Themes of the French Romantic movement: dream and daydream

Dreams and Daydreams in Romantic Literature

The most powerful and lasting contributions to the literature of a given era are invariably penned by bold thinkers struggling to comprehend the ever changing world in which they live. Spanning the 18th and 19th centuries, the French Romantic movement, which was propelled by the authorial brilliance of writers such as Victor Hugo and Honore de Balzac, was shaped and inspired by the momentous political and social upheaval roiling all of France after a contentious and bloody revolt. The toppling of a once infallible monarchy and the sudden distribution of democratic ideals forced the literary class to recalibrate their worldview instantly, and the result is a wealth of material, including novels, plays and critical pieces of nonfiction, all of which focuses intently on the machinations of the human mind. With the external foundations of the preexisting social order irrevocably shattered, authors like Marie-Henri Bayle, who crafted the pen name Stendhal for himself, focused their intellectual insights inward in an attempt to understand the only aspect of existence still intact. Another historic societal shift changing the way people viewed their world during this era, the Industrial Revolution, heightened this collective sense of displacement and mourning and only furthered the Romantic author's interest in abstractions such as imagination, reverie and dream. It was the concept of dreaming which captivated the Romantic School's attention most of all, however, and with the field of psychoanalysis and dream study as conceived by Sigmund Freud finally gaining traction as a respected scientific endeavor, Hugo, Balzac, Stendhal, Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand and their contemporaries produced perhaps the most significant literary contributions to humanity's comprehension of their nightly visions.