French literary romanticism was in essence an extension into the intellectual world of those principles which had received so striking a political embodiment in the French Revolution of 1789. About a generation was required for these principles to propagate themselves from the realm of practice into that of theory; in the Revolution they appeared as crude instincts; romanticism refined and systematized them into self-conscious doctrines. The revolutionary mob murdered the aristocrats who oppressed them; the romanticists proclaimed the effeteness of all arbitrary rules and all traditional ordinances, whether in life or in art. The revolutionists cried, in effect, "Each man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost"; the romanticists asserted, more politely but in as anarchic a spirit, "The individual alone is sacred; his development is of greater import than the welfare of society." And if romanticism had its analogue for the "Liberty" of the famous formula in its emancipation from traditional law, and its own version of the "Equality" as the "sacredness of the individual," it also had its equivalent for "Fraternity" in that somewhat hectic sentiment which usually proved too vaporous to bear the stress of an actual human situation. Both movements, too, were passionate exaggerations; they overshot their mark, and have had to be limited, qualified, and restrained by the saner sense of later generations.
If romanticism had everywhere this general character of revolt against authority, assertion of the individual, and deification of the sentiments, it is notable that while in England it applied its theories chiefly to political and religious life, and in Germany to metaphysical realms, in France it concentrated itself largely upon the relations of the sexes. In such typical romantic documents as Châteaubriand's "René" and George Sand's "Leone Leoni," the traditional bugaboo is marriage (especially the _mariage de convenance_, which indeed was a fair mark for reformers), the extolled individualism takes the form of free love, and the sentiments deified are the thrills of the amorous heart. The results of the over-enthusiastic application of these romantic ideas to so complex a matter as sexual relations are sometimes bewildering, sometimes absurd, sometimes pathetic. George Sand's utterances on love and friendship, for example, often leave one uncertain whether to laugh or to cry, so generous is her primary impulse, so sophistical and topsy-turvy are the conclusions to which it opens the way. When she writes, "The greater the crime, so much the more genuine the love it accomplishes," our anger at the sophism quickly gives place to pity for the sophist. When we learn that her ideal of friendship between a man and a woman, or, as she called it, _camaraderie_, involved "unlimited confidential conversations," we know not which to doubt, her insight or her good faith. And in all this she is typical of her age and school, which made a fetich of the "demoniac power of love," and pursued liaisons with a fervor that can only be called religious.