Since the storming of the Bastille in 1789 and the establishment of the first Republic in 1792, France had lived through a succession of regimes—the Directory, the Consulate, the Empire of Napoleon I, the Bourbon Restoration in 1815, and finally, following the revolution of July 1830, the constitutional monarchy of the “bourgeois king” Louis-Philippe dOrléans. During his reign (1830-1848), known as the July Monarchy, the industrial revolution took root in France, although more slowly than it did across the Channel. The land-based aristocracy lost ground; the power of a capitalist middle class—the principal beneficiary of the previous revolutions and the key player in a very restrictive electoral system—soared; and there emerged a working class whose exploitation created urban poverty. The confrontation typical of the Restoration, between Legitimists (partisans of the Old Regime) and Liberals (Bonapartist or Orleanist), gave way to a new and enduring split between the conservatives who, under the ministry of François Guizot, favored a “golden mean,” and the democrats who, often influenced by a widespread utopian socialism, preached liberty, equality, and fraternity between rich and poor, a set of ideals inspired by the motto of the French Revolution as well as by Christian thinking.

This new split became apparent in the revolution of 1848. Over the course of three days, February 22-24, Louis-Philippe was overthrown and the Second Republic was proclaimed. The 1848 revolution helped spark rebellious movements all over Europe, from Italy to Germany and Hungary, from Vienna to Prague. Unfortunately, this “Spring of the Peoples”—with “Peoples” having the double meaning of “plebeians” and “patriots”—was short-lived. In France, Romantic poet and statesman Alphonse de Lamartine and his friends, heads of the provisional government installed at the Hotel de Ville, soon faced enormous difficulties. They had instituted universal male suffrage, but the legislative elections favored the conservatives. The national workshops created by the socialist Louis Blanc to counter unemployment proved a failure. Between June 23 and June 26, more than a thousand working-class insurgents were killed by government troops led by General Louis Cavaignac. In December 1848, the presidential election was won by the nephew of Napoleon the Great, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, an opportunist who had been sympathetic to the impoverished class but would soon throw in his lot with the “Party of Order.” On December 2, 1851, Bonaparte led a coup détat, followed by a wave of extremely repressive measures and a plebiscite in his favor, and in 1852 he established the Second Empire. Until its collapse during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, the Second Empire proved a period of economic prosperity, reinforcement of the upper middle class, and clericalism and authoritarianism that gradually gave way to a more parliamentary and socially responsible regime. It was during the war-time occupation of Paris by Prussian troops that the last revolution of the nineteenth century and the first authentic proletarian revolution took place: the Commune of 1871. The Third Republic, the dawning of France’s modern democracy, could then really get underway.

Although it is difficult to assign dates to cultural trends, 1848 appears as a landmark in the literary realm too. Since the Restoration, Romanticism (a word borrowed from the German that initially designated a literature inspired by chivalric times) had dominated the scene, first in its aristocratic, nostalgic, and Catholic incarnation, best represented by François de Chateaubriand and Alfred de Vigny, and then with a liberal and humanitarian leaning, exemplified by the bourgeois Victor Hugo and George Sand and the historian Jules Michelet. In 1848, faithful to their ideas, a large number of the Romantic writers took to the streets, or at least to their pens. The ensuing ferocious repression contributed to their withdrawal into the ivory tower of “Art for Art’s Sake,” while Realism, which was to flourish in the second half of the century with the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Émile Zola, and Guy de Maupassant, started to assert itself.

A reaction against Old Regime Classicism, Romanticism celebrated nature in its picturesque or sublime aspects; exalted the sensibility, passions, and genius of the ego; explored history as the struggle of major forces incarnated by heroes and led by Providence; and, in its later tendency, glorified “the people” and “woman” as the regenerating forces of humanity. Romanticism favored imagination and cultivated poetry, drama, and even the epic. Realism retrieved the inheritance of Enlightenment—rationality, materialism, anticlericalism, and a critical spirit—but gave it a more pessimistic spin. After 1848 the dominant classes seemed to have lost the ascendant and dynamic spirit of the decades following the Great Revolution, and the individual lost the confidence he had derived from the recognition of his new rights and his new dignity. Linked to the consolidation of capitalism, of urbanism, and of middle-class values, Realism held a more sober conception of the ego and led to a cynical reevaluation of history; it explored the people as repulsive masses, and woman as a biological and psychological case. To do so, Realism chose the novel, a form it was to bring to perfection.

Midway between the noble genres of tragedy, poetry, and epic, and low genres like farce, satire, and pamphlet, the novel proved the most appropriate tool to describe the predicaments of the class situated between the nobility and the people, the bourgeoisie. Just as the bourgeoisie depends on private property, private interests, and domesticity to ensure the proper functioning of public life, the novel seeks, by concentrating on private matters, to illuminate the public sphere. Devoid of any aristocratic legitimacy, the novel is free of the canons that govern high literature as well as of the archetypes that constrain popular literature, and it has the same diversity and openness as the bourgeoisie. A genre still considered minor when first taken up by Honoré de Balzac, and primarily conceived as the reading matter of women and persons of leisure, the novel was to become—thanks to technological improvements in the printing process, the serialization of novels in periodicals, and increased literacy and the broadening of readership—the dominant form in Zola’s time.

Under the July Monarchy, the precursors of Realism, Stendhal and Balzac, were still suffused with Romanticism. Balzac, who gave himself the mission of representing, explaining, and even modifying contemporary history, expressed the post-revolutionary rapport between the ego, a society in mutation, and the universe at large in terms of action; whether successful or not, his characters, impressed by the Napoleonic myth, take action and try to change the world while advancing their careers or their destinies. Similarly, Stendhal’s heroes, male or female, are defined by their energy. While highly dramatic, as the title of Balzac’s series, La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy), suggests, Stendhal’s and Balzac’s novels also lay claim to the seriousness of the emergent social sciences, and their authors do not refrain from offering an authoritative or challenging opinion. Under the Second Empire, things change.