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they exhibit. In pure literary criticism more particularly, Joubert, though exhibiting some inconsistencies due to his time, is astonishingly penetrating and suggestive. Of science and erudition the time was fruitful. At an early period of it appeared the remarkable work of Pierre Cabanis (1757–1808), the Rapports du physique et du morale de l’homme, a work in which physiology is treated from the extreme materialist point of view but with all the liveliness and literary excellence of the Philosophe movement at its best. Another physiological work of great merit at this period was the Traité de la vie et de la mort of Bichat, and the example set by these works was widely followed; while in other branches of science Laplace, Lagrange, Haüy, Berthollet, &c., produced contributions of the highest value. From the literary point of view, however, the chief interest of this time is centred in two individual names, those of Chateaubriand and Madame de Staël, and in three literary developments of a more or less novel character, which were all of the highest importance in shaping the course which French literature has taken since 1824. One of these developments was the reactionary movement of Maistre and Bonald, which in its turn largely influenced Chateaubriand, then Lamennais and Montalembert, and was later represented in French literature in different guises, chiefly by Louis Veuillot (1815–1883) and Mgr Dupanloup (1802–1878). The second and third, closely connected, were the immense advances made by parliamentary eloquence and by political writing, the latter of which, by the hand of Paul Louis Courier (1773–1825), contributed for the first time an undoubted masterpiece to French literature. The influence of the two combined has since raised journalism to even a greater pitch of power in France than in any other country. It is in the development of these new openings for literature, and in the cast and complexion which they gave to its matter, that the real literary importance of the Revolutionary period consists; just as it is in the new elements which they supplied for the treatment of such subjects that the literary value of the authors of René and De l’Allemagne mainly lies. We have already alluded to some of the beginnings of periodical and journalistic letters in France. For some time, in the hands of Bayle, Basnage, Des Maizeaux, Jurieu, Leclerc, periodical literature consisted mainly of a series, more or less disconnected, of pamphlets, with occasional extracts from forthcoming works, critical adversaria and the like. Of a more regular kind were the often-mentioned Journal de Trévoux and Mercure de France, and later the Année littéraire of Fréron and the like. The Correspondance of Grimm also, as we have pointed out, bore considerable resemblance to a modern monthly review, though it was addressed to a very few persons. Of political news there was, under a despotism, naturally very little. 1789, however, saw a vast change in this respect. An enormous efflorescence of periodical literature at once took place, and a few of the numerous journals founded in that year or soon afterwards survived for a considerable time. A whole class of authors arose who pretended to be nothing more than journalists, while many writers distinguished for more solid contributions to literature took part in the movement, and not a few active politicians contributed. Thus to the original staff of the Moniteur, or, as it was at first called, La Gazette Nationale, La Harpe, Lacretelle, Andrieux, Dominique Joseph Garat (1749–1833) and Pierre Ginguené (1748–1826) were attached. Among the writers of the Journal de Paris André Chénier had been ranked. Fontanes contributed to many royalist and moderate journals. Guizot and Morellet, representatives respectively of the 19th and the 18th century, shared in the Nouvelles politiques, while Bertin, Fievée and J. L. Geoffroy (1743–1814), a critic of peculiar acerbity, contributed to the Journal de l’empire, afterwards turned into the still existing Journal des débats. With Geoffroy, François Bénoit Hoffman (1760–1828), Jean F. J. Dussault (1769–1824) and Charles F. Dorimond, abbé de Féletz (1765–1850), constituted a quartet of critics sometimes spoken of as “the Débats four,” though they were by no means all friends. Of active politicians Marat (L’Ami du peuple), Mirabeau (Courrier de Provence), Barère (Journal des débats et des décrets), Brissot (Patriote français), Hébert (Père Duchesne), Robespierre (Défenseur de la constitution), and Tallien (La Sentinelle) were the most remarkable who had an intimate connexion with journalism. On the other hand, the type of the journalist pure and simple is Camille Desmoulins (1759–1794), one of the most brilliant, in a literary point of view, of the short-lived celebrities of the time. Of the same class were Pelletier, Durozoir, Loustalot, Royou. As the immediate daily interest in politics drooped, there were formed periodicals of a partly political and partly literary character. Such had been the décade philosophique, which counted Cabanis, Chénier, and De Tracy among its contributors, and this was followed by the Revue française at a later period, which was in its turn succeeded by the Revue des deux mondes. On the other hand, parliamentary eloquence was even more important than journalism during the early period of the Revolution. Mirabeau naturally stands at the head of orators of this class, and next to him may be ranked the well-known names of Malouet and Meunier among constitutionalists; of Robespierre, Marat and Danton, the triumvirs of the Mountain; of Maury, Cazalès and the vicomte de Mirabeau, among the royalists; and above all of the Girondist speakers Barnave, Vergniaud, and Lanjuinais. The last named survived to take part in the revival of parliamentary discussion after the Restoration. But the permanent contributions to French literature of this period of voluminous eloquence are, as frequently happens in such cases, by no means large. The union of the journalist and the parliamentary spirit produced, however, in Paul Louis Courier a Courier. master of style. Courier spent the greater part of his life, tragically cut short, in translating the classics and studying the older writers of France, in which study he learnt thoroughly to despise the pseudo-classicism of the 18th century. It was not till he was past forty that he took to political writing, and the style of his pamphlets, and their wonderful irony and vigour, at once placed them on the level of the very best things of the kind. Along with Courier should be mentioned Benjamin Constant (1767–1830), who, though partly a romance writer and partly a philosophical author, was mainly a politician and an orator, besides being fertile in articles and pamphlets. Lamennais, like Lamartine, will best be dealt with later, and the same may be said of Béranger; but Chateaubriand and Madame de Staël must be noticed here. The former represents, in the influence which changed the literature of the 18th century into the literature of the 19th, the vague spirit of unrest and “Weltschmerz,” the affection for the picturesque qualities of nature, the religious spirit occasionally turning into mysticism, and the respect, sure to become more and more definite and appreciative, for antiquity. He gives in short the romantic and conservative Madame
de Staël. element. Madame de Staël (1766–1817) on the other hand, as became a daughter of Necker, retained a great deal of the Philosophe character and the traditions of the 18th century, especially its liberalism, its sensibilité, and its thirst for general information; to which, however, she added a cosmopolitan spirit, and a readiness to introduce into France the literary and social, as well as the political and philosophical, peculiarities of other countries to which the 18th century, in France at least, had been a stranger, and which Chateaubriand himself, notwithstanding his excursions into English literature, had been very far from feeling. She therefore contributed to the positive and liberal side of the future movement. The absolute literary importance of the two was very different. Madame de Staël’s early writings were of the critical kind, half aesthetic half ethical, of which the 18th century had been fond, and which their titles, Lettres sur J. J. Rousseau, De l’influence des passions, De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales, sufficiently show. Her romances, Delphine and Corinne, had immense literary influence at the time. Still more was this the case with De l’Allemagne, which practically opened up to the rising generation in France the till then unknown Chateaubriand. treasures of literature and philosophy, which during the most glorious half century of her literary history Germany had, sometimes on hints taken from France herself, been accumulating. The literary importance of Chateaubriand (1768–1848) is far greater, while his literary influence