Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier (31 August 1811 - 23 October 1872) was a French poet, novelist, critic, and journalist whose influence was strongly felt in the period of changing sensibilities in French literature—from the early Romantic period to the aestheticism and naturalism of the end of the 19th century. He has been cited as a Romantic, but his work also remains a point of reference for many subsequent literary traditions such as the Decadent movement, Aestheticism, and Parnassianism, a movement that sought artistic control, polish, elegance, objectivity, and impassiveness, in response to what it considered the excessive sentimentality of the Romantics.
Théophile Gautier was born in Tarbes, capital of Hautes-Pyrénées département in Southern France, on 31 August 1811. His father was Jean-Pierre Gautier, a fairly cultured minor government official; his mother was Antoinette-Adelaïde Cocard. The family moved in 1841, taking up residence in the ancient Marais district.
He started his education at Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris (where notable alumni included Voltaire, Charles Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, and the Marquis de Sade), but three months in, he had to be sent home due to illness. He completed the remainder of his education at Collège Charlemagne, but his most significant instruction came from his father, who prompted him to become a Latin scholar by age eighteen.
He lived most of his life in Paris. While he was in Collège Charlemagne, he met the poet Gérard Labrunie (better known as Gérard de Nerval), and the two became lifelong friends. It is through Nerval that Gautier, who at the time studied painting, decided that his true vocation was poetry. One of the authors Nerval introduced Gautier to was Victor Hugo, who at the time wrote the play Hernani. The play premiered in Paris on 23 February 1830, where Gautier notoriously went to the premiere wearing a red vest, to the shock of Parisian society.
Gautier's first poems appeared in 1830, but as the publication took place during the July Revolution, no copies of the book were sold, and it was eventually withdrawn; it was reissued two years later with 20 additional poems under the name Albertus. During this time, he turned from the doctrines of Romanticism to the dictum of "art for art's sake", and expressed his views in the preface to Albertus and his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835). These views caused a stir in literary circles because of his insistence on the sovereignty of the beautiful and disregard for morality. Gautier's pessimism and fear of death were expressed in his poem La Comédie de la mort (1838).
In 1840, Gautier visited Spain, which inspired some of his best poetry in España (1845), and prose, in Voyage en Espagne (1845). He soon found travelling to be an escape from the pressures of his work as a journalist; he took journalism to support himself, his two mistresses, his three children, and his two sisters, but bemoaned that his work drained the creative energy that should have been used for his poems.
His experiences from travelling, especially in Greece, reinforced his theory of art and admiration of the Classical forms; he taught that art should be impersonal, free from teaching moral lessons, and that the artist must concentrate on achieving perfection of form. He developed a poetic technique called transposition d'art, in which he recorded his exact impressions when experiencing a painting or another work of art, producing Émaux et camées (1852). This poetry collection is considered to be among his finest, and Baudelaire paid tribute to Gautier in the dedication of his poetry collection Les Fleurs du mal.
In addition to poetry, Gautier wrote prose fiction, like La Morte amoureuse (1836), and reviews on art, theatre, and ballets, and he wrote the ballet Giselle in collaboration with Vernoy de Saint-Georges.
Gautier was esteemed by many contemporaries who were also prominent literary figures, like Gustave Flaubert and Baudelaire. The 1860s were when he was assured literary fame; though he was rejected by the French Academy thrice (1867, 1868, 1869), Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, the most influential literary critic of the day, devoted no less than three major articles in 1863 to reviews of Gautier's published works. In 1865, he was admitted into the salon of Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, cousin of Napoleon III and niece to Napoleon; she offered Gautier a sinecure post as a librarian to ease his financial strain.
During the Franco-Prussian War, Gautier returned to Paris upon hearing of the Prussian advance on the capital. He remained with his family throughout the invasion and the aftermath of the Commune, eventually dying on 23 October 1872 due to a long-standing cardiac disease at the age of 61 years. He is interred at the Cimetière de Montmartre in Paris.
Trope pages of some of his works:
Adaptations of his works include:
- Le Capitaine Fracasse (1961)
- Captain Fracassa's Journey (1990)
