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Roots of the Romanticism Movement
Romanticism, a primarily intellectual movement, had been around since the late 18th century, primarily in literature and arts. It centers around the idea that reason cannot explain everything. In reaction to the Enlightenment’s cult of rationality, Romantics searched for deeper, often subconscious meaning and appeal, holding that pure logic is insufficient to answer all questions. This led the Romantics to view things with a different spin than the Enlightenment thinkers. For example, Enlightenment thinkers condemned the Middle Ages as a period of ignorance and irrationality, but the Romantics, on the other hand, idealized the Middle Ages as a time of spiritual depth and adventure. This kind of idealization led to a Gothic Revival in architecture in the 1830s, with Gothic novels increasing in popularity, and paintings of various historical periods and exotic places coming into vogue.
Romanticism and Nationalism
While not strictly a political movement, Romanticism often did provide support for other ideologies, especially nationalism. German Romanticism, in particular, with its idea of a Volksgeist unique to each nation (derived from Herder’s writings), gave an intellectual basis to nationalism. Overall, Romantics tended to think that everything had its own value, called an “inner genius,” and that “genius” had the power to change the world. This idea could sometimes be used to uphold historical institutions, claiming that tradition revealed the “inner genius” of a people. However, not all Romantics agreed, as some would use the ideology to instead advocate for the overthrow of old institutions. In this way, Romanticism could be a somewhat contradictory ideology that was subject to individual interpretation.
British and French Romanticism in the Arts and Philosophy
Romanticism found its foothold in the arts and philosophy across Europe. While it is most often associated with Germany literature and thinking, it also flourished in Britain and France. One of the most well-known British Romantic authors is Mary Shelley, who published Frankenstein in 1818, a story of a man attempting to master life and death through science and reason, with disastrous results. The poets William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Lord Byron typified Romanticism in Britain as well.
In France, the movement was led by men like the author Victor Hugo, who wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and the French Romantic painter, Eugene Delacroix, who prized the emotional impact of color over the representational accuracy of line and careful design. Delacroix painted historical scenes, such as "Liberty Leading the People" (1830) which glorified the beautiful spectacle of revolution.
German Romanticism in the Arts and Philosophy
But Romanticism was especially prevalent in Germany, spearheaded by artists like Goethe and thinkers such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who dominated Romantic philosophy. He was most famous for outlining the concept of the dialectic, in which the mind makes progress through finding contradictions, which are then resolved in a synthesis. Hegel used this philosophy to argue for a German national dialectic that would result in synthesis into a state in Germany. Also in Germany, Friedrich Schiller produced plays known for their sense of a German Volk, or national spirit, and architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel of Prussia led the Gothic Revival movement, beginning his first plans for Gothic structures in Germany as early as the 1820s.
