Karen, I swear-- that's exactly it. I think that's what they were trying to get across in the programme, and you've just summed it up in a paragraph! LOL!
The Romantics-- particularly Blake and Diderot-- seemed to favour pure emotion over any real reason, at least before the Terror. Voltaire could argue the wrongs of the oppressive state as much as he liked; it got people talking, but not acting. When the little periodicals and poems and essays of the Romantics described the queen in vulgar terms, and Blake proclaimed that the Americans would be free in a way we never could be, it set off a chain of thought favouring the individual over the state. I think that's it-- Romanticism makes the individual seem unique, a person in a state rather than part of a state, and it changed peoples' perceptions forever.
Rousseau remarked that society needed to change, or even to fall, because nature does not betray; society does. And when the individual feels himself separate from state and that he no longer believes in the "rights" of a king, or of a priest, over any other living thing, then why should he obey those old laws?
I think you're right. The Englightenment sowed the seeds of revolution, but the Romantics nutured those seeds and saw them explode in the face of all that had gone before.
And here I had thought Romanticism was just really pretty. ;)
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The Romantics-- particularly Blake and Diderot-- seemed to favour pure emotion over any real reason, at least before the Terror. Voltaire could argue the wrongs of the oppressive state as much as he liked; it got people talking, but not acting. When the little periodicals and poems and essays of the Romantics described the queen in vulgar terms, and Blake proclaimed that the Americans would be free in a way we never could be, it set off a chain of thought favouring the individual over the state. I think that's it-- Romanticism makes the individual seem unique, a person in a state rather than part of a state, and it changed peoples' perceptions forever.
Rousseau remarked that society needed to change, or even to fall, because nature does not betray; society does. And when the individual feels himself separate from state and that he no longer believes in the "rights" of a king, or of a priest, over any other living thing, then why should he obey those old laws?
I think you're right. The Englightenment sowed the seeds of revolution, but the Romantics nutured those seeds and saw them explode in the face of all that had gone before.
And here I had thought Romanticism was just really pretty. ;)