SOURCE: "Conclusion," in Alphonse de Lamartine: A Political Biography, St. Martin's Press, 1983, pp. 281-88.

An English historian, Fortescue is the author of Revolution and Counter-Revolution in France, 1815-1852 (1988). In the following excerpt, he discusses the relationship between Lamartine 's literary career and his public life.

[Lamartine] was always one of the most prominent and controversial speakers, while Méditations Poétiques and the Histoire des Girondins were two of the most sensational publications of his generation. He owed his success as a writer to a remarkable facility for literary composition in the Romantic manner. He played on his readers' emotions; he aroused their enthusiasms by the use of colourful imagery and lavish description; he overwhelmed them with words—chosen as much for sound and effect as for precise meaning…. [His] popular success in both literature and politics depended on the extent to which his emotive appeal and individual...