Empathy, Framing, and Structural Artifice: Implicit Didacticism in French Romantic Verse

Abstract

The three major French Romantic poets — Lamartine, Vigny, and Hugo — suggested as well as proclaimed humanitarian ideals. They framed their messages with the familiar doctrines of Catholicism, adapting these beliefs to a post-Christian message in which the visionary poet rather than Jesus implicitly served as the chief mediator for justifying God. They implied social values by contrasting leitmotifs of persecution and innocence, and by featuring innocence more prominently. In a century of political and religious turmoil, both the monarchy and the Church had failed to ensure justice. Lamartine's Jocelyn and La Chute d'un ange, Vigny's Journal d'un Poète, and Hugo's La Légende des Siècles and L'Art d'être grand-père depict suffering victims to make readers uneasy with the status quo. Lamartine aims mainly to elicit sympathy. Vigny at times suggests, in addition, that readers may risk incurring the characters' fate. But it is Hugo who most richly integrates his personal experience with universal appeals to empathy, culminating in the successful life review and reminiscence of his neglected final masterpiece, L'Art d'être grand-père (1877).