Paul Bénichou

Paul Bénichou (1908–2001) was a French literary historian and critic whose studies traced how French Romantic writers inherited and transformed religious ideas amid secularization.

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French Romanticism: A literary and intellectual movement in France emphasizing imagination, emotion, historical consciousness, and individual experience. Bénichou examined how Romantic writers recast inherited religious and moral ideas.
Morale du grand siècle: A study by Paul Bénichou of moral thought and literary culture in seventeenth-century France. This early work establishes his interest in the moral authority expressed through literature.
Prophet: A person believed to communicate divine messages or proclaim a religious or moral truth. Romantic writers, in Bénichou’s account, adopted a prophetic public role.
New Criticism: A twentieth-century approach to literary study that emphasizes close reading of the text as an autonomous work. Bénichou’s historical explanations extend beyond the text’s internal structure.
Victor Hugo: A French poet, novelist, and playwright whose works include Les Misérables and Les Contemplations. Hugo exemplifies the poet’s public and prophetic vocation central to Bénichou’s studies.
Secularization: The process by which social institutions, knowledge, or culture become less governed by religious authority. It names the historical transformation Bénichou traced through French literature.
Le Sacre de l'écrivain: Paul Bénichou’s study of the writer’s rise to moral and spiritual authority in nineteenth-century France. It develops his account of writers taking on roles once associated with religious authority.
Romanticism and religion: The study of how Romantic movements reworked religious beliefs, symbols, and forms of experience. Bénichou shows religious ideas persisting in transformed literary and social forms.
Formalism: An approach to literature that analyzes form and structure as primary sources of meaning. His studies foreground the historical roles and beliefs surrounding literary forms.
Alphonse de Lamartine: A French poet and statesman whose Méditations poétiques helped establish French Romantic poetry. Lamartine’s poetry gives a major instance of Romantic spiritual aspiration.