Ronsard and Malherbe, Corneille and Bossuet defended in their time the state, the king, the fatherland, property, the family and religion. Romantic literature attacked the laws or the state, public and private discipline, the fatherland, the family and property; an almost unique condition of their success seemed to be to please the opposition, to work towards anarchy.

Good society of a vast country cannot reasonably give its active support to a tissue of anarchic declamations or abstruse cryptograms. It is constituted precisely to encourage all the luxuries except the latter. The national sense, the traditional spirit were shocked doubly by these new directions of the intelligentsia. One should not at all forget that French literature was in the past profoundly conservative even when it sang revolutionary songs, and favourable to social life when it penetrated the most secret labyrinth of the human heart. | p. 32–34