A crucial, if obvious, part of securing Gluck's reputation in French music history was to establish definitively that the composer was in fact French, by style if not by birth. Fin-de-siècle critics consequently spent a fair amount of time reinforcing Gluck's Frenchness and minimizing his German “otherness.” In the introduction to his 1882 book on Gluck (drawn from articles he wrote for Le Ménestrel), for example, Hippolyte Barbedette asks, “Can one not say that in matters of art, nationality does not depend on an act of birth?—Gluck is and will remain the founder of the French drame lyrique, with this title, he is French in the same way as Meyerbeer, and France should have the right to lay claim to him. Germans, when they are honest about it, acknowledge this themselves.” This attitude toward the composer is typical; while acknowledging Gluck's Germanic roots, Barbedette nonetheless regarded him as French by naturalization. The critic also points to France's historical tradition of adopting composers, such as the similarly German Meyerbeer (or, for that matter, the Italian Lully—the founder of the French tragédie lyrique). Félix Clément, in his Histoire de la musique (1885), argued at least for the inherent Frenchness of Gluck's ideas, if not the composer himself: “Gluck's theory … opposed exclusively the tendencies of Italian dramatic art… The ideas published by the famous Bohemian composer in his letters and developed by his partisans were in essence French, and had been put into practice by Lully, Campra, and even Rameau, especially in Castor et Pollux.”