Alphonse de Lamartine

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Alphonse Marie Louis de Lamartine (1790-1869) was one of the first French romantic poets. A diplomat as well, he led the provisional government of the Second Republic in 1848.

Alphonse de Lamartine was born on Oct. 21, 1790, in Mâcon. His family was of the landed, pious, provincial aristocracy, who remained loyal to the monarchy during the Revolution. He had five younger sisters who later married but became dependent on his support. He spent his childhood in the country at Milly, where the Abbé Dumont was his tutor. Both Milly and the abbé would be idealized in his poetry. Eventually he was sent to Lyons to study, but he rebelled, and escaped at the age of 11. He was then sent to a Jesuit school for a traditional, pious education, which he completed in 1808. He was a good student, described as a tall young man with an intense, proud expression.

During the next few years Lamartine led a leisurely life first at Milly, then in Italy, and eventually in Paris. He immersed himself in the works of the 18th-century philosophers, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Madame de Staël - all of which had been unavailable in his school. He also started to write verse and plays and even thought of writing an epic poem. During a trip to Italy in 1812 he became infatuated with a Neapolitan woman who was to become Graziella in his Confidences (1849). During the brief reign of Louis XVIII, Lamartine joined the army.

Career as Poet

In 1816 during a trip to Aix-les-Bains, where he had gone for treatment of a nervous ailment, Lamartine fell deeply in love with Julie Charles. They were to meet again at Lake Bourget a year later, but her respiratory disease was more serious than his illness, and she was unable to leave Paris, where she died a few months later.

Profoundly moved by this relationship, Lamartine wrote some of his best lyrical poetry and in 1820 published a collection of 24 poems entitled Méditations. The anthology was an immediate success. This collection is generally considered the first romantic poetic work in French. Though not strikingly innovative in form or technique, the poems develop an intense personal lyricism which animates the abstract language and the sometimes outworn images.

Le Lac (The Lake) is the poem for which Lamartine is most remembered; it evokes the passage of time and the poet's consolation in the feeling that nature, at least, harbors intact the memory of his lost love. Other poems, such as Isolement (Isolation), treat the lonely anguish of a sensitive man indifferent to life since love and meaning have been taken from him. In still other poems the poet asserts new faith born of resignation. Lamartine had no intention of creating a literary revolution with these poems, most of which retain much of the cadence and imagery of neoclassic verse. But the personalism of the themes and his direct lyricism were new to French verse.

The success, financial as well as literary, of the Méditations and an appointment to the embassy at Naples allowed Lamartine to marry Mary-Ann Birch, an English-woman, in June 1820. For the next 10 years the young diplomat pursued his career in Naples and Florence with some time in Paris. A son was born but died in infancy, and in 1822 a daughter, Julia, was born. He continued to publish various poems: a second collection of Méditationsin 1823; Le Dernier chant du pélerinage d'Harold (The Last Canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage), in homage to Byron, in 1825; and Harmonies poétiques et religieuses in 1830. Still the idea of creating a great epic haunted him. In 1832 he undertook a trip to the Holy Land with his wife and daughter. Julia died tragically during the course of the trip, and the despair caused by her death found expression in Géthsémani (1834).

Career as Statesman

While still traveling, Lamartine was elected deputy from his region in 1833 but without partisan party ties. In the next 15 years he evolved slowly from the conservative, monarchist sympathies of his aristocratic background toward an increasingly vocal republicanism. His liberalism was founded on a belief in property as a cornerstone of stability and legitimacy. His Ode sur les révolutionspresents an image of the unceasing movement and progress of an ever-changing society and illustrates the role of the poet as interpreter and guide for history and society.

During this period also, Lamartine published two long poems meant to be fragments of a larger epic. The overall epic was to recount the myth of an angel, Cédron, who, having loved a mortal, was condemned to live on earth during the whole of human history, reincarnated in a new identity with each successive age. His slow acceptance of suffering would lead to his ultimate redemption. Jocelyn, published with great success in 1836, consists of 10,000 verses centering on a village priest who is an idealization of the Abbé Dumont. The priest is more a Voltairean rationalist than an orthodox Catholic; his innate goodness and sacrifice help him fulfill his spiritual destiny. There are many faults both thematically and technically in the long poem, but some of the tableaux, such as the ideal peasant types in "The Tillers," have a continued appeal.

La Chute d'un ange (The Fall of an Angel), published in 1839, was meant to precede Jocelyn but was a failure with the public. A long poem divided into 15 visions, it presents the beginning of the epic myth immediately before the Flood, as Cédron commits suicide, throwing himself on the family funeral pyre. The images of Lucifer and of Prometheus - superior beings who revolt against suffering - haunted many 19th-century artists.

After publishing another anthology, Recueillements (Contemplations) in 1839, Lamartine ceased to publish to avoid compromising his image as a politician. His political influence grew steadily as he opposed Louis Philippe. When the opposition forces revolted in 1848, Lamartine became leader of the provisional government. Though he could have kept power personally, he proclaimed the Second Republic and set up an executive commission of several members. It was then that he began to lose the support of his own constituents, but he personally contained popular unrest until the bloody days of June and July. In December he lost the presidency to Napoleon III, and though he continued to be deputy until the Second Empire succeeded the republic in 1851, his political career had ended.

The last 20 years of Lamartine's life present a pathetic story of decline and humiliation. Over the years he had accumulated enormous debts, and he was now forced to write for money. In 1849 he incorporated his memories in Confidences. Social novels for popular consumption, historical compilations, and biographies followed. In 1856 he started a monthly review called Cours familier de littérature (Informal Course on Literature), which occasionally included poems worthy of his earlier efforts. Financial efforts largely failed, though, and in 1860 he was forced to accept money from the government he despised. His wife and his niece Valentine de Cessiat were his only consolation. His wife died in 1863 after a long and painful illness. In 1867 Lamartine suffered an attack that left him semiconscious until his death in Paris on Feb. 28, 1869.

Further Reading

There is no English edition of Lamartine's poetry. For his life see Henry Remsen Whitehouse, The Life of Lamartine (2 vols., 1918), and Mark Gambier-Parry, Studies of Childhood and Youth (1925). Recommended for background is Robert T. Denommé, Nineteenth Century French Romantic Poets (1969), which has an especially interesting chapter on Lamartine.

Additional Sources

Fortescue, William, Alphonse de Lamartine: a political biography, London: Croom Helm; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983.

Lamartine, Alphonse de (1790-1869). French poet, politician, historian, writer of travel books and popular literature. Son of an aristocratic and military father and a noble and religious mother, Lamartine grew up on the relatively modest estate of Milly near Mâcon. In turn melancholic and dissipated, he spent his youth and early manhood pursuing a sequence of romantic and casual liaisons. His love for the consumptive Julie Charles provided the inspiration for his most famous poem ‘Le Lac’. Immediate poetic success led to distinguished diplomatic postings in Italy and, later, to eminence in national politics. Lamartine's political fame rests on the leading role he took in the provisional government during the 1848 Revolution (and no less, perhaps, on the spectacular failure of his presidential candidacy at the end of that year).

Lamartine's importance as a poet is still seen primarily in terms of the reputation he acquired on the publication of his earliest work, Méditations poétiques (1820). This collection is enshrined in traditional literary history as the first poetic text of the ‘Romantic revolution’ in France, and in ‘Le Lac’ it contains the poem commonly considered to offer the quintessential example of Romantic lyrical poetry, with its treatment of lost love and lost time. His many other collections of lyrical and meditative poetry have been little read in modern times (Nouvelles méditations poétiques, 1823; Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, 1830; Recueillements poétiques, 1839). His completed ‘fragments’ of a vast Christian epic (Jocelyn, 1836; La Chute d'un ange, 1838) are indispensable for an understanding of 19th-c. religious ideas and testify to crucial 19th-c. poetic ambitions, but these poems have remained alien to modern poetic sensibilities [see Epic Poetry].

Although Méditations poétiques conferred on Lamartine the status of a Romantic poet, literary historians have stressed that the poems were, in fact, firmly rooted in the late-18th-c. neoclassical and elegiac tradition. Critics have repeatedly pointed to the dominance of unreconstructed neoclassical practice in Lamartine's verse (stale, conventional poetic diction; over-dependence on classical and biblical sources). Those who have spoken positively of the qualities of his poetry have tended to invoke such vague criteria as ‘musicality’, fluidity', and ‘dreamy luminosity’. English-speaking readers and critics, with their taste for original metaphor and eye-on-the-object recreations of the natural world, have found Lamartine's conventional and abstract verse particularly hard to admire. His portentous metaphysics has been equally difficult to swallow.

Initially considered as a French Byron, Lamartine could not see beyond the adolescent and mystificatory posturing of Byron's early verse. Byronic irony and self-mockery were understood in France only in terms of a rebellious Satanism. In trying to understand the impact of Lamartine's early verse, one has to acknowledge that readers responded to the agonized self-questioning, and saw in it a profounder form of French poetry than what had gone before. The central paradox of Lamartine's poetic success was that, while he exploited conventional poetic devices, he nevertheless injected into his works a new existential urgency. His poems of love and loss, time and death, faith and doubt, despair and consolation, are some of the most characteristic works of French Romanticism, which is most centrally defined by its intense preoccupation with religious and metaphysical questions, at a time of post-revolutionary upheaval and fundamental challenge to established orthodoxies.

Apart from the Histoire des Girondins (1847), which is said to have been influential in 1848 and which remains a significant text on the French Revolution, his historical output is not highly regarded. It was largely the product of the literary drudgery of his later years and was intended to clear his heavy financial debts. More deserving of attention, and still almost completely undiscovered, are his popular educational works (especially the vast Cours familier de littérature, 1852-69). Lamartine had long been interested in ‘the People’ and the social question. His liberal humanitarianism was imbued with the idealistic spirit of early socialism. He believed literature should be used as a prime instrument in the progress of humanity (Des destinées de la poésie, 1834), and he devoted numerous literary and journalistic projects to the cause of popular education. He also wrote sentimental and idealized tales about working people (Geneviève, histoire d'une servante, 1850; Le Tailleur de pierres de Saint-Point, 1851).

[Brian Rigby]

Bibliography

• M. E. Birkett, Lamartine and the Poetics of Landscape (1982)
• W. Fortescue, Alphonse de Lamartine (1983)

Quotes:

"Limited in his nature, infinite in his desire, man is a fallen god who remembers heaven."

"Experience is the only prophecy of wise men."

"There is a woman at the beginning of all great things."

"Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys."

"Habit with it's iron sinews, clasps us and leads us day by day."

"Sometimes, when one person is missing, the whole world seems depopulated."

See more famous quotes by Alphonse De Lamartine

Alphonse Marie Louis de Lamartine
Lamartine, by Henri Decaisne (Musée de Mâcon)
Occupation	Writer, poet, politician
Literary movement	Romanticism
Influences Bible, Dante, Milton, Swedenborg
Influenced William Butler Yeats, Hart Crane, Victor Hugo

Lamartine in front of the Hôtel de Ville de Paris, on the 25 February 1848, by Félix Philippoteaux

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Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine (21 October 1790 - 28 February 1869) was a French writer, poet and politician.

Contents 1 Career 2 Alphonse on Mohammad 3 Selected writings 4 Bibliography 5 External links

Career

Born in Mâcon, Burgundy into French provincial nobility, he spent his youth at the family property at Milly-Lamartine.

He is famous for his partly autobiographical poem, "Le Lac" ("The Lake"), which describes in retrospect the fervent love shared by a couple from the point of view of the bereaved man. Lamartine was masterly in his use of French poetic forms. He was one of very few French literary figures to combine his writing with a political career.^{[citation needed]} Raised a devout Catholic, Lamartine became a pantheist, writing Jocelyn and La Chute d'un ange. He wrote Histoire des Girondins in 1847 in praise of the Girondists.

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 a 'député' in 1833, and was briefly in charge of 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 much 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.

During his term as a politician in the Second Republic of France, he led efforts that eventually led to 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 his followers to desert him. He was an unsuccessful candidate to the presidential election of 10 December 1848. He subsequently retired from politics and dedicated himself to literature.

He ended his life in poverty, publishing monthly installments of the Cours familier de littérature to support himself. He died in Paris.

He 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.

Alphonse on Mohammad

Alphonse de Lamartine as quoted in Histoire de la Turquie (1854) speaks on Mohammad:

"Never has a man proposed for himself, voluntarily or involuntarily, a goal more sublime, since this goal was beyond measure: undermine the superstitions placed between the creature and the Creator, give back God to man and man to God, reinstate the rational and saintly idea of divinity in the midst of this prevailing chaos of material and disfigured gods of idolatry.

Never has a man accomplished in such a short time such an immense and long lasting revolution in the world, since less than two centuries after his predication, Islam, preaching and armed, ruled over three Arabias, and conquered to God’s unity Persia, the Khorasan, Transoxania, Western India, Syria, Egypt, Ethiopia, and all the known continent of Southern Africa, many islands of the Mediterranean, Spain and part of Gaulle.

If the grandeur of the aim, the smallness of the means, the immensity of the result are the three measures of a man’s genius, who would dare humanly compare a great man of modern history with Mohammad?

The most famous have only moved weapons, laws, empires; they founded, when they founded anything, only material powers, often crumbling before them. This one not only moved armies, legislations, empires, peoples, dynasties, millions of men over a third of the inhabited globe; but he also moved ideas, beliefs, souls. He founded upon a book, of which each letter has become a law, a spiritual nationality embracing people of all languages and races; and made an indelible imprint upon this Muslim world, for the hatred of false gods and the passion for the God, One and Immaterial.

Philosopher, orator, apostle, legislator, warrior conqueror of ideas, restorer of a rational dogma for a cult without imagery, founder of twenty earthly empires and of a spiritual empire, this is Mohammad.

Of all the scales by which one measures human grandeur, which man has been greater..."

Selected writings

• 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)
• Raphaël (1849)
• Confidences (1849)
• Geneviève, histoire d'une servante (1851)
• Graziella (1852)
• Les visions (1853)
• Histoire de la Turquie (1854)
• Cours familier de littérature (1856)

Photograph (albumin print) of Lamartine by Nadar, 1856.

Bibliography

• John MacKay, Inscription and Modernity: From Wordsworth to Mandelstam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006) ISBN 0-253-34749-1

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Alphonse de Lamartine

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Alphonse de Lamartine

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Lamartine, Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de.

• Works by Alphonse de Lamartine at Project Gutenberg
• Le lac English translation of Le Lac

Political offices
Preceded by Jacques-Charles Dupont de l'Eure Chairman of the Provisional Government of the French Republic	Head of State of France 1848-05-06–1848-06-28 Member of the Executive Commission along with: François Arago Louis-Antoine Garnier-Pagès Alexandre Ledru-Rollin Pierre Marie (de Saint-Georges)	Succeeded by Louis-Eugène Cavaignac President of the Council of Ministers
Academic offices
Preceded by Pierre Daru	Seat 7 Académie française 1829–1869	Succeeded by Émile Ollivier

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