In literary terms, Alphonse de Lamartine made his mark on his century with his books of poems, Les Méditations (Poetic Meditations, 1820) and Nouvelles Méditations poétiques (New Poetic Meditations, 1823) which launched the Romantic movement. Lamartine was also a politician, however: he was first elected to the National Assembly in 1833. In 1848, he was the one to proclaim the establishment of the Second Republic, whose provisional government he was a member of, but he failed in his bid for the presidency. Nadar didn’t care much for Lamartine. Alphonse Karr, the head of Le Journal at the time, even pointed out that Nadar hadn’t “supported his expedition in favor of Poland,” and that he got up in the middle of the night “to pen some nasty lines about Lamartine.” Not insignificantly, Lamartine did not make it into the Nadar’s Contemporaries series. Although he is Number 9 in the Pantheon, the caricaturist portrayed him in shadow, and in almost two-dimensional profile. Something otherworldly about his far-off gaze seems to remove him from current events of the day.