Courier's pamphlets, sold "chez tous les marchands de nouveautés" (novelties are ephemeral, non-periodic pamphlets), were a great success, as Balzac recalls in Illusions perdues. The novelist also points out that the pamphlet is always a text of opposition to power. Listing the names of the century's great pamphleteers - Constant, Chateaubriand, Courier, Vatout, more recently Lamennais and Cormenin, or Béranger - the author of La Comédie humaine allows Courier to join the canon: his target may have disappeared with the Restoration, but his literary monument remains.
Cormenin is an interesting figure: he was an opposition deputy throughout the July monarchy, systematically voting against the government, but never speaking in the Chamber. It seems that he used his silence as a means of scrupulously monitoring the regime, but also as the birthplace of parliamentary eloquence. In 1842, he published a Livre des orateurs, in which he sets out a theory of parliamentary, journalistic and pamphleteering rhetoric, based on the example of his colleagues. He sees the pamphleteer as the "soldier of the militant press". Nevertheless, Cormenin is criticized for the heaviness and incoherence of his style. Balzac, who defined the pamphlet as "sarcasm in cannonball form", criticized Cormenin's "stringy" style rather than Courier's "Figaro-like allure".
Courier's war was largely political, but it was also literary: he detested all writers since the 17th century, mocking "the Jean-Jacques, Diderot, d'Alembert [...] in terms of language". To his publisher, who calls him a Hellenist, he replies thatHellenist rhymes with dentist, druggist, cabinetmaker: they want to make him a scholar by trade or by policy, a book-maker like Chateaubriand, but he claims the studious leisure of Montaigne.
It's always on a linguistic error, on a detail of expression, rather than on the opposing thesis, that Courier focuses his attack, as if he were a meticulous philologist. He mocks Chateaubriand in his great speech to the Chamber on his return from the Verona congress. To Lamartine, he criticizes his phrases "outside the common language that everyone speaks and hears". Common language" is the language of the fresh 16th century, as opposed to the specious refinements of the court of Louis XIV. It's the language of Rabelais, Montaigne or Amyot - Courier imitated his style to translate the missing passages of Daphnis et Chloé - and it's still the language of the peasants. This hatred of neoclassical academicism brings him even closer to Stendhal, and explains why Delescluze was able to rank Courier's texts, along with the preface to Cromwell and Stendhal's Racine and Shakespeare, among the influences of the Romantic battle. Stendhal himself recognizes himself in Courier's interest in the proper word, against the previous century's rage to ennoble.
As for Courier and Chateaubriand, they held each other in high esteem, despite the former's repeated criticisms and their political opposition. Chateaubriand devotes a long digression to Courier in the Vie de Rancé, and even pays a moving tribute to the murdered pamphleteer, evoking the song of a thrush reminiscent of Montboissier. Courier had paid reciprocal tribute in a letter of 1824, shortly before his death, recognizing in Chateaubriand the "true writer [...] poet, as no one in prose ever was", despite his taste for Rousseau, Bernardin or Shakespeare. Courier was included in all the school anthologies of the Third Republic, but he disappeared with it: the last major edition was the Pléiade of 1940, just before the war and the start of a regime he had vilified.
