Dictionnaire du Romantisme éd. par Alain Vaillant (review)

Reviews 241 has included an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources in addition to a select chronology. I highly recommend this book for inclusion in any college or university library collection where there is a French and/or Comparative Literature program at the undergraduate level or above. Sweet Briar College (VA) Angelo Metzidakis Vaillant, Alain, éd. Dictionnaire du Romantisme. Paris: CNRS, 2012. ISBN 978-2271 -06813-2. Pp. cviv + 848. 39 a. This encyclopedic tome of 649 articles offers a fascinating analysis of Romanticism and an overview of its global influence on aesthetics and intellectual and cultural history.A biographical dictionary of authors and works, it also traces the evolution of key Romantic themes throughout literature, social and political history, philosophy, music, and the fine arts over ten geographical areas, including Northern and Western Europe, Russia and the Slavic nations, North America, Latin America, the East, and former colonial empires. Alain Vaillant’s invaluable essay, serving as an introduction, focuses on the European foundations of the movement. After outlining its genesis in Germany, he details how France in the 1830s becomes “le vrai centre romantique” (xxii), propelling Romanticism beyond an aesthetic and intellectual phenomenon, and creating a worldwide culture involving all aspects of life, such as fashion, leisure, public spectacles (in theaters and on the street), media, social mores, and personal expression. Vaillant provides a masterful examination of Romanticism, which he characterizes broadly as any effort to fuse the material and the ideal, or the concrete and the abstract. He locates its beginning in questions dating back to the Renaissance, and he finds its influence even in the search for the absolute that is symptomatic of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, as well as in the globalized world culture of the twenty-first century. In exploring connections between Romanticism, nationbuilding , and democracy during the 1800s,Vaillant outlines the seismic shift that takes place when popular classes, such as“le peuple révolutionné né en 1789 et 1793”(xxvii) in France, generate culture instead of members of the upper echelons of society and government.Vaillant goes on to discuss the importance of the economic prosperity of the bourgeoisie and the middle class in the evolution of Romanticism, as well as the influence of the movement in religion (le Dieu romantique), history (the cult of les grands hommes), love (the union of the intellectual and the spiritual with the corporal), and art (the projection of an immaterial subject into a physical art object). In this vein, he identifies as“la véritable invention esthétique du romantisme”the process of “subjectivation, [...] la présence du sujet auctorial dans l’objet d’art créé”(liii).Vaillant’s extensive study serves as an advance organizer for readers, first as they make their way through his account of the influence of Romanticism on the development of the press and other media, the notion of privacy, the role of children as representatives of morality, the modernism of the later part of nineteenth century, and subsequently as they peruse the substantial entries that make up the Dictionnaire. A useful index of themes guides readers to articles according to geographical areas, facilitating the investigation of Romanticism in a specific country or region. The combination of general information and fresh insights makes this volume an essential resource for teachers and scholars of the nineteenth century. Brandeis University (MA) Hollie Markland Harder Van Deth, Jean-Pierre. Ernest Renan: simple chercheur de vérité. Paris: Fayard, 2012. ISBN 978-2-213-63738-9. Pp. 604. 32 a. Sans être complètement oublié, Renan (1823–1892) fait partie des écrivains dont la célébrité n’a pas longtemps dépassé son siècle. Les controverses autrefois acerbes entre cléricaux et laïques n’ayant plus le même niveau d’acuité, les écrits souvent austères de ce philologue et historien (qui avait failli devenir prêtre) ne sentent plus le soufre, ne suscitent plus la colère des bien-pensants ni l’enthousiasme des libres penseurs. À la relecture du texte, l’immense polémique créée par sa Vie de Jésus (1863), par exemple, semble difficile à comprendre de nos jours. Quant à “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?”(1882...