The French Revolution and the Cultural Renewal of Europe - Essay Example

The French Revolution and the Cultural Renewal of Europe 2 ABSTRACT The French Revolution altered the cultural sensibilities of Europe’s nation states as well as the continent’s traditional political power structure. A world ruled by the wealthy and powerful, in which artists and writers created great works for their patrons, came to embrace egalitarian themes in the years after the Revolution. The development of Western culture, including the evolution of its various art forms, reflected those new themes. The French Revolution had a tidal wave effect on Western society. The “divine right of kings” gave way before new concepts of inalienable human rights and popular government. The seminal event in the evolution of political thought also was transformative for the development of Europe’s great cultural tradition. A civilization in which Neo-Classically influenced works of art and literature honored royalty and aristocracy underwent a radical change. The toppling of the ancien regime in France did more than set off a chain of events that would transform Western Europe from monarchy to democracy. It radically changed the very notion of culture. After the revolution, the idea that culture was the exclusive province of the wealthy and powerful changed forever. Culture in a world where noblemen had been patrons of the great artists was now the property of everyone, of rich and poor. Liberty, equality and fraternity The ideas that fired the revolution were equally motivating to the painters, composers and writers of Europe, who had seen nothing comparable to the fervor with which Marat, Robespierre and other firebrands of the Revolution took up the philosophies of Rousseau and Montesquieu. The power of Enlightenment thinking took solid root on both sides of the Atlantic, inspiring political and cultural leaders to adopt the cause of liberty, equality and fraternity as their own. “The tide of Revolution that swept away much of the old political order in Europe and America in the last quarter of the 18th century had momentous consequences for the arts. Both the American and French revolutions had in fact used art as a means of expressing their The French Revolution 4 spiritual rejection of the aristocratic society against which they were physically rebelling…” (Cunningham and Reich, 2006). The art of David typified this spiritual and physical break with the past, using classical imagery to glorify the ideals of the Revolution. While David never truly freed himself from the constraints of Neo-Classicism, artists throughout Europe used revolutionary principles to form a new school of thought, one in which the individual reigned supreme. In “the Romantic period, the idea gained ground of the artist as unique individual genius who was at once eccentric to or removed from society and the sage critic of it” (Murray, 2004). To the artists of the Romantic era, the French Revolution was far from being simply a widespread political phenomenon, a power struggle arising from economic deprivation of the lower classes in which politically ambitious figures manipulated circumstances in order to gain control of government. For the Romantics, the Revolution was a human experience, a manifestation of primal forces at work in people’s hearts and psyches. The English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge idea of revolution was that it was “not a conspiracy but an elemental power whose challenge cannot be answered by mere obedience to the past” (Ben-Israel, 2002). As observers whose response to the passion of the Revolution was both eloquent and emotional, “Romantics always insisted that it was natural and honourable for young and benevolent hearts to fall for the French Revolution” (Ben-Israel, 2002). One of the most “natural” literary expressions from this period was Thomas Carlyle’s history of the Revolution itself, which was “an illustration of romantic history which consists mainly of the writing of imaginative, dramatic and live history” (Ben-Israel, 2002). Some of the most renowned creative geniuses in the Western cultural tradition were deeply affected by the great principles of the Revolution. The French Revolution 5 Beethoven Few have ever matched Beethoven for drama and sheer raw emotion. A contemporary of the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary periods, Beethoven translated the call for freedom, creating a body of work that seemed to evoke the unlimited potential of the human spirit unshackled from the fetters of its oppressive past. Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, one of many artists who gained inspiration from Beethoven’s artistic vision, wrote “Beethoven is the friend and contemporary of the French Revolution, and he remained faithful to it even when, during the Jacobin dictatorship, humanitarians with weak nerves…turned from it, preferring to destroy tyrants on the theatrical stage with the help of cardboard swords” (Stravinsky, 1998). After the heady days of the Revolution had passed and tyranny again held sway in France, Beethoven, who had once regarded Napoleon as a liberator (he composed the “Eroica” symphony in Napoleon’s honor), did indeed “remain faithful” to his belief in freedom and the sanctity of human rights. After the dictator’s armies crushed the Prussians in 1808, Beethoven vented his anger over what he saw as Napoleon’s betrayal of the Revolution. “It’s a pity I don’t understand the art of war as well as that of music,” he wrote. “I would destroy him!” (Sipe, 1998). Dickens English novelist Charles Dickens was also profoundly impacted by the Revolution and by the progressive ideas that emerged from it and from the Romantic period. Dickens’ highly dramatic style and strong social conscience were inspired by the promise of social freedom and equality that emerged from the French Revolution. Dickens’ highly critical profiles of Industrial The French Revolution 6 Age England generally invariably take a dark, oppressed view that is subsumed in a kind of moral and spiritual triumph that echoes the optimism of the Revolution. Dickens seemed to have captured – in a way that escaped others - the exultant hope for the future that Democratic principles brought out of the morass of absolutism. “Dickens’ French Revolution is probably more like the real French Revolution than Carlyle’s…Dickens knew less of the Revolution but he had more of it. When Dickens attacked abuses, he battered them down with exactly that sort of cheery and quite one-sided satisfaction with which the French mob battered down the Bastille” (Chesterton, 2004). New ethic, transcendent perspective: Romanticism The gloss of high-minded enthusiasm, which the Revolution gave off like the flames of a warming fire, helped to produce another transformative event, one that proved as culturally influential as was the political cataclysm of 1789. The Romantic movement transcended the worldly concerns of the political realm. “For philosophers as much as for historians, the world after 1789 called for something higher than cynicism, more memorable than the tattle of the salon, more plausible than the publicizing of progress and the hidden hand of l’esprit humain” (Bentley, 2003). From a cultural standpoint, Romanticism provided fertile ground indeed for the highly personal, subjective themes favored by artists of the era, subjects that often drew from folktales and mythological traditions. These traditions, which offered the native populations of Europe moral sustenance during the post-Revolutionary period, helped stiffen resistance to Napoleon. “Many Romantic artists identified with the nationalist movements of the times and either The French Revolution 7 supported their own country’s fight for freedom (as in the case of Verdi) or championed the cause of others (as did Lord Byron)” (Cunningham and Reich, 2006). In any event, the tumultuous political environment of the Revolution spawned a powerful reaction within the cultural environment of Europe. Murray found an inextricable link between the two, suggesting that “Perhaps there is indeed an expectation that artistic and political radicalism should go hand in hand” (Murray, 2004). The highly personal and nationalistic works of the German Romantic artist, Friedrich, and of the Spaniard, Goya, would seem to bear out the proposition that the two do “go hand in hand.” As this nationalism yielded to explorations of Nature and of the spiritual in the world around, the new aesthetic grew closer to a vision of Utopia, in itself an outgrowth of the fervor of the Revolution. The exhilaration of the new egalitarianism emerged from the despotism of Napoleon reinvigorated, energizing artists with “a degree of utopianism (which) influenced their visions of social possibilities” (Murray, 2004). These possibilities “appealed confidently to the present (and future) vastly expanded public, who were now both the patrons and consumers of art…the reaction to the French Revolution opened rifts within the public, and between the public and private that Romantic culture struggled to unite” (Murray, 2004). It is possible, then, to see Romanticism as the cultural salve that sought to heal the scars left by the violence of the Revolution. The French Revolution set in motion powerful forces of cultural as well as political change. The cultural revolution that ensued marked nothing less than a change in consciousness, a new way of looking at the world, both physically and spiritually. For the first time in history, The French Revolution 8 culture truly belonged to the people of Europe. The fires of revolution didn’t truly diminish until after 1848 but the world that emerged from the revolutionary period of 1789-1848 was changed forever, from without and within. The French Revolution 9 References Ben-Israel, H. (2002). English Historians on the French Revolution. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 126. Bentley, M. (2003). Companion to Historiography. New York, NY: Routledge. 405. Chesterton, G.K. (2008). Appreciations and Criticisms of Works of Charles Dickens. London, UK: Echo Library. Cunningham, L.S., and Reich, J.J. (2006). Culture and Values, Vol. 2. Boston, MA: Wadsworth. 424, 460. Murray, C.J. (2004). Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760-1850, Vol. 1. New York, NY: Taylor & Francis Group. 33, 110, 577. Sipe, T. (1998). Beethoven, Eroica Symphony. Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge Press. 52. Stravinsky, I. (1998). An Autobiography. New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, Ltd. 116. Read More