Politics & Power Quote by Alfred de Vigny

“Of late years” is de Vigny’s quiet alarm bell: a poet noticing that something in the cultural weather has shifted, and that art is responding less with invention than with retrieval. The parenthetical aside - “perhaps as a result of our political changes” - is doing the real work. It’s a tactful shrug that isn’t a shrug at all, the kind of polite sentence you write when the politics are loud, unstable, and dangerous to name too directly.

De Vigny is writing from the churn of post-Revolutionary France: the Napoleonic aftershock, the Bourbon Restoration, the July Revolution. When institutions keep collapsing and re-forming, history stops being background and becomes daily atmosphere. In that climate, the past isn’t just a subject; it’s a shelter, a weapon, a courtroom transcript. Artists “borrow from history” because history offers ready-made plots of legitimacy and betrayal, empires and exiles - narratives that let you comment on the present without getting crushed by it.

The phrasing “borrowed” is pointed. It implies both dependence and calculation: art isn’t merely inspired by history; it takes from it, repurposes it, maybe even hides behind it. That’s Romanticism’s double move in miniature: dressing urgent contemporary anxieties in period costume. De Vigny’s subtext is not nostalgia but diagnosis. Political upheaval doesn’t just change laws; it changes the imaginative supply chain. When the present feels untrustworthy, artists turn to the past not because it’s safer, but because it’s legible.