Les Confidences Reading Order

Les Confidences (1849) by Alphonse de Lamartine is the most widely read volume of his autobiographical prose — a series of linked memories, portraits, and episodes from his childhood, youth, and early manhood that he published in the late 1840s, when financial ruin and political failure were driving him to produce books at a desperate pace. The book covers his birth and childhood in Burgundy, his education at Belley, his years in Italy before and after the Restoration, and the meeting with Julie Charles that would eventually be transformed into Raphaël. Les Confidences is the work that established the French Romantic autobiographical mode at its most accessible — less demanding than Chateaubriand's Mémoires and less confessional than Rousseau's, it presents the life as a series of crystallized, beautiful moments, each described with the lyric intensity that Lamartine brought to his poetry. It was enormously popular and was translated into many European languages; it belongs to the tradition of genteel Romantic memoir that runs from Chateaubriand through Lamartine to Renan and that understands the literary life as itself a form of art.