History and Fiction in the Works of Mérimée, 1803-1870
Written by a master, Mérimée declared, history was ‘as much superior to all novels and all plays as a diamond is to paste’. By A.W. Raitt.
Prosper Mérimée, born in 1803, grew up at a time when historical studies in France were coming to enjoy enormous popularity, both in their own right and as an apparently inexhaustible source of inspiration for imaginative literature. His was the generation of such illustrious representatives of the new school of historiography as Michelet, Augustin Thierry and Thiers, the same generation as those novelists and dramatists like Hugo, Vigny, Musset, Dumas and George Sand who, following the success of the Waverley novels and Chateaubriand’s Les Martyrs, avidly battened on history for their subjects.
But he is almost unique among his contemporaries in standing poised between the two sides of the Romantic enthusiasm for history: a pretext for picturesque excursions into far-off times and an earnest desire for a precise knowledge of the past. Eminent both as a novelist and as an historian, Mérimée exemplifies in unusually acute form the hesitations and dilemmas of a period in which history, having first served to stimulate the imagination, gradually seemed to be strangling it.
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