With characteristic variations the most eminent contributors to the _Globe_ formulate their definitions of Romanticism in very fair harmony with each other and with Beyle. At the time when Hugo was still royalist, Christian, and conservative, the _Globe_ was already revolutionary, philosophic, and liberal. The first to publish the programme of Romanticism in the _Globe_was Thiers. He proclaimed its watchwords to be _nature_ and _truth_--those almost inevitable war-cries in every artistic and literary revolution. He opposes himself to the academic, the symmetrical in plastic art, and in dramatic poetry demands _historic_ truth, which is the same as what was afterwards called local colouring. Duvergier de Hauranne, in an article _On the Romantic_, defines classicism as routine, Romanticism as liberty--that is to say, liberty for the most varied talents (Hugo and Beyle, Manzoni and Nodier) to develop in all their marked individuality. Ampère defines classicism as imitation, Romanticism as originality. But an anonymous writer (in all probability Sismondi) tries to give a more exact definition; he remarks that the word Romanticism has not been coined to designate the literary works in which any society whatever has given itself expression, but only that literature which gives _a faithful picture of modern civilization_. Since this civilisation is, according to his conviction, spiritual in its essence, Romanticism is to be defined as spirituality in literature. The future author of _Les Barricades_, Vitet, at this time a youth of twenty, tries to settle the matter with the impetuosity and audacity of his age. According to him it simply means independence in artistic matters, individual liberty in literary. "Romanticism is," he says, "Protestantism in literature and art;" and in saying so he is obviously thinking merely of emancipation from a kind of papal authority. He adds that it is neither a literary doctrine nor a party cry, but the law of necessity, the law of change and of progress. "Twenty years hence the whole nation will be Romantic; I say the whole nation, for the Jesuits are not the nation." The reader can see for himself that there is only the merest shade of difference between these definitions and the conclusion arrived at by Victor Hugo: "Romanticism is Liberalism in literature;" and it will not surprise him to learn that the _Globe_ greeted the preface to _Cromwell_ with the exclamation: "The movement has now reached M. Hugo." Hugo's chief contribution to it was victory.[3]