ABSTRACT
The seismic shift in the intellectual life of Europe that led to what has since become known as ‘Romanticism’ occurred slowly and began to reveal itself well before the nineteenth century. There was no sudden break between one era and the next, although the pace of change quickened significantly in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. This is most apparent in the case of Germany, where the ‘Sturm und Drang’ movement questioned some of the key assumptions and implications (as they saw it) of the Aufklärung in the 1770s. It was there that the term ‘Romanticism’ was first coined at the close of the eighteenth century. In France, virtually everything that came to preoccupy Romantic writers was a matter of at least some interest and attention throughout the eighteenth century, even among the philosophes. However, the ‘Other’ of the Enlightenment began to receive an attention and centrality in the closing decades of the eighteenth century that it had not received in an age when reason, empiricism, science and anti-clericalism were intellectually dominant. This was at least in part a backlash against the growing popularity of atheism and materialism in the quarter century before 1800, which caused increasing alarm in some quarters and made the question of the limits of enlightenment a matter of pressing concern for many. In addition, as we saw in Chapter 3, the Revolution galvanised opposition to the philosophes and their (alleged) beliefs, which were ‘tainted with the blood of the guillotine’ in the eyes of many.2 Thus by the time the first generation of Romantic writers were entering their late adolescence and early adulthood, the Enlightenment was already in a serious crisis.
