Reading Order
La Chute d'un angeLa Chute d'un ange Reading Order
La Chute d'un ange (The Fall of an Angel, 1838) by Alphonse de Lamartine is the boldest and strangest of his major works — a vast symbolic epic in verse set in antediluvian times, in which the angel Cédar falls from heaven out of love for the mortal Daïdha, takes human form, and journeys with her through a primordial world of monsters, patriarchal nomads, and a decadent Oriental city that anticipates Babylon and Sodom. The poem was intended as the first episode in Lamartine's unfinished epic cycle L'Humanité (of which Jocelyn was the second), but it was received badly by critics and the public — who found its violence, its Oriental imagery, and its departure from the pastoral and elegiac Lamartine they knew disorienting. The failure of La Chute d'un ange effectively ended Lamartine's ambition for the great epic cycle. The poem has been reassessed by modern critics as one of the most interesting and ambitious things in the French Romantic tradition — a genuine attempt at the total mythological poem that Blake achieved in English and that Lamartine was among the very few French poets to attempt.
Where to start
La Chute d'un ange is a very different work from the rest of Lamartine's output and needs to be approached without expecting the lyric intimacy of Jocelyn or the Méditations. Read the Prologue and the first five Episodes first to understand the scale and ambition; the 'Vision de Saül' episode (Episodes 14-17) is the dramatic and imaginative high point.
Complete La Chute d'un ange Book List
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La Chute d'un ange
Alphonse de Lamartine·1838·The complete text in verse (available in French in older Hachette and Garnier editions; the Pléiade Oeuvres poétiques complètes is the scholarly edition). No complete English translation. - Buy
Jocelyn
OptionalAlphonse de Lamartine·1836·The other completed episode of L'Humanité — best read before or after La Chute to understand what the full epic cycle would have been.
La Chute d'un ange — Frequently Asked Questions
What is the relationship between La Chute d'un ange and Jocelyn?
La Chute d'un ange and Jocelyn were both planned as episodes of Lamartine's unfinished mythological epic L'Humanité (also called La Vision de Laure), which was intended to follow the human soul from its prelapsarian origins through history to final redemption. La Chute d'un ange was planned as the first episode — the moment when a divine being enters the human condition out of love — and Jocelyn as a later episode, covering the Christian era and the figure of the self-sacrificing rural priest. Together they represent two very different phases of this vast spiritual history: the primordial, violent, and mythological (La Chute), and the tender, pastoral, and Christian (Jocelyn). The plan was never completed, and the contrast between the two finished episodes — one a failure with contemporaries, the other an enormous popular success — says something important about the tensions within Lamartine's aesthetic ambitions.
Why was La Chute d'un ange a critical failure on publication?
La Chute d'un ange failed with critics and the public in 1838 for several reasons. First, it was not the Lamartine his readers expected — the poet of intimate lyric elegy and Alpine landscape had produced a violent Oriental epic with monsters, slave markets, and the destruction of a corrupt city, and the contrast was jarring. Second, the scale and style were unusual in French poetry: at over 10,000 lines it was far longer than anything Lamartine had previously published, and its prosody (rhymed octosyllables throughout) was uncongenial to critics trained on alexandrines. Third, it appeared in the wake of Jocelyn's enormous success (1836), and readers who loved the Alpine priest could not orient themselves in the antediluvian world. Sainte-Beuve, whose praise could make a reputation, was at best cautious; other influential critics were openly dismissive. Lamartine was wounded by the reception and effectively abandoned the L'Humanité project, though he continued to maintain that La Chute was his most ambitious and interesting work.
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