A child of the Enlightenment, a sympathizer with the Romantic movement and, with Honoré de Balzac, the progenitor of the realist novel, Stendhal (the pen name of Marie-Henri Beyle, 1783–1842) was one of the most original writers of his time. The themes and style of his major fictional works – The Red and the Black (Le Rouge et le noir, 1830), Lucien Leuwen (written 1834–35, published posthumously) and The Charterhouse of Parma (La Chartreuse de Parme, 1839) – have an almost self-contradictory quality: ironic and poetic, comic and tragic, satirical and lyrical. This is reflected in the psychological complexity of the central characters and the subtlety of Stendhal's style of narration. A particular blend of Romantic fervour and eighteenth-century rationalism gives his novels their distinctive quality. The characterization, themes and oblique narrative methods of Stendhal's fiction reflect his preoccupation with the nature of post-Napoleonic France and the problems of selfhood confronting the generation that grew up in the aftermath of Napoleon's downfall at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

After Waterloo

An ardent admirer of Napoleon, Stendhal thrived in the heady atmosphere of the Napoleonic age. In 1800 he joined Napoleon's army in Italy (but resigned his commission the following year). From 1806 to 1814 he served as an aide de-camp during the Emperor's campaigns in Germany, Austria and Russia. After the fall of Napoleon, he experienced French society – that of the Bourbon Restoration (1815–30) – as a dull anti-climax, presenting the spectacle of a philistine, money-grubbing bourgeoisie jostling for power with a stagnant, effete aristocracy. As the momentous events and military triumphs of the Napoleonic era receded into history, the world seemed to shrink and grow grey. The qualities Stendhal valued – energy, passion, spontaneity: the qualities he saw embodied in the Emperor – were those he found lacking in the world around him.

Denis Diderot (1713–84) was a supreme man of letters as understood in the eighteenth century: that is to say, a person seriously concerned with every aspect of human activity and critical inquiry. The range of his writings was astonishing. Moreover, he made important and original contributions in almost every field he engaged with: the natural sciences, moral philosophy, art criticism, the nature of theatre and of acting, the art of fiction. Towards the end of his life, he even travelled to St Petersburg to meet Catherine the Great and advise her on the government of Russia. If his work has a unifying theme, it lies in his exploration of the implications – ethical, political and aesthetic – of a materialist world-view. But rather than proposing firm answers, Diderot asks questions; what is most characteristic of him is his philosophical scepticism and its expression in peculiarly dialogic forms. His intellectual interests and his mode of writing make him the most modern of the great figures of the Enlightenment.

The mind of a sceptic

Diderot was best known by his contemporaries as the editor of the famous Encyclopédie, a vast work published between 1751 and 1772 and comprising seventeen folio volumes of text and eleven volumes of plates. The aim of the Encyclopédie was to collate all the knowledge of the day – scientific, philosophical, historical and practical – and to disseminate that knowledge with a view to reducing theological superstition and improving the human lot. It was a monument to Enlightenment values and its project of demystification. Diderot challenged conventional thinking of any kind and encouraged his readers to beware of preconceived ideas. However, he was interested less in the accumulation of knowledge than in its instability and limits. He had a sense of existence as dynamic and constantly changing.

Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) occupies a key position in the development of modern writing, not just as the author of the most celebrated collection of verse in the history of modern French poetry, The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal, 1857), but as the proponent, in his critical writings, of a new aesthetic based on the experience of city life. According to the Marxist cultural critic Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), Baudelaire, by being the first poet of the city, was the first poet of modernity; he was the first writer to recognize in the transformation of Paris during the Second Empire (1852–70) a radical transformation of society itself, and to perceive the impact the new social reality would have on the creative artist. He is seen as the very embodiment of a sensibility and consciousness we regard as modern.

Modernity and the city

In December 1848 Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, was elected president of the Second Republic (1848–51), which had been born out of a revolution in February of the same year. On 2 December 1851 he staged a coup d'état that gave him dictatorial powers. A year later he proclaimed the Second Empire. He was now Emperor Napoleon III. To establish his authority, and acquire a kind of legitimacy, he pursued a policy of modernization and ‘progress’. He determined to make Paris clean and safe, and above all ‘modern’, and would do this through a vast scheme of urban redevelopment. He entrusted the project to Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809–91), whom he appointed Prefect of the Seine. The ‘Haussmannization’ of the city was social planning on a spectacular scale, glorifying Louis-Napoleon's empire as if it were a new Augustan Rome. Haussmann's overriding aim, however, was to advance the bourgeoisie's business interests by creating a more efficient transport network – by creating a city that would allow the rapid circulation not only of troops but also of goods, people and money.