The Romantic Revolution

by Tim Blanning

  Franz Pforr, Count Habsburg and the Priest (1809–10)

  Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt am Main (AKG)

  The art of the Nazarenes became immensely popular. Helped by the recent invention of lithography, their images were disseminated right across Germany and Austria. Overbeck was told by a proud parent in 1818 that “your name races through every German speaking territory. Political newspapers and other journals bear it from south to north and from west to east. Your Frankfurt Cartoons, and those of the excellent Cornelius, become described in greater and greater detail, and are judged great patriotic achievements.”179

  The Nazarenes started out as a secession (from the Vienna Academy), indeed arguably represented the first secession movement in European painting, but they ended up well and truly integrated into the establishment. Their studios in Rome were visited by the crown prince of Bavaria, Ludwig, in 1818 and by the Austrian emperor Francis I the following year.180 The former visit inspired possibly the most informal of all depictions of a prince patronizing artists in the shape of Franz Ludwig Catel’s Crown Prince Ludwig in the Spanish Wine Taverna at Rome.181 By that time they had already painted a fresco (a medium they favored just because of its antique nature) for the Prussian consul at Rome. A broad stream of commissions from German princes followed. The most successful of them, Peter Cornelius, became director of the Academy at Munich, where among many other projects he painted the enormous frescoes commissioned by King Ludwig I for the Ludwigskirche in the Ludwigstrasse.182

  Also deeply integrated in the political establishment was Adam Heinrich Müller, who started out in the service of Prussia but spent most of his career working as a publicist for the Austrian chancellor Prince Metternich, by whom he was rewarded with a noble title (Ritter von Nittersdorf). As the chief political theorist among the German romantics, he did more than anyone to encourage an alliance between intelligentsia and state. In a public lecture delivered in 1808 he proclaimed, “Man cannot be thought of outside the state … the state is the embodiment of all the needs of the heart, the spirit and the body.… Man can neither hear, see, think, feel nor love without the state; in brief, he is not conceivable other than in the state.”183 In a series of influential articles published in the Berliner Abendblätter, which he edited and mostly wrote with Heinrich von Kleist, Müller argued that academics must abandon their hypercritical and negative attitude, together with their “sterile, insatiable lust for knowledge.” When the Christian faith stood in all its glory, he went on, then all scholarship had a religious point of reference to give it meaning, but in the present secular age scholarship could attain the necessary vitality and shape only through voluntary service of the state.184 It need hardly be added that this olive branch was seized with alacrity by the German princes. When Frederick William IV laid the foundation stone of the south portal of Cologne Cathedral, he was also proclaiming the union of throne, altar, and intelligentsia.185

  Across the Rhine, the French romantics were not inclined to view with favor a revolutionary state that had done so much to demystify the world and had adopted neoclassicism as its official style. The meretricious vulgarity of the parvenu Napoleon was, if anything, even less to their taste. The angry young French romantics were angry young royalists and clericalists. Alphonse de Lamartine, Alfred de Vigny, and Victor Hugo were all originally keen supporters of aristocracy, monarchy, and Catholicism.186 Chateaubriand resigned from the service of Napoleon and went into exile when the Bourbon duc d’Enghien was judicially murdered in 1804.187 During Napoleon’s “Hundred Days,” Eugène Delacroix even served as a camelot du roi, or life-guard, for Louis XVIII.188

  The alliance between throne and altar did not last long in France. It could not survive the strain imposed by the returning Bourbons, who, as Talleyrand famously remarked, “had learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.” By the middle of the 1820s, the romantics who had opposed Napoleon and welcomed back Louis XVIII were beginning to turn. In Honoré de Balzac’s novel Lost Illusions, set in 1821–22, Lucien Chardon, a young poet from Angoulême, is told on his arrival in Paris that he must take sides in a fierce literary-cum-political battle in which “the royalists are romantics, the liberals are classicists” and is advised to throw in his lot with the former, because “the romantics are all young folk and the classicists are periwigs: the romantics will win.”189 In 1824 Victor Hugo was still speaking of literature as “the expression of a religious and monarchical society,”190 but it was in that year that the battle lines shifted decisively, not least because on September 16 Louis XVIII died and was succeeded by his less intelligent but more reactionary brother as Charles X. As if to demonstrate that the cultural climate was turning colder, the director of the Académie française denounced romantic literature in a public session. To add insult to insult, the rector of the University of Paris, who also happened to be a bishop, then argued at a prize-giving ceremony that once a national literature had attained perfection, as it had done in France during the golden age of Louis XIV, writers should be required to adhere to its precepts.191

  Hugo found his way to the left through the decompression chamber of admiration for Napoleon, in whose service his father had risen to the rank of general. His “Ode à la Colonne de la Place Vendôme” of 1827 marked a rupture with the Bourbons. Three years later, in the preface to his play Hernani, he completed his conversion by writing: “Romanticism, taken as a whole, is only liberalism in literature. Literary liberalism will be no less democratic than political liberalism. Freedom in art and liberty in society are the twin goals to which all consistent and logical thinkers should march in step.”192 In a letter to de Lamartine in the same year he added, referring to romanticism: “Ours too is a question of freedom, it too is a revolution; it will stand intact to walk side by side with its political sister. Like wolves, revolutions don’t eat one another.”193

  In July 1830 that promise was put to the test in the revolution that put an end to the Bourbon monarchy and installed Louis Philippe Duc d’Orléans as king. It was a test that the romantics passed, at least in a visual sense, for the street fighting in Paris inspired the most famous of all revolutionary images—Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People. This was also the perfect illustration of the famous definition offered by the French art critic Auguste Jal in his book on the Salon of 1827, “Romanticism in painting is political; it is the echo of the cannon shot of 1789.”194 Delacroix had already dramatized the revolutionary nature of his romantic vision by exhibiting Scenes from the Massacres of Chios at the Salon of 1824. This depicted the atrocities committed by Turks on the island of Chios in 1822, which had become a cause célèbre of the Greek War of Independence. At the left, a group of prisoners awaits transportation to slavery; at the right, a child tries to suckle the breast of its dead mother; dominating all is a Turkish rider who has tied a young girl to his horse and is drawing his scimitar to strike down her imploring mother. The painting’s impact was enhanced by being exhibited alongside Ingres’s Vow of Louis XIII, which presented as great a contrast as it is possible to imagine. Three years later, the two artists again offered the chance to compare classicism with romanticism when they exhibited The Death of Sardanapalus and The Apotheosis of Homer, respectively.

  Also in 1827 Delacroix had painted another powerful image drawn from the Greek war—Greece expiring on the ruins of Missolonghi, although it was not exhibited at the Salon. It not only was a statement of support for the Greek struggle for independence, but was probably also a lament for Byron, who had died at Missolonghi in 1824.195 It was not an isolated tribute. Byron’s contribution to giving European romanticism a radical flavor was colossal. His visits to the Eastern Mediterranean in 1809 and 1810 turned him into an enthusiastic campaigner for Greek independence from Turkish rule. There was nothing new about that, but his ability to express his philhellenism in powerfully poetic language gave it immense and lasting force. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage advertised the cause with the following lines that instantly became famous:

&
nbsp; Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth!

  Immortal, though no more; though fallen, great!

  Who now shall lead thy scatter’d children forth,

  And long accustom’d bondage uncreate?196

  Even more famous were the lines from Don Juan, published nine years later:

  The mountains look on Marathon—

  And Marathon looks on the sea;

  And musing there an hour alone,

  I dream’d that Greece might still be free;

  For standing on the Persian’s grave,

  I could not deem myself a slave.197

  By that time, Byron had left England in disgrace and high dudgeon, hounded out by persistent rumors of sexual misconduct, including incest with his half sister. His exile did nothing to diminish his impact, at home and abroad. As much thrilled as repelled by the air of danger and scandal that accompanied him on his journeys, Europeans turned him into a cult figure. In his Méditations poétiques, published in 1820 and often regarded as the start of French romanticism, Alphonse de Lamartine expressed his disapproval of Byron’s cynicism, but in a way that amounted to admiration: “You, whom the world is still unable to name, mysterious spirit, mortal, angel or demon, whoever you are, Byron, good or bad spirit, I love the savage harmony of your music, as I love the way the thunderbolt and winds mix during the storm, together with the noise of the torrents!”198 Intellectuals as diverse as Goethe and Heine, Pushkin and Mickiewicz, paid tribute to his demonic genius. The most authoritative came from Goethe—“Byron is the greatest genius of the century.… He is not antique, he is not modern; he is like the present day.”199

  It was ironic that Byron was regarded as the romantic hero par excellence, for, as Maurice Bowra has written, he was not really a romantic at all, rather a survivor from the eighteenth century having more in common with Pope (or even Dryden) than with Keats or Wordsworth.200 If, as Bowra maintains, it was the importance assigned to the imagination that distinguished the romantics, then Byron disqualified himself, for he wrote with a characteristic jeer: “It is the fashion of the day to lay great stress upon what they call ‘imagination’ and ‘invention,’ the two commonest of qualities: an Irish peasant with a little whisky in his head will imagine and invent more than would furnish forth a modern poem.”201 As Keats wrote to his brother in 1822: “You speak of Lord Byron and me—There is this great difference between us. He describes what he sees—I describe what I imagine. Mine is the hardest task. You see the immense difference.”202 Ironic, sarcastic, skeptical, and cynical, Byron would have been a short-priced favorite in any competition to find the poet who least resembled Novalis.

  But Byron did believe passionately in the Greek cause, and it was he who turned philhellenism into a European movement.203 So, when the Greek War of Independence began in 1821, European public opinion was ready to give it enthusiastic support. Byron’s death at Missolonghi on April 19, 1824, albeit from fever rather than enemy action, sealed his heroic status. His images had circulated widely during his lifetime, but after his death their popularity was rivaled only by those of Napoleon.204 If his influence on the movement that led eventually to Greek independence in 1832 cannot be assessed with any precision, it was certainly great. The historian of the philhellene movement has written: “To the philhellenes in action, he was a practical inspiration; to the Greeks he was a poet, a hero, and a god. His contribution to the liberation of Greece is literally incomparable.”205

  As the old regimes restored after the fall of Napoleon turned increasingly reactionary, so were the romantics driven leftward. Even in relatively liberal Great Britain (or the United Kingdom, as it should be known following the union with Ireland in 1801), the repression of social and political radicalism provoked a strong reaction from the younger romantics. A particular bugbear was Lord Castlereagh, of whom Shelley wrote in The Masque of Anarchy:

  I met Murder on the way—

  He had a face like Castlereagh—

  Very smooth he looked, yet grim;

  Seven bloodhounds followed him.

  All were fat; and well they might

  Be in admirable plight,

  For one by one, and two by two,

  He tossed them human hearts to chew

  Which from his wide cloak he drew.206

  When Castlereagh died by his own hand in 1822, Byron wrote of his grave in Westminster Abbey:

  Posterity will ne’er survey

  A nobler grave than this:

  Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:

  Stop, traveller, and piss.207

  This engagement with the political world was common to many of the British romantics. Wordsworth told a visitor that “although he was known to the world as a poet, he had given twelve hours thought to the conditions and prospects of society, for one to poetry,” while Shelley wrote to a friend: “I consider Poetry very subordinate to moral & political science, & if I were well, certainly I should aspire to the latter.”208 While Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge were propelled from left to right by the impact of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, the younger generation never stopped attacking the establishment. In his “Ode to Liberty” of 1820 Shelley wrote:

  Oh, that the free would stamp the impious name

  Of King into the dust! or write it there,

  So that this blot upon the page of fame

  Were as a serpent’s path, which the light air

  Erases, and the flat sands close behind!209

  At least George IV was a native. Elsewhere in Europe, alienation from the regime was especially acute where it was associated with foreign occupation. Already in 1815 the Austrian military commander in Italy, Count Heinrich von Bellegarde, warned Metternich that “the men of spirit and letters are trying to write with a common purpose, which under an academic form hides the political aim of making Italy its own master, an idea which is disturbing even as a Utopia.” The image of Austrian rule, personified by Metternich, was as unromantic as could be imagined, so—as the poet Silvio Pellico remarked—to be a romantic was to be a liberal, for “only ultras [conservatives] and spies dare call themselves classicists.”210 It was an association the Austrians themselves confirmed when they closed down the leading romantic periodical Il Conciliatore: foglio scientifico-letterario in 1819.211

  Geographic proximity to the Greeks’ struggle for liberation from Turkish rule naturally gave encouragement to Italians wishing to follow their example. Particularly stimulating was a well-reported episode in 1818 when the inhabitants of Parga were forced to leave their homes after the British had handed over the town to the Turks. This inspired at least two major works, the first being Giovanni Berchet’s epic poem The Refugees of Parga, written in exile in London in 1821 and published in 1824. Berchet had already composed the first manifesto of Italian romanticism in 1816, in the shape of his Semi-Serious Letter from Grisostomo to His Son.212 The second was one of the most memorable of all Italian romantic paintings, Francesco Hayez’s The Refugees of Parga. It was commissioned by Count Paolo Tosio of Brescia, who originally asked for something classical. Hayez persuaded him to allow a modern subject, commenting later that “among the many [subjects] that crowded into my mind, I gave preference to the topic of the refugees from Parga, a subject that represented patriotic feelings that were very well suited to our condition.”213

  As this suggests, Hayez and his fellow patriots had no difficulty in identifying themselves with the oppressed Greeks and their Austrian masters with the Turkish oppressors. This simple transfer mechanism proved to be a useful way of evading censorship, favored especially by Italy’s favorite art form—opera. Nowhere else in Europe and at no other time in European history has so much opera been performed as in Italy between 1815 and 1860. In Milan there were six theaters in which opera was performed regularly; in Naples there were five plus one more occasional venue.214 Looking back from 1869, one contemporary observed: “No one who did not live in Italy before 1848 can imagine what the opera house meant in those days. It was the
only outlet for public life, and everyone took part. The success of a new opera was a capital event that stirred to its depths the town lucky enough to have witnessed it, and word of it ran all over Italy.”215 When Italian opera audiences saw the Gauls resisting the Romans (in Bellini’s Norma) or the Children of Israel resisting the Babylonians (in Verdi’s Nabucco), they knew that it was their own heroic struggle for liberty that was really being depicted onstage.216 As we have seen, the Czechs in Bohemia were engaged in a very similar enterprise when they too opposed what they perceived to be Austrian oppression.217

  In German-speaking Europe, the gulf between state and society was less wide. The policies dictated by Metternich and imposed by the German princes with varying degrees of enthusiasm certainly aroused resentment, but at least the oppression was homegrown. Moreover, it was first and foremost political. In many German states it was accompanied by cultural policies and patronage that could only win the approval of the intelligentsia. Whether it was Frederick William III of Prussia buying Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings for the crown prince or Ludwig I commissioning major works of art from the Nazarenes or Frederick Augustus I of Saxony appointing Richard Wagner as his director of music, there were enough positives to promote at least an ambivalent attitude toward the regimes. This was summed up best by the liberal politician Friedrich Dahlmann, who likened the Prussian state to “the magic spear that heals as well as wounds.”218 Many of the leading German romantics nestled comfortably in the warm embrace of state patronage, for example Schinkel, Schlegel, Müller, and Cornelius. Of course there were others who went into internal exile, such as Caspar David Friedrich, or even took to the barricades when insurrections erupted in 1830 and 1848–49. Among this activist group, Wagner stood out for his characteristic extremism, conspiring to incite a violent revolution, buying hand grenades, inciting the Saxon troops to mutiny, and playing an active part in the uprising.219 He was very lucky to escape to exile in Switzerland with the assistance of his ever-generous friend Liszt.