchy's last years.[1][10] Lamartine denounced the French government's decision to back down during the Oriental Crisis of 1840, forcing France's ally Muhammad Ali to surrender Crete, Syria, and Hejaz to the Ottoman Empire, calling it "the Waterloo of French diplomacy"[11]A follower of Lamennais, Lamartine advocated the separation of church and state believing it allowed the church to better fulfill its diving mission.[12] By the end of the 30s the radical opposition considered Lamartine their leading spokesman against King Louis-Phillipe and François Guizot. [13]
Lamartine's Histoire des Girondins was an instant success to the point that he styled himself the "Minister of Public Opinion" and considered one of the causes of the 1848 revolution.[14]
Second Republic
[edit]He was briefly in charge of the government during the turbulence of 1848. He was Minister of Foreign Affairs from 24 February 1848 to 11 May 1848. Due to his great age, Jacques-Charles Dupont de l'Eure, Chairman of the Provisional Government, effectively delegated many of his duties to Lamartine. He was then a member of the Executive Commission, the political body which served as France's joint Head of State.
Lamartine was instrumental in the founding of the Second Republic, having met with republican deputies and journalists in the Hôtel de Ville to agree on the makeup of its provisional government. Lamartine himself was chosen to declare the Republic in traditional form in the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville, and ensured the continuation of the Tricolour as the flag of the nation.
On 25 February 1848, Lamartine said about the Tricolour Flag:
During his term as a politician of the Second Republic, he led efforts that culminated in the abolition of slavery and the death penalty, as well as the enshrinement of the right to work and the short-lived national workshop programs. A political idealist who supported democracy and pacifism, his moderate stance on most issues caused many of his followers to desert him. He was an unsuccessful candidate in the 1848 presidential election, receiving fewer than 19,000 votes and losing to Louis Napoléon Bonaparte. He subsequently retired from politics and dedicated himself to literature.
Final years and legacy
[edit]
He published volumes on the most varied subjects (history, criticism, personal confidences, literary conversations) especially during the Empire, when, having retired to private life and having become the prey of his creditors, he condemned himself to what he calls "literary hard-labor to exist and pay his debts". Lamartine ended his life in poverty, publishing monthly installments of the Cours familier de littérature to support himself. He died in Paris in 1869.
Nobel prize winner Frédéric Mistral's fame was in part due to the praise of Alphonse de Lamartine in the fortieth edition of his periodical Cours familier de littérature, following the publication of Mistral's long poem Mirèio. Mistral is the most revered writer in modern Occitan literature.
Lamartine is considered to be the first French romantic poet (though Charles-Julien Lioult de Chênedollé was working on similar innovations at the same time), and was acknowledged by Paul Verlaine and the Symbolists as an important influence. Leo Tolstoy also admired Lamartine, who was the subject of some discourses in his notebooks.[16]
Other interests
[edit]
Alphonse de Lamartine was also an Orientalist. He used themes and materials of the Levant and the Bible to create plotlines, heroes, and landscapes that resemble an exotic Oriental world.[17] He also had a particular interest in Lebanon and the Middle East. He travelled to Lebanon, Syria and the Holy Land in 1832–33.[18] During that trip, while he and his wife, the painter and sculptor Elisa de Lamartine, were in Beirut, on 6 December 1832,[1] their only remaining child, Julia, died at ten years of age.[19] It was, however, considered a journey of recovery and immersion in specific Christian icons, symbols, and terrain with his view that the region could bring about the rebirth of a new Christianity and spirituality that could save Europe from destruction.[20]
During his trip to Lebanon he had met prince Bashir Shihab II and prince Simon Karam, who were enthusiasts of poetry. A valley in Lebanon is still called the Valley of Lamartine as a commemoration of that visit, and the Lebanon cedar forest still harbors the "Lamartine Cedar", which is said to be the cedar under which Lamartine had sat 200 years ago. Lamartine was so influenced by his trip that he staged his 1838 epic poem La Chute d'un ange (The Fall of an Angel) in Lebanon.
Raised by his mother to respect animal life, he found the eating of meat repugnant, saying 'One does not have one heart for Man and one for animals. One has a heart or one does not'. His writings in La chute d’un Ange (1838) and Les confidences (1849) would be taken up by supporters of vegetarianism in the twentieth century.
Bibliography
[edit]- Saül (1818)
- Méditations poétiques (1820)
- Nouvelles Méditations (1823)
- Harmonies poétiques et religieuses (1830)
- Sur la politique rationnelle (1831)
- Voyage en Orient (1835)
- Jocelyn (1836)
- La chute d'un ange (1838)
- Recueillements poétiques (1839)
- Histoire des Girondins (1847)
- Histoire de la Révolution (1849)
- Histoire de la Russie (1849)
- Raphaël (1849)
- Confidences (1849)
- Toussaint Louverture (1850)
- Geneviève, histoire d'une servante (1851)
- Graziella (1852)
- Héloïse et Abélard (1853)
- Les visions (1853)
- Histoire de la Turquie (1854)
- Cours familier de littérature (1856)
See also
[edit]
- French demonstration of 15 May 1848
- Lamartine Place Historic District in Manhattan, New York City
- Lamartine, Wisconsin
References
[edit]- ^ a b c Jenson, Deborah (2001). Trauma and Its Representations: The Social Life of Mimesis in Post-Revolutionary France. Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 152–154. ISBN 9780801867231.
- ^ Carruth, Gorton (1993). The Encyclopedia of World Facts and Dates. New York: HarperCollins. p. 492. ISBN 9780062700124.
- ^ Whitehouse, Henry Remsen (1918). The Life of Lamartine, Volume 1. BiblioBazaar (2009). p. 13. ISBN 978-1-115-29659-5. Retrieved 14 November 2010.
- ^ "Alphonse de Lamartine". Catholic Encyclopedia – via Catholic.org.
- ^ "Alphonse de Lamartine". Catholic Encyclopedia. Retrieved 21 April 2016 – via Catholic.org.
- ^ Stoléru, Lionel (2011). Une écoute du romantisme. Paris: Editions L'Harmattan. p. 12. ISBN 978-2-296-55104-6.
- ^ "Alphonse de Lamartine". Catholic Encyclopedia – via Catholic.org.
- ^ Mauriac, François (2015). Francois Mauriac on Race, War, Politics and Religion. Washington, D.C.: CUA Press. p. 258. ISBN 978-0-8132-2789-4.
- ^ Schapiro, J. Salwayn (1919). "Lamartine". Political Science Quarterly. 34 (4): 633.
- ^ Halsted, J.B. (1969). Alphonse de Lamartine: History of the Revolution of 1848. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 271–284.
- ^ Mansel, Philip (2010). Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean. Hachette UK. p. 86-87. ISBN 9781848544628.
- ^ Schapiro, J. Salwayn (1919). "Lamartine". Political Science Quarterly. 34 (4): 636.
- ^ Schapiro, J. Salwayn (1919). "Lamartine". Political Science Quarterly. 34 (4): 637.
- ^ Schapiro, J. Salwayn (1919). "Lamartine". Political Science Quarterly. 34 (4): 637-638.
- ^ de Lamartine, A. (1848). Trois mois au pouvoir (in French). Michel Levy. p. 66.
- ^ Frank, Joseph (2010). Between Religion and Rationality: Essays in Russian Literature and Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. p. 69. ISBN 978-1-4008-3653-6.
- ^ Peleg, Yaron (2018). Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. p. 15. ISBN 978-1-5017-2935-5.
- ^ Inman, Nick (2007). DK Eyewitness Travel Guide: Jerusalem & the Holy Lands. London: Penguin. p. 33. ISBN 978-0-7566-5053-7.
- ^ Flower, John (2013). Historical Dictionary of French Literature. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. p. 288. ISBN 978-0-8108-7945-4.
- ^ Makdisi, Ussama (2000). The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. p. 22. ISBN 978-0-520-92279-2.
- ^ Lamartine, Alphonse de, 1790–1869. Atheism among the people. Retrieved 21 April 2016 – via Internet Archive.
- ^ Rev. Robert Nash. "A Priest" (PDF). Catholicpamplets.net. Archived from the original (PDF) on 27 April 2016. Retrieved 21 April 2016.
Further reading
[edit]- Kelly, George Armstrong. “Alphonse De Lamartine: The Poet in Politics.” Daedalus 116, no. 2 (1987): 157–80. online.
- MacKay, John (2006). Inscription and Modernity: From Wordsworth to Mandelstam. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ISBN 0-253-34749-1. Retrieved 14 November 2010.
- Schapiro, J. Salwayn. “Lamartine.” Political Science Quarterly 34, no. 4 (1919): 632–43. online.
- Tilley, A. “Lamartine’s ‘Méditations Poétiques.’” The Modern Language Review 26, no. 3 (1931): 288–314. online.
- Wright, Gordon. "A Poet in Politics: Lamartine and the Revolution of 1848" History Today (Sep 1958) 8#9 pp 616-627
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