Reason and Feeling - The Enlightenment Transformation

The 18th century presents a paradox in French poetry. The age that produced Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau—prose writers who changed Western thought—created surprisingly little memorable verse. Yet this apparent poetic drought prepared the ground for Romanticism's explosive flowering. The Enlightenment transformed what poetry could say, even as it struggled with how to say it.

The period began with the Regency's libertine spirit and ended with revolutionary tumult. Between these extremes, French poetry grappled with new ideas about nature, reason, feeling, and society. If the century produced few great poems, it produced essential arguments about poetry's purpose and possibilities.

The Rococo Moment: Poetry as Pleasure

The Regency (1715-1723) and Louis XV's early reign saw Classical severity give way to rococo playfulness. Poetry became lighter, more ornamental, openly erotic. This shift reflected broader social changes—the court's move from Versailles to Paris, the rise of intimate salons, a new emphasis on pleasure over duty.

Jean-Baptiste-Louis Gresset (1709-1777) exemplified rococo wit. His "Ver-Vert" tells of a parrot raised by nuns who learns to swear when visiting a different convent:

Ver-Vert était un perroquet dévot, Une belle âme innocemment guidée...

(Ver-Vert was a devout parrot, A beautiful soul innocently guided...)

The poem's mock-heroic tone and metrical virtuosity show Classical techniques serving frivolous ends. Yet Gresset's playfulness has serious implications—his satire of religious education anticipates Enlightenment anticlericalism.

Gentil-Bernard (1708-1775) pushed rococo eroticism further. His "L'Art d'aimer" updates Ovid for French bedrooms:

Que l'Amour soit toujours le dieu de mes vers! C'est lui dont je reçois cette flamme divine...

(Let Love always be the god of my verses! From him I receive this divine flame...)

Such poetry seems merely decorative, but it asserted pleasure's legitimacy against religious and Classical austerity. The rococo prepared for deeper challenges to authority.

Voltaire: The Philosopher as Poet

Voltaire (1694-1778) dominated the century's literary life, though his poetry is now overshadowed by his prose. Yet contemporaries considered him primarily a poet—his epic La Henriade went through 60 editions. Understanding why requires historical imagination.

Voltaire wrote in every poetic genre: epic, tragedy, satire, epistle, epigram. His verses spread Enlightenment ideas to audiences who might never read philosophical treatises:

Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer.

(If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.)

This famous line from the "Épître à l'auteur du livre des Trois Imposteurs" shows Voltaire's method—complex ideas compressed into memorable formulas. His poetry made philosophy portable.

Voltaire's tragedies, now rarely performed, pioneered political themes. Mahomet critiques religious fanaticism through the Prophet's story. Zaïre explores cultural conflict between Christian and Muslim. These plays brought contemporary issues to the classical stage.

His lighter verse remains more readable. The "Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne" confronts optimistic philosophy with earthquake horror:

Philosophes trompés qui criez : « Tout est bien » ; Accourez, contemplez ces ruines affreuses...

(Deceived philosophers who cry: "All is well"; Come, contemplate these frightful ruins...)

Voltaire's poetry matters less for aesthetic achievement than cultural impact. He proved verse could carry any content—science, politics, philosophy—preparing for poetry's expanded role in the next century.

Women Philosophers in Verse

Enlightenment salons, like their 17th-century predecessors, fostered women's writing. But 18th-century women poets engaged more directly with philosophical and political questions. Their work challenges narratives that separate "feminine" feeling from "masculine" reason.

Françoise de Graffigny (1695-1758), though better known for prose, wrote verses exploring women's condition:

Du sexe malheureux déplorable partage! À la honte, aux douleurs nous sommes condamnés...

(Deplorable lot of the unhappy sex! To shame and sorrows we are condemned...)

Her poetry connects personal experience to social analysis, anticipating feminist critique.

Julie de Lespinasse (1732-1776), muse to the Encyclopédistes, wrote passionate verses that complicate period stereotypes:

Il faut aimer, c'est ce qui nous soutient...

(One must love, it's what sustains us...)

Her poems argue for emotion's philosophical importance, challenging pure rationalism. The tension between reason and feeling that defines late 18th-century culture appears clearly in women's verse.

Didactic Poetry: Verse as Vehicle

The Enlightenment produced enormous quantities of didactic poetry—versified treatises on everything from astronomy to agriculture. Modern readers find these works unreadable, but they served important functions, making knowledge accessible and memorable.

Jacques Delille (1738-1813) became hugely popular translating Virgil's Georgics and writing original descriptive poems. His Les Jardins codified landscape aesthetics:

Ainsi l'art des jardins, favorable aux rêveurs, Des poètes anglais a deviné les mœurs...

(Thus the art of gardens, favorable to dreamers, Has divined the customs of English poets...)

Delille seems merely decorative now, but his nature poetry prepared French readers for Romantic landscape. His technical skill—he could describe anything in perfectly scanning alexandrines—showed Classical verse's continued vitality.

The Caribbean Revolution: Francophone Poetry Beyond France

The century's most innovative French poetry may have been written in Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti). The colony's complex society—white planters, free people of color, enslaved Africans—produced distinct literary cultures in French and Creole.

The mixed-race poet Minette, whose full name is lost, wrote verses celebrating creole beauty that challenged metropolitan standards:

Belle créole, objet de mon ardeur extrême...

(Beautiful creole, object of my extreme ardor...)

Such poems asserted colonial difference within French forms. They began the long process of decolonizing French poetry from within.

The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) produced revolutionary songs and poems mostly preserved in oral tradition. These verses, switching between French and Kreyòl, created new hybrid forms:

Liberté! Liberté! Grande moun, ti moun, Nous tous enfants de la France nouvelle...

(Liberty! Liberty! Great ones, little ones, We all children of new France...)

Colonial poetry expanded French verse's possibilities, even as metropolitan writers largely ignored these innovations.

Pre-Romantic Stirrings

As the century progressed, new sensibilities emerged that would crystallize in Romanticism. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, though writing little verse, influenced poetry profoundly through his emphasis on individual feeling and natural virtue.

Nicolas Gilbert (1750-1780) died young but left verses of genuine anguish that break through Classical restraint:

Au banquet de la vie, infortuné convive, J'apparus un jour, et je meurs...

(At life's banquet, unfortunate guest, I appeared one day, and I die...)

Gilbert's personal suffering enters his poetry directly, violating Classical impersonality. His work points toward Romantic subjectivity.

Évariste de Parny (1753-1814) brought new music to French verse. Born in Réunion, educated in France, he created an exotic persona that licensed emotional directness:

Ô ma chère Éléonore! Mon amour, mon unique bien!

(O my dear Eleanor! My love, my only good!)

Parny's melancholy eroticism influenced all subsequent French love poetry. Lamartine called him his master. His colonial background enabled innovations metropolitan poets couldn't risk.

André Chénier: The Lost Master

André Chénier (1762-1794) might have become France's greatest poet had the Revolution not cut short his life. Guillotined at 31, he left manuscripts that wouldn't be published for 25 years. When they appeared, Romantic poets claimed him as predecessor.

Chénier combined Classical learning with modern sensibility. His "Jeune Tarentine" adapts Greek forms to contemporary feeling:

Pleurez, doux alcyons, ô vous, oiseaux sacrés, Oiseaux chers à Thétis, doux alcyons, pleurez!

(Weep, sweet halcyons, o you, sacred birds, Birds dear to Thetis, sweet halcyons, weep!)

The repetitions create incantatory effects impossible in strict Classical verse. Chénier maintains alexandrine structure while revolutionizing its music.

His prison poems, written awaiting execution, achieve extraordinary power:

Comme un dernier rayon, comme un dernier zéphyre Animent la fin d'un beau jour...

(As a last ray, as a last zephyr Animate the end of a beautiful day...)

Chénier transforms personal terror into universal beauty. His synthesis of Classical form and Romantic feeling provided a model for the coming century.

Revolutionary Voices

The French Revolution (1789-1799) produced enormous quantities of verse—songs, hymns, odes—mostly forgotten now. Revolutionary poetry subordinated aesthetic concerns to political purpose, yet this utilitarian verse transformed French poetry's possibilities.

Marie-Joseph Chénier (André's brother) wrote patriotic hymns sung at revolutionary festivals:

Amour sacré de la Patrie, Conduis, soutiens nos bras vengeurs!

(Sacred love of the Fatherland, Lead, sustain our avenging arms!)

Such verses seem crude, but they democratized poetry. Sung by crowds, memorized by children, they proved poetry could move masses, not just salons.

Women revolutionaries also wrote verses, though fewer survive. Olympe de Gouges included poems in her political writings:

Homme, es-tu capable d'être juste? C'est une femme qui t'en fait la question...

(Man, are you capable of being just? It's a woman who asks you this question...)

Her verses merge political and poetic revolution, challenging both governmental and literary authority.

The Emigré Experience

The Revolution created a diaspora of French aristocrats who wrote poetry in exile. This émigré verse, long dismissed as reactionary nostalgia, deserves reconsideration as poetry of displacement and loss.

Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1786-1859), not an aristocrat but affected by revolutionary upheaval, began writing verses that bridge Enlightenment and Romanticism:

J'ai voulu ce matin te rapporter des roses...

(I wanted this morning to bring you roses...)

Her seemingly simple poems contain complex psychology. Revolutionary trauma enters obliquely through images of scattered flowers, broken homes, lost children.

Colonial Expansion and Poetic Silence

The late 18th century saw renewed French colonial expansion in Africa and Asia, yet these encounters barely register in metropolitan poetry. When Egypt or India appear, they're decorative "Oriental" backdrops, not real places where French power operated.

This absence is revealing. Enlightenment universalism couldn't accommodate colonial reality without contradiction. The few poems acknowledging empire resort to extreme abstraction:

Sous les palmiers de l'Inde ou les cèdres d'Asie...

(Under India's palms or Asia's cedars...)

Such vague exoticism avoided confronting colonialism's violence. Not until the 20th century would French poetry seriously engage with empire's implications.

The Century's Legacy

The 18th century transformed French poetry less through great poems than through expanding possibilities. It proved verse could carry scientific knowledge, political argument, and personal confession. It questioned Classical authorities while maintaining Classical forms. It began conversations about nature, progress, and justice that Romanticism would continue.

Most importantly, the Enlightenment democratized poetry. Through songs, accessible didactic verse, and public recitations, poetry reached beyond elite audiences. This broader public would support Romanticism's innovations.

The century ended with French poetry poised for revolution. Classical forms remained intact but filled with new pressures—personal feeling, political engagement, colonial encounter. The Romantic explosion was inevitable. When it came, it would transform not just French but world poetry.