Literature, The 19th Century

The history of 19th-century France is that of a country struggling to deal with the aftermath of the Revolution. Two republics, several revolutions and coups d'etat, the empires of Napoleon I and Napoleon III, and the restoration of the monarchy followed one another in a topsy-turvy succession of regimes, ideologies, and political philosophies. Similarly, the literary history of the 19th century is of a series of efforts to replace the classicism of the 17th and 18th centuries and its emphasis on order, reason, and clarity. Romanticism, realism, naturalism, Parnassianism, and symbolism were the concepts, movements, and schools that dominated the 19th century. The novel continued to prosper in the 19th century and provided some of the masterpieces of French literature. It was the preeminent democratic genre, documenting detail and fact rather than the universal and general principles that the 18th-century philosophes pursued. Liberated from the hierarchy of the old regime, the 19th-century novel could express the distinctiveness of the individual. Writers increasingly portrayed protagonists from different levels of society, even the very lowest.