Though not often highlighted in literature on music aesthetics, the Saint-Simonians, a group of French Romantic socialists, exerted widespread influence on politics, philosophy and the arts after 1830. Their conception of music as a political-affective tool in the hands of an artistic avant-garde impacted the aesthetics and practice of musique populaire, a category embracing ‘popular’ and ‘folk’ music. Pierre-Jean de Béranger, the most popular writer of chansons in this period, declared his sympathy for the cause of radical social change in song, while his friend the working-class socialist philosopher Pierre Leroux influenced music aesthetics through his alliance with the novelist George Sand (Aurore Dupin). Drawing on Leroux’s writings for its philosophy of history, Sand’s major ‘music novel’, Consuelo, advocated for musique populaire, as its operatic singer heroine finally abandons the stage and becomes a travelling folk musician.

Florence Naugrette examines the genesis and legacy of the nineteenth century’s most celebrated movement, romanticism. Whereas romanticism is often susceptible to being cast at the opposite end of the spectrum to classicism, Naugrette argues that it took its cues from wherever it could find them: the noble classical and neoclassical genres of tragedy and comedy; opera and comic opera; the Elizabethans; bourgeois drama; and popular genres including pantomime, féerie and above all melodrama. Romantic theatre thus appeared in all registers from comic to tragic, realist to fantastical. Naugrette also dispels the myth that Victor Hugo and his best known contemporaries Dumas, Vigny and Musset, all consecrated by posterity, were romantic theatre’s sole figureheads. She affords due credit to a host of other playwrights who contributed to the movement, notably women such as George Sand, Virginie Ancelot and Delphine de Girardin; and offers visibility to the actors and actresses who contributed to the success of the romantic theatre not only by playing its characters but also by inspiring playwrights and inventing new acting methods. Naugrette concludes by positing that French romanticism, originating predominantly in the French Revolution’s ethos of democratization, was also a nascent form of national popular theatre.

This chapter examines cross-fertilization in the ‘transitional’ period (roughly 1818–37) between the Gothic novel, the French roman noir, and the German Schauer traditions, including the well-known influence of E. T. A. Hoffmann on the French conte fantastique and Hoffmann’s relation to George Sand and to Sir Walter Scott. It does so by tracing the European peregrinations of the Gothic trope of forbidden space across diverse national and literary borders, from Perrrault’s ‘Bluebeard’ to Tieck, Hoffmann, Radcliffe, Stevenson, and Wilde’s Dorian Gray. The chapter then focuses on George Sand’s novel Mauprat and its dialogue with Hoffmann and Scott.

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the juggernaut of Mozart reception is witnessed in full flow – in momentous biographies, lavish anniversary celebrations, delightful fiction, and laudatory criticism. Musicians and writers had become increasingly invested in Mozart; any questioning of his genius, or collision between legends and realities in the life story, could elicit a torrent of argument and counter-argument.1 His quasi-sacred status is captured in a humorous exchange from The Musical World (1841). Deemed a heretic for questioning Mozart’s instrumentation in the Don Giovanni overture, Henry Tilbury confessed that ‘there is no such wretch living (at least I hope not) that would attempt to tarnish the bright and glorious halo of Mozart’s name’; he was duly admitted – tongue firmly in cheek – by the ‘Lord High Archbishop of the “Musical World” … into the bosom of the “Mother Church” again’.2

This chapter focuses on novels by George Sand, Marcelle Tinayre, Rachilde and Colette, along with a series of lesser-known works from the July Monarchy to explore the relation between gender and the novel in nineteenth-century France. While it would be impossible to write a history of the nineteenth-century English novel without making women writers central to the analysis, the same has not been true for histories of the French novel of this period. The chapter explores how women grappled with their outsider status and the different strategies which they adopted in order to legitimate their voices in an often hostile literary world. While drawing attention to similarities of both content and form in women’s novelistic practice, it also considers and illustrates the diversity of literary practices which characterises women’s writing of the period, and highlights the important ways in which gender shaped separate but interconnecting histories of male and female authorship of the nineteenth-century French novel.

The realist novel can be understood to bear witness to a changed understanding of history, ushered in with the modern era. This chapter argues that the French realist novel grew out of the historical novel, insofar as it attempted to offer a history of the present. However, a history of the present is challenging if not impossible to write because of the difficulty, and even the impossibility, of achieving a sufficiently distanced vantage point. French realist novels, consequently, aim to represent present reality but indirectly suggest the impossibility of any such representation. The chapter goes on to show that the French realist novels of the 1830s draw attention to the changeable nature of the present, partly because of the unstable social and political contexts of nineteenth-century France, and partly because of a shift in the way that people conceived of present reality. In at least two broad and closely interconnected senses, therefore, the early French realist novel is profoundly historical in its ambitions: it aims to offer a history of the present, however flawed that attempted history necessarily is, and it reveals the historical, or mutable, qualities of the present that it attempts to capture.

The chapter describes the emergence of the personal novel in the first decade of the nineteenth century and its subsequent evolution thirty years later in parallel with the rise of the historical novel in France. These developments were shaped by changes in book production and readership after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, leading in the 1830s to the increasing professionalization of writing. While maintaining a narrative focus on the experience of insoluble personal conflicts, the personal novel is as much concerned with the transformations and conflicts of post-Revolutionary life as with an altered private domain. Though eclipsed by the realist novel in the middle part of the century, it exerted a prolonged influence, formal as well as thematic, on fiction in Europe and beyond for 100 years or more. The kinds of motivations to which the protagonists of the personal novel appeal, because these imply a break with received belief systems, tend to be sources of scandal. The fictions themselves border on scandal in representing the reasons for these outcomes and also show how challenging it is for those who witness such actions to evaluate or respond to them. The forms through which fiction performs this role would prove to be adaptable to the representation of quite different subsequent social changes. Thus, from the 1830s the novel displays increasing ideological militancy, notably in the work of Sand.

The two centuries following Goethe’s publication of Faust witnessed a proliferation of dramas based on the Faust legend, representing a wide diversity of nations and languages. Chapter IV discusses the following adaptations of the Faust legend: George Sand, A Woman’s Version of the Faust Legend: Seven Strings of the Lyre (written in French, 1838); W. B. Yeats, The Countess Cathleen (written in English, 1892-1913); A. V. Lunacharsky, Faust and the City (written in Russian, 1908-1916); Frank Wedekind, Franziska (written in German, 1911); Arthur Davison Ficke, Mr. Faust (written in English, 1913-1922); Michel de Ghelderode, The Death of Doctor Faustus: A Tragedy for the Music Hall (written in French, 1925); Dorothy Sayers, The Devil to Pay (written in English, 1939); Paul Valéry, My Faust (written in French, 1940); Lawrence Durrell, An Irish Faustus (written in English, 1963); Vàclav Havel, Temptation (written in Czechoslovakian, 1985); David Mamet, Faustus (written in English, 2003); and David Davalos, Wittenberg (written in English, 2008).