A short life of the author
Théophile Gautier was the man who made beauty an ideology. In the famous preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), he declared that art exists for its own sake, that beauty is its sole justification, and that anything useful is ugly — a manifesto that scandalised the moralists and utilitarians of his day and that became the foundational text of aestheticism, influencing writers from Baudelaire (who dedicated Les Fleurs du mal to Gautier as “the impeccable poet”) through Pater and Wilde to the Symbolists and beyond. Gautier was a prolific and versatile writer — poet, novelist, critic, travel writer, journalist — but his lasting significance lies in the idea he planted at the centre of modern literature: that art owes nothing to morality, society, or utility, and that its only obligation is to be beautiful.
The Red Waistcoat
Gautier was born in 1811 in Tarbes, in the Hautes-Pyrénées, and grew up in Paris. He originally intended to become a painter — he studied in the studio of the artist Louis-Édouard Rioult — and the visual arts remained the foundation of his aesthetic throughout his life. His eye was that of a painter: he thought in colour, form, and composition, and his prose and poetry are characterised by a pictorial precision that sets them apart from the more musical or emotional registers of his contemporaries.
He burst onto the literary scene at the age of nineteen when he attended the famous première of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830), wearing a flamboyant red waistcoat (gilet rouge) that became the symbol of Romantic defiance against classicism. Gautier was initially a devoted Romantic, allied with Hugo, Nerval, and the Young France movement, but his aesthetic sensibility was more visual and formal than the emotionalism that characterised high Romanticism, and he gradually developed a position that emphasised craft, beauty, and objectivity over self-expression and passion.
Mademoiselle de Maupin
Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) was the novel that established Gautier’s reputation — more for its preface than for its narrative, though the novel itself is a considerable achievement. The story concerns d’Albert, a young aesthete searching for ideal beauty, and Madelaine de Maupin, a young woman disguised as a cavalier, whose beauty and ambiguity of gender make her the object of desire for both men and women.
The novel’s treatment of desire, cross-dressing, and sexual ambiguity was startling for its period, but it was the preface that proved explosive. In it, Gautier attacked the utilitarian critics who demanded that literature serve moral or social purposes, arguing with savage wit that a novel was not a pair of boots, that beautiful things were precisely those that served no purpose, and that the most useful place in a house was the lavatory. This calculated provocation became the manifesto of l’art pour l’art — art for art’s sake — and its influence on the subsequent development of European aesthetics was immeasurable.
Émaux et camées
Gautier’s most important book of poetry, Émaux et camées (“Enamels and Cameos,” 1852, with expanded editions in 1858, 1863, and 1872), put his aesthetic principles into practice. The poems were short, formally perfect, and visually precise — each one a miniature artwork rendered with the finish of a jeweller working in enamel. The title itself announced the programme: these poems aspired to the condition of the decorative arts, to the hardness and permanence of worked stone and fired glass.
The collection included some of Gautier’s finest poems, including “L’Art” (“Art”), which argued in its final stanza that sculpture outlasts all other forms of expression — that the poet, like the sculptor, must carve his meaning into a resistant material, and that only the most worked and most permanent forms will survive. This poem became the credo of the Parnassian school of poetry that followed Gautier, and its influence can be traced through Leconte de Lisle, José-María de Heredia, and into the early modernism of Pound and the Imagists.
The Critic and Travel Writer
Gautier spent much of his career as a working journalist, producing an enormous quantity of art criticism, theatre reviews, and travel writing. His art criticism was informed by his painter’s eye and his aesthetic principles — he championed Delacroix, defended the Romantic painters, and helped shape French taste during the crucial decades of the mid-nineteenth century.
Voyage en Espagne (“Travels in Spain,” 1843) was his finest travel book — a vivid, painterly account of Spain’s landscapes, cities, architecture, and bullfights that set the standard for French travel writing about the Iberian Peninsula. Constantinople (1853) and Italia (1852) extended his travels to the eastern Mediterranean, and these books demonstrate Gautier’s gift for description: he could render a sunset, a cathedral façade, or a street market with a visual specificity that made his readers see what he had seen.
Fantastic Fiction
Gautier also produced some of the finest supernatural fiction of the nineteenth century. “La Morte amoureuse” (1836, translated variously as “Clarimonde” or “The Dead Lover”) tells the story of a priest who falls in love with a beautiful vampire — a tale rendered with such sensual beauty and psychological subtlety that it transcends its Gothic premises. “Le Pied de momie” (“The Mummy’s Foot”) and Le Roman de la momie (“The Romance of a Mummy,” 1858) reflected his fascination with ancient Egypt — a fascination shared by his era but rendered by Gautier with unusual archaeological specificity and narrative skill.
Le Capitaine Fracasse (1863), his most popular novel, was a swashbuckling adventure set in the seventeenth century, following a young baron who joins a troupe of travelling actors. It is Gautier at his most accessible and entertaining — a pure adventure novel written with the verbal elegance and descriptive power that characterised all his work.
Collecting Gautier
French first editions of Gautier’s works are collected by specialists in French Romantic literature. Mademoiselle de Maupin (Renduel, 1835) in two volumes is the primary target and commands substantial prices. Émaux et camées (Didier, 1852) in first edition is also highly desirable. Le Capitaine Fracasse (Charpentier, 1863) in two volumes is sought after. Gautier’s travel books and criticism, published in numerous editions, are collected for their literary quality and their documentation of nineteenth-century French cultural life.