Alphonse de Lamartine : du Solitaire au Conseiller du peuple

Alphonse de Lamartine is one of the greatest romantic poets. From the 1820s and in Rousseau’s wake, his works allows a meaningful spot to this loneliness which is paradoxically designed as an opening to the world and to contemplation. However, ten years later, the author is destined to play a major-scale role in the Parliament. This will urge him to offer his pen to the service of the people and the oppressed. Despite strokes of bad luck and painful disappointments, Lamartine will not cease to commit for his brothers in a speech or a newspaper article. Nevertheless, the last days of this writer are getting darker, at the moment when death and debts are overwhelming him from everywhere to plunge him into a bitter isolation, from which it seems impossible to get through. Thus, this article will deal with the successive conditions of a soul caught between the call of the outside and the temptation of an exile. The latter being, whatever happens, an essential pattern of Lamartine’s writing.