Chapter 14 - A. W. Schlegel, Staël, and Sismondi in 1814

Summary

Chapter 14 reviews the texts published in French in 1814 by A. W. Schlegel, Staël, and Sismondi – core members of the Groupe de Coppet – which led to them being dubbed a confédération romantique. The texts furnish a Romantic dialectic and a vision of the new man for the various anti-classical reactions playing out in Europe over the previous fifty years. Schlegel offers Shakespeare and arguments to reject France, Staël proposes Faust and Kant, and in Sismondi, finally, one finds a free Middle Ages opposing that of Chateaubriand. But the three also offer an idea of the nation that seems as influential as their literary ideas, and tools to transform the Europe of the nineteenth century. These writers elaborate a new Europe of the imagination to confront the dead Europe of the Emperor. Romanticism is vast, and these texts are distinguished above all by the immense scope of the subjects they treat.