“The Army of the Romantics”, on Arte: the other French Revolution

ARTE – SATURDAY DECEMBER 21 AT 8:50 P.M. – DOCUMENTARY SERIES

The 19th^e century is that of revolutions. Not just political. The series dedicated by Arte to “young, exalted artists who dream of settling scores with the old world”recalls that“at the beginning of this century, theater, music and painting ignite minds”says the narrator, the actress Cécile de France.

Paris, 1827. Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas and Eugène Delacroix follow in their wake “a young generation of artists, inspired by their German and English neighbors, tired of academic classicism”. The time has come to “put a big kick in the anthill”. First manifestation of the concept of “engaged artist”, which would experience its golden age at the turn of the following century.

Reconstructed in anime rather than based on archives, staged “like a series from today” to better target the young audience it targets, this documentary, directed by Amélie Harrault, Céline Ronté, Valérie Loiseleux (in the same spirit as The Adventurers of Modern Art), brings back to life the troublemakers and the Paris that they will shake up.

The ancestor of bestsellers

It all began in 1827, with a – literary – duel between Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo, who were 25 years old. “Both dream of the Comédie-Française, both admire Shakespeare”whose astonishing modernity, two centuries after his death, “excites their imagination”. Dumas launches into the emerging boulevard theater. Hugo, already very popular in literary salons, sees his enthusiasm for poetry and theater curbed by his publisher: he wants a novel in the style of Walter Scott, which is all the rage across the Channel with Ivanhoe (1819). The publisher will wait until 1831 to see his young writer deliver Notre-Dame of Paristhe ancestor of bestsellers.

For his part, in his studio, day and night, Eugène Delacroix painted like a madman. At 29, an orphan from a large, ruined bourgeois family, he dreams of revenge. You have to shock your times to make a career, he told himself. He also had a political vision of art, which he brought to fruition in 1830 with Liberty leading the peopleinspired by the Three Glorious Revolutions.

Also haunted by the English romantics, in this case Lord Byron, who wrote Sardanapale (1821), the French painter presented a painting at the Salon du Louvre in 1827 which caused a scandal for the violence it unvarnished: The Death of Sardanapale. Victor Hugo applauds: Delacroix was able to capture this indescribable moment when everything changes, he succeeded in painting what the poet wants to write. The battle between classics and romantics is on.

And fashion hippie

Battle, that’s the word. In February 1830, Victor Hugo finally held his founding scandal, with Hernanithe passionate drama that he has just written for the Comédie-Française, and which will spark a virulent confrontation in the Paris of arts and letters after having broken the canons of classical theater. “The battle that will begin in Hernani is that of ideas, that of progress”says the author.

Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas and Eugène Delacroix met in 1827 at the Théâtre de l'Odéon where an English troupe was playing Romeo and Julietin English. A whole world of passion is revealed before their eyes. In the bays, a 24-year-old musician: Hector Berlioz. “What poets do in verse, he will do in music. » A nod from the creators of the animated images in the series: the future composer of the Fantastic Symphony is represented in hippie mode, messy hair, playing the guitar…

All the arts are now mobilized in the “army of the romantics”. The four episodes unfold his victories, his defeats, his journey through the century, between revolutions and authoritarian regimes. A journey which will be told by one of them, Théophile Gautier, in his History of romanticisman unfinished will written on the eve of his death in 1872.

The last episode begins the post-revolution period. In the limbo of the Second Empire and then the Paris Commune, the heirs of romanticism were, in turn, pilloried by good society: Madame Bovaryby Gustave Flaubert (1857), The Flowers of Evilby Baudelaire (1857), Lunch on the grassby Manet (1863), are censored, the Manifesto of realism (1855), co-signed by the painter Gustave Courbet, is mocked. The bourgeoisie are slumming with the music of Offenbach, who has swept away that of Berlioz, which has become… classic.

But modernity is making its way, it is embodied in the photography of Nadar, the anticipation novels of Jules Verne. The XX^e century looms on the horizon.