FRENCH REVOLUTION 



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FRENCH REVOLUTION 



contained Cinderella, the Sleeping Beauty, 

 Puss in Boots, Tom Thumb and other favor- 

 ites. See MOTHER GOOSE. 



From the Eighteenth Century to the Present. 

 The eighteenth century was far below the sev- 

 enteenth in the quality and amount of liter- 

 ary achievement. During the first half there 

 was very little that could pretend to original- 

 ity, while later in the century, when there 

 arose writers of undoubted power and indi- 

 viduality, all France was so engaged with 

 social and political problems that little save 

 propaganda literature was demanded or pro- 

 duced. If one man were to be chosen to rep- 

 resent the century, that man would undoubt- 

 edly be Voltaire, and Voltaire's works were 

 destructive rather than constructive. The cur- 

 rent religion, the current philosophy, he at- 

 tacked fiercely, and by his stirring up of the 

 questioning spirit he did much to bring on 

 that great outbreak which he did not live to 

 see the French Revolution. Even more in- 

 fluential in this direction was Rousseau, who, 

 as one writer says, "provided most of the 

 ideas which the Revolution tried to put in 

 practice." Other outstanding writers of the 

 eighteenth century were Montesquieu, who 

 wrote on the philosophy of history; Le Sage, 

 damatist and novelist; and Beaumarchais, the 

 most important dramatic writer of the century 

 in France. 



The most significant literary movement of 

 the nineteenth century was that toward free- 

 dom of literary form the movement known 

 as Romanticism. Chateaubriand, perhaps un- 



consciously, began it, but it reached its cul- 

 mination in the works of Victor Hugo. As 

 always, the tendency toward romanticism was 

 carried too far, and the real merits of the 

 movement were obscured by exaggerations, so 

 that as a movement it had only a brief life, 

 but it left its permanent impress on literature, 

 lessening the formal restraints of classicism and 

 imparting a new note of naturalness. 



The French writers of note in the nineteenth 

 century are numerous, and include Lamartine, 

 Gautier, Sainte-Beuve, Musset, George Sand, 

 Dumas (father and son), Balzac, Daudet, Zola 

 and Maupassant. Each of these was preemi- 

 nent in one or more ways. Balzac, for in- 

 stance, is accounted by some critics the world's 

 greatest novelist, while to Maupassant is con- 

 ceded almost universally the honor of having 

 produced the very finest short stories ever 

 written; but Hugo towers above them all by 

 reason of his versatility and his power to draw 

 characters that live in men's minds. Though 

 fiction in one form or another was perhaps the 

 dominant literary type in the nineteenth cen- 

 tury, other departments were well represented. 

 Sardou, Rostand and Anatole France produced 

 plays that acquired wide popularity, and Renan 

 and Taine wrote histories that were epoch- 

 making in their methods. The literary future 

 of France looked very bright during the early 

 years of the twentieth century, but with the 

 outbreak of the War of the Nations in 1914 

 there was practically a cessation of produc- 

 tions, excepting those of a controversial char- 

 acter. A.MC c. 



FKENCH REVOLUTION 



RENCH REVOLU'TION, one of the great- 

 est internal struggles that ever rent any na- 

 tion. The motto of its leaders was "Liberty, 

 Equality, Fraternity" and if at the close it 

 seemed that these had not been achieved '(for 

 the same reactionary Bourbon house again held 

 the throne), the results were still very real and 

 very lasting.. In the broadest sense the Revo- 

 lution may be looked upon as extending from 

 1789 to 1815, the date of Napoleon's overthrow 



in the Battle of Waterloo, but this article 

 treats only of the first ten years of that period, 

 leaving the latter part to be considered in the 

 article NAPOLEON I.. The causes, too, are 

 passed over here, but are fully discussed under 

 FRANCE, subtitle History. 



The Outbreak. Even Louis XVI, of the 

 House of Bourbons who "forgot nothing and 

 learned nothing," had become convinced that 

 only the States-General, the legislative branch, 



