The sea in France was not always close to people like these days. Not to mention the beautiful beaches, C?te d'Azur and Saint Tropez, the French sea is the most famous resort in Europe. However, the coast in France was deserted and desolate until 18th ...
The sea in France was not always close to people like these days. Not to mention the beautiful beaches, C?te d'Azur and Saint Tropez, the French sea is the most famous resort in Europe. However, the coast in France was deserted and desolate until 18th century. At this time, the French?s view on the sea was hostile. Since mid-19th century, such negative perspectives have changed into an amicable way. This change is thanks to a new social phenomenon called ?the invention of the beach?. The sea, for a long time, had been abandoned and also despised by the majority of the French on the contrary to other European countries.Like Korea, France is surrounded by three coasts but France had always focused on expanding its power to the continent rather than to the ocean.This inclination changes radically staring from the romantic period.What happened, then What made it possible to transit from despise to excitement of the sea Our study consists of pursuing the process of those changes through the literature and the motives of its evolutions.The image of the sea in the literary texts had changed radically from Romanticism. It witnesses a lot of changes of the view on the sea. Before the mid-19th century, the Biblical language dominated to describe the sea. The main structure of the Bible describes the sea as the chaotic and diabolic space. Without the help of God, Human beings were not supposed to overcome fear from this image of the ocean. The stories in the Bible such as the Noachian Deluge, Leviathan, and Jonah intensify fear for the sea to the individual humans. In the French literature, this perspective is easily found; the sea was always depicted as the space threatening and terrifying people.The baroque poetry gives a fresh approach to these sea images almost banal and repetitive. Excited with momentary changes in the ripples on the water, the baroque poets begins ?to look at the sea? for the first time in the history of the French literature. Away from the conceptual blue water, they actually turn their eyes to the sea in distance and this experience introduces the new language of the sea in their poems. Jean-Jacques Rousseau discovers a dreamlike power in the lake and in its isle, while Chateaubriand finds the similar energy in the sea near Saint-Malo and the ocean. Their literary texts present the intimate relations between water and the writers themselves. For them, the water functions like a mirror that reflects all the sentiments.On this basis, the romantic generation diversifies and flourishes different languages of the sea. How did the romantic writers develop the language of the sea so monotone until then This revolution of language is primarily indebted to ?the invention of the beach? which literally means bathing in the sea. The beach attracts the bourgeoisie and the artists tired and suffocated by the modern life. Their desire to escape from industrialization and urbanization was increased in great amount. On the contrary to the previous years, the beach is not the place of alienation and isolation. The beach, now, is transformed into the place to start new possibilities with the utopian exoticism and the colonial economy firmly settled in the 18th century. Unlike English aristocrats contributed to develop the beach, in France, it has been the bourgeoisie that played the predominant role to create the modern beach since 1789. The artists are also the first group to discover and to revive the beach and the sea. They create a new language based on their real experiences. Now, they see new values of the sea such as sensuality, freedom.