Reading Order
JocelynJocelyn Reading Order
Jocelyn (1836) by Alphonse de Lamartine is the most successful narrative poem of the French Romantic period and one of the most widely read French poems of the nineteenth century — a long verse novel in the form of the private journal of a village priest in the Dauphiné Alps who had originally planned to enter holy orders only to allow his brother to inherit the family estate, but who during the Terror is forced to take true orders when his bishop dies in prison, binding him permanently to celibacy and separating him forever from Laurence, the young woman he has come to love. Jocelyn tells this story of renunciation and spiritual devotion through the Alpine landscape, the passage of seasons, the cure's ministry to his peasant parishioners, and his late encounter with the dying Laurence. The poem sold in enormous quantities — more than any other French Romantic poem — and was considered by contemporaries to be the definitive expression of the Romantic spirit of self-sacrifice and spiritual aspiration. Victor Hugo called it one of the most beautiful things written in the nineteenth century. It was intended as one episode of an unfinished epic, La Vision de Laure (L'Humanité), but Lamartine only completed Jocelyn and La Chute d'un ange, which is a very different and less successful work.
Where to start
Start at the beginning — the opening books in the seminary — and read through the prison episode, the Alpine years, and the pastoral ministry. The final reunion with Laurence is the emotional center of the poem and only works if read after the preceding books establish the weight of what has been renounced.
Complete Jocelyn Book List
- 1Buy
Jocelyn
Alphonse de Lamartine·1836·The complete text in verse (available in French in older Hachette and Garnier editions; a modern edition exists in GF Flammarion). No recent English verse translation; Victorian prose translations exist. - Buy
Méditations poétiques
OptionalAlphonse de Lamartine·1820·The earlier collection that established Lamartine's tone and themes — the essential preparation for understanding what Jocelyn is doing in extended narrative form.
Jocelyn — Frequently Asked Questions
What is the narrative structure of Jocelyn?
Jocelyn is written as the private journal of the Abbé Jocelyn, a village priest in the Alps above Valence, recording his memories and his daily life. The journal begins with his youth in the seminary and proceeds through the central episode: during the Terror, he takes refuge in a cave in the Alps with a young person he takes to be a boy but discovers is a girl named Laurence, with whom he falls in love during their months of hiding. When the crisis forces him to take holy orders to succeed his dying bishop, he must renounce Laurence. The poem then follows his decades as a village priest — his ministry to the poor, the rhythm of the seasons, his solitude — before the final episode in which he encounters Laurence again, now dying in Paris, and administers the last rites to the woman he has loved all his life. The structure is deliberately that of a simple, rural, anonymous life made significant by the intensity of feeling it contains — Lamartine wanted to write the epic of the ordinary rather than the heroic.
How was Jocelyn received in the nineteenth century?
Jocelyn was one of the great popular successes of the French nineteenth century — it sold over 40,000 copies in its first year, which was enormous for the period, and went through dozens of editions over the following decades. It was read throughout France, not just by the literary public but by the broader reading public including clergy, peasants in regions with access to books, and the new middle-class audience that Romanticism was cultivating. Critics praised it in largely the same terms: they found in it the expression of Catholic Romantic sentiment at its purest — the renunciation of personal happiness for spiritual duty, the relationship between the individual soul and the Alpine landscape, and the dignity of rural ministry. Hugo's praise was representative: he found in Jocelyn the poem of the century's common spiritual experience. The poem has since fallen out of the canon — largely because its religious sentiment reads as conventional and its verse as unambitious compared to Hugo — but for a generation it was the touchstone of what French Romantic poetry could achieve.
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