19th-century French poetry, similar to other literary genres, was profoundly influenced by the events of 1789 and after, and the regime change that marked the following decades. The French Revolution itself produced one of its foremost poets in André Chénier. After having welcomed the Revolution in his Le jeu de paume (1791), Chénier, disgusted with its radical excesses, wrote pamphlets and articles against the Jacobin leaders, and militant verses, such as his Iambes (written in prison and published posthumously in 1819) or the famous Ode à Marie-Anne-Charlotte Corday.

While imperial poetry was characterized by “sterility and atony”, with the great writers like Chateaubriand and Mme de Staël declared enemies of the state, the Restoration was more fruitful. Copious verses were penned about the foreign invasion, the collapse of the Napoleonic dynasty, and the return of the Bourbons. Besides specifically “commissioned poems”, a more spontaneous production also expressed frustration, pain, and anger, as well as the hopes of the nation. Béranger and Casimir Delavigne were among the most famous exponents of this kind of poetry.

Having welcomed Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise to power, the fervent Republican Pierre-Jean de Béranger (1780-1857) began to use poetry as a political weapon after the return of Louis XVIII in 1815. He criticized the monarchy and ecclesiastical power, and published Ma République (1814) and two collections of songs, in 1816 and 1821, the second volume bringing him a prison sentence. He continued to challenge the monarchy in Nabuchodonosor (1823), against Louis XVIII, and Sacre de Charles le Simple (1825), in which he ridiculed the ultra-traditionalist coronation of Charles X. Further Chansons appeared in 1825 and 1828, which saw him imprisoned again. Under the July Monarchy, his fame reached its peak. Having refused an appointment to the Académie, Béranger closed his poetical career with a final volume of Chansons (1833).

In similar fashion, the poet and dramatist Jean-François Casimir Delavigne was hailed as the official poet of Liberalism, and hence that of Louis-Philippe’s bourgeois France. Author of the Dithyrambe sur la naissance du roi de Rome (1811) and the tragedy Les vêpres siciliennes (1819, the basis of Verdi’s opera), Delavigne achieved notoriety for Les Messéniennes (1818), three elegies in which he bewailed the humiliation of France, and the Philhellenic Les nouvelles Messéniennes (1822). His fame continued to grow with the tragedies Marino Faliero (1829), Louis XI (1832), and Les enfants d’Édouard (1833). On the occasion of the Revolution of 1830, Delavigne wrote La Parisienne, which was set to music by Daniel Auber.

Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and Alfred de Vigny started their careers as fervent monarchists, but almost all of them would later espouse Republican ideals. Victor Hugo, who would later become the great icon of radically democratic republicanism, had made his debut with monarchist entries for the Jeux Floraux festival in Toulouse; these and others were collected in his Odes et ballades (1828), which include most of his political poems on the Revolution, the Empire, and the Restoration. Les Orientales (1829) was Philhellenic.

Edgar Quinet was the dominant Romantic-National poet of the July Monarchy. Frustration at the progress of the Algerian war of conquest was expressed in his Siège de Constantine (1837), and by Joseph Autran, a disciple of Lamartine, who eulogized the French campaign in Milianah (1842). But the events that rekindled the most ardent patriotic sentiment surrounded the return of the remains of Napoleon, to which Victor Hugo dedicated his poem À la Colonne (in Les chants du crépuscule, 1836), and the Rhine Crisis, which provoked many German and French poets into vituperatively nationalistic effusions – among the latter, Musset and Quinet (Lamartine taking a more conciliatory stance).

In 1848, Louis-Philippe abdicated and the Second Republic was proclaimed; by the end of the year, Louis Napoléon Bonaparte was elected president. After the election, Victor Hugo, who had initially thought that Louis Napoléon would restore order, and whose appointment as Minister of Public Education was blocked by the newly elected president, joined the ranks of the opposition. In mid-1851, he denounced the clericalism of the new government and the dictatorial ambitions of “Napoléon-le-Petit”. It was the beginning of a struggle that was to culminate in the verse collection Les châtiments (1853). Decades later, Hugo would use poetry as political commentary again: L’année terrible (1872) was based on the events from mid-1870 to mid-1871.

Indeed, the Franco-Prussian War, the French defeat, and the consequent annexation of French territory by Germany provoked a new generation of patriotic poets and bards – among them Paul Déroulède, founding member of the Ligue des Patriotes. In his Chants du soldat (1872) and Noveaux chants du soldat (1875), he celebrated the heroism of French soldiers and generals. Eugène Manuel’s Pendant la guerre (1871) was specifically dedicated to the rank and file of both opposing armies. Thédore de Banville’s poems Idylles prussiennes (1871) denounced the victorious enemy with bitter sarcasm. Other examples of patriotic revanchism verses were Henri de Bornier’s Fille de Roland, performed at the Théâtre-Français for the first time in 1875, which invoked the Chanson de Roland to channel the emotions of the period; and Jules Barbier’s Le franc-tireur: Chants de guerre 1870-1871.

The events of the Franco-Prussian War, the siege, and the Commune were also described in François Coppée’s poems Lettre d’un mobile Breton (1870), Plus de sang! (1871), and Aux amputés de la guerre (published in Le cahier rouge, 1892), as well as in Prudhomme’s Impressions de la guerre (1872). Coppée’s works contained a hint of chauvinism; the poet himself was to become one of the founding members of the anti-Semitic Ligue de la Patrie Française.

Both Coppée and Prudhomme were members of the aestheticist Parnassian movement around the anthology Parnasse contemporain (1866; 1871; 1876). In the wake of Banville, who contributed to the reintroduction of mythology in poetry, the Parnassian poets took refuge in the imagery of a remote past. By now, Symbolism was characterized by the disentanglement of art from reality (the vocation of art was to develop an autonomous language, organized in a system of symbols), as this French fin de siècle witnessed the ultimate divorce between poetry and real life.