Like other cultural movements, romanticism was characterized by intellectual diversity. Nonetheless, common parameters stand out. Artists inspired by romanticism repudiated the emphasis on reason associated with well-known Enlightenment philosophes like Voltaire or Montesquieu (see “The Influence of the Philosophes” in Chapter 16). Romantics championed instead emotional exuberance, unrestrained imagination, and spontaneity in both art and personal life. Preoccupied with emotional excess, romantic works explored the awesome power of love and desire and of hatred, guilt, and despair.

Where Enlightenment thinkers applied the scientific method to social issues and cast rosy predictions for future progress, romantics valued intuition and nostalgia for the past. Where Enlightenment thinkers embraced secularization, romantics sought the inspiration of religious ecstasy. Where the Enlightenment valued public life and civic affairs, romantics delved into the supernatural and turned inward, to the hidden recesses of the self. As the Austrian composer Franz Schubert exclaimed in 1824:

Nowhere was the break with Enlightenment classicism more apparent than in romanticism’s general conception of nature. Classicists were not particularly interested in nature. The romantics, in contrast, were enchanted by stormy seas, untouched forests, and icy arctic wastelands. Nature could be awesome and tempestuous, a source of beauty or spiritual inspiration. Most romantics saw the growth of modern industry as an ugly, brutal attack on their beloved nature and on venerable traditions. They sought escape — in the unspoiled Lake District of northern England, in exotic North Africa, in an imaginary and idealized Middle Ages.

The study of history became a romantic obsession. History held the key to a universe now perceived to be organic and dynamic, not mechanical and static, as Enlightenment thinkers had believed. Historical novels like Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1820), a passionate romance set in twelfth-century England, found eager readers among the literate middle classes. Professional historians influenced by romanticism, such as Jules Michelet, went beyond the standard accounts of great men or famous battles. Michelet’s many books on the history of France consciously promoted the growth of national aspirations; by fanning the embers of memory, Michelet encouraged the French people to search the past for their special national destiny.

Romanticism was a lifestyle as well as an intellectual movement. Many early-nineteenth-century romantics lived lives of tremendous emotional intensity. Obsessive love affairs, duels to the death, madness, strange illnesses, and suicide were not uncommon. Romantic artists typically led bohemian lives, wearing their hair long and uncombed in preference to donning powdered wigs, and rejecting the materialism of refined society. Great individualists, the romantics believed that the full development of one’s unique human potential was the supreme purpose in life.