Alain Vaillant: «We're witnessing the end of a romantic age»
Alain Vaillant, photographed in Paris on October 9, 2025 in the Jardin des Grands-Explorateurs, his childhood playground. Photo: Nicolas Brodard for Le Regard Libre
In Paris, where we met him at length in his childhood neighborhood, Romanticism specialist and literary historian Alain Vaillant reads two centuries of Western culture as the rise and fall of a civilization centered on the individual.
Where do our Western ways of thinking about life, love, politics and art come from? Alain Vaillant, a literary historian and passionate reader of the 19th century, sees in this period, including in Switzerland, the intertwining of liberal modernity and the Romantic heritage, whose fault lines he now follows. Interview.
Le Regard Libre: Romanticism is often presented as an artistic movement spanning a few decades of the 19th century. But as you read it, it constitutes a vast cultural fabric that has infused the culture oThis content is reserved for our subscribers.
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