'Ce monument national': Aesthetic and political conflict in the reception of romantic dramas (1813--1848) (France, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas).

摘要

This dissertation studies the critical and satiric reception of Romanticism, notably Alexandre Dumas, père and Victor Hugo's major dramas. These responses stage a veritable battle between the Classiques and Romantiques over poetics. Close readings demonstrate that both sides cast the debate over artistic production as a crisis for the French nation. Beginning in 1814, the Classiques condemn Romanticism as political factionalism and subversion falsely disguised as an aesthetic doctrine. Conversely, proponents of the “nouvelle école” argue in favor of a French imaginary and poetics that breaks with the foreign and pagan doctrine inherited from Classical Antiquity. Each side rejects the poetics of the other as sterile and destructive. While the acrimonious exchange of insults continued for approximately thirty-five years, all remained deeply committed to the same goal, that of defining an aesthetics and poetics that would guarantee the value of the French literary canon and ensure its future development. In their arguments, this canon functioned simultaneously as the inherited corpus of masterpieces demonstrating France's dominance through its intellectual and artistic genius, and as a collection of cultural references that serve to educate the French public and develop its taste and judgment. Although the stakes involved in anchoring the prestige and reputation of the French cultural patrimoine were political, the question at the heart of the debate remained one of aesthetics and poetics. By concentrating on the portrayal of the artistic debate itself, the figure of the popular critic, and that the artist and his production methods, this dissertation traces the coupling and uncoupling of the artistic and political in reception documents in an attempt to better understand the intersection between art, theory, and national identity.