LAMARTINE, ALPHONSE-MARIE-LOUIS de. - French poet, writer and politician, b. at Mâcon on 10 Oct. 1790, d. at Paris on 28 Feb. 1869. He completed his studies at the College of the Fathers of the Faith (former Jesuits) at Belley, and in his youth he sojourned in Italy and Switzerland. In 1820 he married an English Protestant woman, M. E. Birch. Having entered the diplomatic career, he was attached to the legation at Naples (1821), then embassy secretary in London, and finally chargé d'affaires at the court of Tuscany. After the accession to the throne of Louis Philippe he entered the political arena, drawing close to the liberals, whereas in the early years of the Restoration he had been a conservative. In 1832 he set out with his family for the East, where he lost his daughter Julie. The following year he was elected deputy for the constituency of Bergues, and from this moment begins his political fortune, owed above all to the skill of his speeches, which have remained famous. He was a member of the provisional government of 1848 as minister of Foreign Affairs, and in this office he always maintained a line of prudence and respect for the democratic institutions of other countries. On 23 Apr. 1848 he was elected a member of the Constituent Assembly, but in June of the same year he was forced to yield power to General E. Cavaignac, and in the December elections for the presidency of the Republic he was defeated by Prince Louis Bonaparte, the future Napoleon III. In 1851, after the coup d'état, he retired to private life.
Among his numerous works in verse and in prose, mention should be made of: Méditations poétiques (1820), the short poem La mort de Socrate (1823); Dernier chant du pèlerinage d'Harold (1825), inspired by the death of Byron at Missolonghi; Harmonies poétiques et religieuses (1830); Souvenirs, impressions, pensées et paysages pendant un voyage en Orient (1835); placed on the Index, decr. 22 Sept. 1836); two episodes of a cyclic epic that L. never brought to completion: Jocelyn, journal trouvé chez un curé de village (1836); placed on the Index, decr. 22 Sept. 1836) and La chute d'un ange (1838; placed on the Index, decr. 27 Aug. 1838); Histoire des Girondins (1847), a work devoid of any scruple for historical truth. Having withdrawn from politics, he wrote, among other things: Confidences (1849), Raphaël (1849), Graziella (1852), Histoire de la Restauration (1852), Cours familier de littérature (1856-69).
Even if the impetus of his inspiration lacks that watchfulness which could have spared him rhetorical redundancy, L.'s poetry has a charm that time does not manage to diminish. His verse has a musicality such as is not found in the work of any of the other great French romantics. But at the same time, this lyrical facility generates superficiality in the interpretation of things, in which, in fact, L. attains gravity, never depth; the voice of the universe that he makes resound in his poetry has a moved accent, not one of passion. His novels, idyllic representations of highly falsified persons and settings, among which in Italy Graziella is especially well known, being set in the Naples area, have the merit of an effective stylistic elegance and of freshness of description.
L. AND THE PROLETARIAN QUESTION
Although his good fortune was short-lived, L. was undoubtedly a great political man. In the provisional government of 1848 he represented the moderate element. He even defied unpopularity, provided that legality was respected. Among the first, he sensed the enormous importance of the proletarian question and foresaw the danger arising from a failure to solve that problem: in this he was a precursor. He advocated the necessity of legalizing charity and of state philanthropic and welfare works, but more to block the path of socialism than to combat the injustice of the inhuman conditions of the workers. His is a conservative republic, in which there is no talk of revising fortunes or of redistributing goods.
L. must be considered in all his greatness and his courage, and also with his basenesses. Apparently his political life is a succession of incoherences; in reality he did nothing but carry out a most skillful game that at the right moment was to bring him to power. His uncertainties, his changes of flag, are the continuity of an intent to win the trust of the masses in order to be able to hold them in his hand, to channel them and in this way to prevent the overthrow of order and the advent of socialism.
Bibliography18 works
L. AND THE CHURCH
As has been mentioned, three works by L. were placed on the Index: Jocelyn, La chute d'un ange, Souvenirs et impressions. Jocelyn is the love story of a priest who falls madly in love with Laurence, and when the blind force of events separates him from her, he can no longer hold out, and over her dying body he bends down and dies. It seems that at least the basis of the plot is true and that L. had known the priest of whom he speaks: but the poem also proclaims the consecration to God of natural love, which one cannot escape, and carries platonic love to the point of exasperation; this being the romantic thesis in vogue in his times (cf., for example, Paul et Virginie by Bernardin de St-Pierre). In La Chute d'un ange, besides the legend of the angel Cedar, who falls in love with a daughter of the Cainites, Daidha, and is therefore condemned to recover eternity, lost as punishment for the step he took, through misery and sorrow, L. sets out an entire design of purifying metempsychosis and of education conducted on the premises of J.-J. Rousseau. The Souvenirs et impressions..., then, clearly show how for L., who at the tomb of Christ, in Jerusalem, had not recovered the faith he had lost, and, having returned to France, had increasingly yielded to the spirit of the times, religion is reduced to a pure sentiment, to a temperament of the soul, which produces a quietistic adaptation, a volitional inertia in the face of events; truth is defined not as a conviction, but as a simple state of mind, which varies with the varying of contingencies and of the reactions of sentiment. These are defects that are not redeemed by the charm of the style and by so many expressions, even exact according to Christianity, but flowered solely from a sentimental blaze, which always ignores Revelation, the profound truths of the faith, the moral duties, which stand above all sensibility.