LAMARTINE, ALPHONSE DE (1790– 1869)

LAMARTINE, ALPHONSE DE (1790– 1869)

For very brief periods of time, Alphonse de Lamartine was the most important figure in nineteenth-century French poetry, and then in nineteenth-century French politics. First celebrated, then obscure, Lamartine was a poet of the sublime who ultimately preached the virtues of popular literature; an aristocrat who helped to launch France’s Second Republic; a man viewing himself as an ‘amateur’ writer who turned to literary commercialism. This poet and politician’s life and work are defined first by drama, then by paradox, irony and contradictions.

Alphonse-Marie-Louis de Prat de Lamartine was born in Mâcon on 21 October 1790. Since five sisters followed, and his father’s two brothers had no heirs, Alphonse was to inherit family estates originally acquired along with the patents of the minor aristocracy in the eighteenth century. A profound attachment to ancestral châteaux and land remained with Alphonse, to the point even of contributing ultimately to his financial downfall; the family’s allegiance to Church and throne, however, did not.

Lamartine’s childhood and early adulthood were marked by Catholicism and his family’s influence. He attended the Institut Puppier from 1801–3, then the former Jesuit school at Belley from 1803–7. When Alphonse left school, his parents and the uncles from whom he was to inherit prevented him from starting a career, because service to Napoleon was unthinkable, and they also kept a close watch on the suitability of his romantic attachments, since he embodied the future of the family name. That

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combination of restrictions resulted in a period of dilettantism and mild dissipation. In 1811 Alphonse was sent to Italy to avoid one alliance; there he had a liaison that later inspired his novella, Graziella (1852); his affair with the wife of a neighbour upon returning to Burgundy produced his illegitimate son, Léon de Pierreclos, on 1 March 1813. Visits to Paris in 1812 and 1813 led to extravagance, gambling debts and the need for rescue by his family.

When Napoleon abdicated in 1815, Lamartine was free at last to pursue a career, and his fortunes began to change. He served briefly in the Gardedu-Corps of Louis XVIII, and when his health prompted a visit to Aix-les-Bains in the autumn of 1816 he met the woman who inspired Les Méditations, Julie Charles (1784–1817). Very poor, and already consumptive, Julie had married the distinguished physicist J.A.Charles in 1804, when she was 20 and he 58. Although their relations were almost certainly passionate at some point, Lamartine’s poetry renders this woman in ethereal and spiritualized terms. By other accounts she was tall, with black hair and dark eyes, lively, and coquettish. The two met when he rescued her from drowning in a boating accident, and professions of love followed almost immediately afterwards. Early the following year Lamartine frequented her salon in Paris, pursuing their relationship and benefiting from her social connections. The pair agreed to meet again at Aix-les-Bains in the autumn, but the illness that soon killed her prevented Julie from joining her lover. Lamartine’s most famous poem, ‘Le Lac’, commemorates that aborted rendezvous.

In one sense a banal story of adultery at a health resort, in another Lamartine’s experience with Mme Charles prepared the ground for his literary, religious and political future. Whatever the reality of their relations, Julie Charles became for him ‘Elvire’, the feminine form of CHATEAUBRIAND’S ‘bien inconnu’ [unknown good] who defines the melancholic, yearning tone of his most famous collection of poetry. In its turn, Elvire’s death and her religious conversion just prior to her death prompted a spiritual crisis and quest in Lamartine, who had abandoned the faith of his youth. He read LAMENNAIS’S Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de la religion at this time. Finally, the trauma of Julie’s death, and probably also the reality of his financial needs, caused Lamartine to seek order in his life. After 1817 he wanted a wife, and he wanted a job in politics.

Lamartine met Maria Anna Eliza Birch (Marianne) (1790–1863) at the marriage of his sister, Césarine de Vignet, in February 1819. After a passionate interlude with Léna de Larche, and unsuccessful attempts at getting a diplomatic post, he saw Marianne again and declared himself two weeks later, on 14 August 1819. Lamartine’s letters make it clear that passion was not the motive for this speedy proposal. The only child of a British major, she had a significant fortune. The problem, according to Lamartine, was that she was not beautiful: ‘I will have moral perfection itself. She lacks only a little beauty, but I’m happy enough with what there is of it.’ Marianne had ‘admirable’ brown hair, intelligent eyes and a swan neck, but her teeth stuck out, her complexion was blotchy and her nose was too big. However, the standard-bearer of the Romantic movement was prepared, and eager, to make a marriage of reason.

At the beginning of 1820 Lamartine went to Paris again to convince Marianne’s mother that he could support a wife. There he promptly fell ill and converted to Catholicism; Marianne did the same, abjuring her family’s Protestant faith. In March 1820 Lamartine was granted the position of attaché to the Embassy in Naples. On 11

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March 1820 the Meditations, unsigned, with twenty-four poems, was published. The new Romantic feelings of religious malaise and melancholia, already identified by Chateaubriand and GERMAINE DE STAËL, were represented in poetry for the first time, and were immediately accessible in the familiar forms of odes and elegies. This collection created a sensation. Sainte-Beuve wrote that ‘from one day to the next the climate and the light had changed…it was a revelation’. A youthful VICTOR HUGO heralded Alphonse de Lamartine as the ‘real poet’ for whom France had been waiting. Audiences were spellbound. Lamennais wanted to meet the author of the spiritual poems. Seven editions of Meditations appeared in its first year of publication; 10 years later there were nineteen more. In response to the Meditations the Minister of the Interior sent Lamartine a collection of great literary works, and the poet was asked to write a report on the role of the French nobility in a government with two chambers. As of 1820, Lamartine was launched in the political and literary worlds of France. Alphonse married his brideon6 June 1820.

On 15 June 1820 the couple, accompanied by Marianne’s mother, left for Naples. In the next 10 years, Lamartine occupied, and resigned from, several diplomatic postings in Italy. And between 1820 and 1830 Lamartine produced a number of individual works along with two major collections of poetry, the Nouvelles méditations poétiques (1823), and Harmonies poétiques et religieuses (1830). Although they had admirers, both collections were criticized for stylistic sloppiness. In the years 1820–30 the Lamartines also had two children and were saddened by several deaths. Their son Alphonse was born on 15 February 1821; he died on 4 November 1822. Their daughter Julia was born 14 May 1822. Two sisters of Lamartine died, and on 16 November 1829, 11 days after Lamartine was elected to the Académie Française, his mother died, fatally burned by scalding bath water. This period concludes with the crowning of Louis-Philippe, and Alphonse’s resignation from the diplomatic service on 15 September 1830.

In 1831 Lamartine failed in his bid to be elected a deputy, in part because of the ambiguity of his platform. He then wrote La Politique rationnelle (Rational Politics, November 1831) to define his political views. At this stage Lamartine, a liberal, constitutional, monarchist influenced by Lamennais, already believed in the separation of Church and state, the abolition of the death penalty, expanded suffrage, freedom of the press and of education. Following his electoral defeat, Lamartine and his family embarked for the Orient in July 1832, partly with a view to addressing Lamartine’s religious questions. The questions remained unanswered. In their stead, Lamartine acquired debts, and more spiritual doubt as a result of Julia’s death in Bayreuth on 7 December 1832. In January 1833 Lamartine was elected in absentia as a deputy from the city of Bergues.

Throughout his career as a deputy, from 1831–47, Lamartine deliberately balanced between the two parties. His increasingly progressive humanitarian ideas gave him many points in common with the Liberal Party, but he did not break with the King’s regime until 27 January 1843, and even then he kept his distance from the leader of the opposition, LOUIS THIERS. Lamartine’s critics found his ideas superficial, but over the years he developed a tremendous following with his gift for speaking, and his appeal to both parties. As a politician Lamartine had to fight against the image of a dreamy poet, but he did continue to publish. Lamartine’s Oeuvres complètes appeared from 1834–43. Jocelyn (1836), a long narrative poem about a man who is forced to renounce human love

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in order to become a priest, was one of Lamartine’s biggest popular successes. La Chute d’un ange (The Fall of an Angel, 1838), another narrative poem, was about an angel who became human for love of a woman. Recognizing Lamartine’s move away from traditional Christianity, Rome put Jocelyn and The Fall of an Angel on the Index. Recueillements (Contemplations) was Lamartine’s last collection of poetry (1839). Echoing most critics, Sainte-Beuve wrote that with these works Lamartine was ‘renouncing his glory’. As an emerging deputy Lamartine also wrote two works in prose to assuage his growing need for money. Proscribed by Rome as well, Voyage en Orient (1835) recounted that trip, but inaccurately, according to travelling companions. Les Girondins (1847), another popular success, told about revolutionaries who missed their chance to avoid bloodshed. Lamartine informed Molé, the King’s minister, that this work was to prepare the next revolution.

Lamartine helped to catalyse that revolution even more directly in February 1848. Over the course of his career he had expanded on the ideas of Rational Politics; his belief in the sovereignty of the people had become even more pronounced. On 19 February 1848 Lamartine gave a speech inciting the public to attend a ‘Banquet’, the means found to get around Louis-Philippe’s interdiction against potentially subversive gatherings. The government threatened military intervention, so no one attended, but on 22 February discontented people were milling around in the streets, and the deputies—without Lamartine’s signature—voted to impeach the government. On 23 February the King tried to form a new government, but it was too late. Barricades were up on 24 February, and by midday Louis-Philippe abdicated in favor of the Duchesse d’Orléans as regent for her son. That day Lamartine was asked to be head of a government under the regency, but he refused to take part in anything but a republic. It is theorized that Lamartine had been planning this moment all along. The leader of a provisional government, his eloquence alone quelled angry mobs in the revolution’s immediate aftermath, and after immense success in that April’s elections, he was encouraged—but declined—to become France’s dictator. Lamartine represented moderate politics and a republic of progress. But the increasingly riotous mobs in May and June led to military intervention, and on 24 June the Assembly voted General Cavaignac executive powers. In August of the same year the hero of February was falsely accused of appropriating public funds, and that December Louis Napoleon was elected president of the Second Republic, with Lamartine coming in fifth.

Lamartine anticipated France’s move towards a republic, and saved that institution with his courage between February and April. There are different theories for why he was unable to sustain his political vision. ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE thought that Lamartine’s dramatic demise resulted from the same coalition of parties that put him into power: ultimately Lamartine could not please everyone. Charles Baudelaire spoke for many when he wrote that in the end ‘the people could not find a real idea for the future beneath the poetic thoughts of a great writer’.

Lamartine came to accept Louis Napoleon, but after 1848 the poet-politician was not an active participant in the Chamber, and he formally resigned as a deputy following the coup d’état in 1851. The all-consuming preoccupation of Lamartine’s last 20 years was money. Over time he had accumulated tremendous debts with a lavish lifestyle, the subsidy of his political life, the acquisition of more land, disastrous speculations and, most touchingly, acts of charity that persisted even in bankruptcy. To pay his creditors,

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Lamartine wrote about his professional life in Histoire de la révolution de 1848 (1849). Les Confidences (1849) and Les Nouvelles confidences (1851) as well as Raphaël (1849) pitched his private life to the public. He wrote a play, Toussaint l’Ouverture (1850). He produced voluminous histories of Russia (1854) and Turkey (1855), as well as of the Restoration (1851–3). All of his historical and biographical works are notoriously unreliable. Lamartine also produced explicitly popular literature, tales about servants who sacrifice themselves for their families. He cranked out occasional poems and regular articles in a succession of journals he produced for a fee—Le Conseiller du peuple (1849–51), Le Civilisateur (1852–4) and Le Cours familier de littérature (1856–69). Finally, he produced his own Oeuvres complètes (1860–6). These works were all obviously written in haste.

By the 1860s Lamartine’s fall from ‘pure’ poetry to hack literature, his shameless use of pathos to market his works, his political oblivion and his desperate financial state rendered him the object of both pity and disdain. In 1860 Lamartine finally started to sell his houses, land and horses. The long-suffering Marianne died on 23 May 1863; in a magnanimous gesture Marianne left her jewels and part of her fortune to Valentine de Cessiat, Alphonse’s niece. Lamartine married Valentine secretly, probably in 1867, after Pope Pius IX had given the necessary dispensation. That year his mind also began to wander, and finally, after rejecting offers twice, he had to accept a pension from the empire that opposed everything for which he had fought. He died on 28 February 1869, with Julie Charles’ death-bed crucifix nearby, and his head on Valentine’s shoulder. Although offered a national funeral, Alphonse de Lamartine was buried with his family in the Chapel at Saint-Point, the only family estate he still owned.

Lamartine considered himself primarily a politician, but he is best known as a poet. As

a poet he is perceived as the first Romantic, but he himself was uninterested in identifying himself with the Romantic movement; in any case Marceline Desborde- Valmore’s Romantic collection of poems actually came first, and his forms are classical. Although Lamartine is a fixture of the French canon, even his Pléiade editor remarks that few read or study him. His facility of expression, his volubility, his sentimental scenarios, do not appeal to the modern reader any more than they did to such later contemporaries as Flaubert. Lamartine’s best chance of rehabilitation currently comes from traits particularly criticized during his life—his association with popular literature, and the ‘femininity’ of his writings. Paradox and irony continue to define Lamartine after his death.