When Georg Brandes held a series of lectures in 1871 with the title "Main Currents in 19th-century Literature", he defined the Modern Breakthrough and started the movement that would become Cultural Radicalism.

In 1870 he published several important volumes, The French Aesthetics of the Present Day, dealing chiefly with Hippolyte Taine, Criticisms and Portraits, and a translation of The Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill, whom he had met that year during a visit to England.

[1] Brandes now took his place as the leading northern European critic, applying to local conditions and habits of thought the methods of Taine.

But the young critic had offended many sensibilities by his ardent advocacy of modern ideas; he was seen as a Jew (which he did not consider himself to be), his convictions were Radical, he was suspected of being an atheist.

The authorities refused to appoint him, but his fitness for the post was so obvious that the chair of Aesthetics remained vacant for years, since no one else dared to place himself in comparison with Brandes.

The tumult which gathered round the person of the critic increased the success of the work, and the reputation of Brandes grew apace, especially in Germany and Russia.

His political views, however, made Prussia uncomfortable with him, and he returned in 1883 to Copenhagen, where he found a whole new school of writers and thinkers eager to receive him as their leader.

[1] He headed the group "Det moderne Gjennembruds Mænd" (The Men of the Modern Breakthrough), composed of J. P. Jacobsen, Holger Drachmann, Edvard Brandes, Erik Skram, Sophus Schandorph, and Norwegians Henrik Ibsen and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson,[3] but a conservative reaction against his "realistic" doctrines began around 1883, headed by Holger Drachmann.

[5] Among his later writings must be mentioned the monographs on Søren Kierkegaard (1877), Esaias Tegnér (1878), Benjamin Disraeli (1878), Ferdinand Lassalle (in German, 1877), Ludvig Holberg (1884), Henrik Ibsen (1899) and on Anatole France (1905).

Brandes wrote with great depth on the main contemporary poets and novelists of Denmark and Norway, and he and his disciples were for a long time the arbiters of literary success in the north.

In his critical work, which extended over a wider field than that of any other living writer, Brandes was aided by a singularly charming style, lucid and reasonable, enthusiastic but without extravagance, brilliant and colored without affectation.

Rousseau desired to return to the state of nature, when men roamed naked through the pathless forests and lived upon acorns.

[8][9] Between the years of 1886 and 1888 Brandes was engaged in a relationship with the Swedish author Victoria Benedictsson, who wrote Penningar and Fru Marianne under the male pseudonym Ernst Ahlgren.

The key idea of "aristocratic radicalism" went on to influence most of the later works of Brandes and resulted in voluminous biographies Wolfgang Goethe (1914–15), Francois de Voltaire (1916–17), Gaius Julius Cæsar 1918 and Michelangelo (1921).

Among his supporters, Brandes' work was seen as a liberator from repressive norms, authority and hypocrisy, and he served as an inspiration for many contemporary writers.

On the other hand, conservative circles condemned him as an immoral, unpatriotic and subversive blasphemer; as he became the lynchpin of criticism against modernity in its entirety.

[8] His brother Edvard (1847–1931), also a well-known critic, was the author of a number of plays, and of two psychological novels: A Politician (1889), and Young Blood (1899).