tag:theconversation.com,2011:/ca/topics/french-literature-8560/articlesFrench literature – The Conversation2023-11-09T08:31:14Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2147812023-11-09T08:31:14Z2023-11-09T08:31:14ZHow Balzac created the myth of the spinster<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551421/original/file-20230914-29-r0x6k9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=2%2C0%2C1994%2C1497&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Dans cette édition illustrée de _La cousine Bette_ (1948), l'héroïne célibataire a les traits durs, la mine sévère et triste. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.edition-originale.com/fr/litterature/livres-illustres/balzac-la-cousine-bette-1948-39977">Editions Albert Guillot, Paris 1948.</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>You only have to hear the word <em>spinster</em> to conjure up the age-old <a href="https://www.editionsladecouverte.fr/vieille_fille-9782348072765">stereotype</a> of a woman in her forties, single and sexually inactive, living alone or with a few cats. Ideally, she will be quite ugly, a little bitter, if not downright nasty, recalling our representations of <a href="https://www.editionsladecouverte.fr/sorcieres-9782355221224">witches</a>. Feminist theorists have been questioning and criticising this figure for decades, whose presence in our collective imagination serves above all as a <a href="https://www.illustre.ch/magazine/feministe-ou-anticonformiste-la-revanche-de-la-vieille-fille-539866">threat to women who decide not to marry or refuse to become mothers</a>.</p>
<p>When we look at the history of <a href="https://theconversation.com/feminisme-dans-la-fiction-quand-bechdel-regarde-moliere-198252">these representations</a>, it’s hard to avoid Balzac and his colossal <em>Human Comedy</em> (in French: <em>La Comédie Humaine</em>), in which portraits of old maids intersect and resemble each other to the point of constituting a <a href="https://www.maisondebalzac.paris.fr/sites/default/files/dossier_portraits_enseignants.pdf">social type</a>. And were those patterns not incriminating enough, one of his novels is entitled <em>Spinster</em> (<em>Vieille fille</em>).</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548337/original/file-20230914-1223-y31aks.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548337/original/file-20230914-1223-y31aks.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548337/original/file-20230914-1223-y31aks.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548337/original/file-20230914-1223-y31aks.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548337/original/file-20230914-1223-y31aks.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548337/original/file-20230914-1223-y31aks.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548337/original/file-20230914-1223-y31aks.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Johann Heinrich Füssli, <em>The Three Witches</em>, 1783.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:Johann_Heinrich_F%C3%BCssli_019.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span>
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<h2>The spinster, public enemy number one</h2>
<p>Why did Balzac create a stigmatising “type” for unmarried middle-aged women? It would seem that the starting point was his pure and simple detestation of celibacy, a state he considered “unproductive” and “contrary to society”. He writes</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“By remaining unmarried, a creature of the female sex becomes void of meaning; selfish and cold, she creates repulsion. This implacable judgment of the world is unfortunately too just to leave old maids in ignorance of its causes. ” (Balzac, <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/7927/pg7927.html">The Celibates: The Vicar of Tours</a>; in French:’Les Célibataires – Le Curé de Tours’).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In the preface to his novel <a href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierrette_(novel)"><em>Pierrette</em></a>, he goes so far as to recommend reviving a bill dating back to the Revolution that sought to impose an additional tax on unmarried people. Although he denies suffering from “singlephobia”, Balzac’s deep aversion toward those who were unable to found a family, and above all give birth, is striking. Also bear in mind that both men and women are targeted by his reproaches – and while the portraits of <a href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Cur%C3%A9_de_Tours">effeminate and ridiculous churchmen</a> or <a href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Rabouilleuse">bachelors driving their families to ruin</a>, are beyond the scope of this article, they are very much present in <em>The Human Comedy</em>.</p>
<p>But the figure of the old maid receives special satirical attention. Indeed, it appears that the deep empathy that the <a href="https://www.revuedesdeuxmondes.fr/balzac-feministe/">“women’s novelist”</a> usually shows toward women stops at those who do not fulfil themselves in marriage and motherhood.</p>
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À lire aussi :
<a href="https://theconversation.com/relire-balzac-a-lere-des-humanites-numeriques-131090">Relire Balzac à l’ère des humanités numériques</a>
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<p>Of course, this rejection didn’t come out of nowhere, and the stigmatisation of celibacy wasn’t invented by Balzac, with the idea of an additional tax dating back to <a href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imp%C3%B4t_sur_le_c%C3%A9libat">antiquity</a>. However, it was Balzac who gave the figure of the old maid its letters of nobility – so to speak – through a series of portraits that show us several variations of characters linked to the stereotype of the single woman. In <a href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Vieille_Fille_(Balzac)"><em>The Spinster</em></a>, he light-heartedly pokes fun at the naivety of a woman so uneducated in the ways of love that she fails to marry; in <a href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Cousine_Bette"><em>Cousin Bette</em></a> (<em>La cousine Bette</em>), he describes the manipulations of an old maid prepared to do anything to ruin her own family, drawing from the aesthetics of the witch in no uncertain terms. Finally, in <em>The Vicar of Tours</em> and <em>Pierrette</em>, he paints an almost identical double portrait of two embittered, penny-pinching and ugly spinsteresses conducting those around them to their ruin. In the course of the novellas, the figure of the spinster as we know it today emerges as a woman who suffers from a laughable ignorance in all things sexual, a boring existence, and ultimately, vicious nature.</p>
<p>It is important to note there is a certain paradox in the way Balzac characterises these characters. On the one hand, he criticises celibacy as an unproductive and unnatural lifestyle choice. On the other, he seems intent on showing that this celibacy is not a choice, but stems from the profound nature of his protagonists, for whom celibacy is an absolute inevitability from which they will never escape. Here, celibacy appears less as a free choice than as a state of affairs <a href="https://theconversation.com/tout-le-monde-naime-pas-le-sexe-comment-lasexualite-devient-un-objet-detudes-184801">almost tantamount to asexuality</a>.</p>
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À lire aussi :
<a href="https://theconversation.com/le-feminist-gaze-quand-les-femmes-ecrivent-en-feministes-212586">Le « feminist gaze » : quand les femmes écrivent en féministes</a>
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<p>Now if Balzac detests celibacy, he equally detests the idea of a forced or unhappy marriage, whose disastrous effect on women’s health and psyche he denounces in his novel <a href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Femme_de_trente_ans"><em>The 30-Year-Old Woman</em></a> (<em>La femme de 30 ans</em>). It therefore appears strange to point the finger at celibacy, which is perhaps the only alternative to undesired marriage.</p>
<p>So why does the 19th-century writer view single women so harshly, framing them in parasitic terms? First of all, non-maternity is at issue:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“They grow sharp and peevish because all human beings who miss their vocation are unhappy; they suffer, and suffering gives birth to the bitterness of ill will” (Balzac, <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1345/1345-h/1345-h.htm">The Celibates: The Vicar of Tours</a>)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The absence of desire and love is also singled out, especially as Balzac sees desire as a powerful driving force in his novels, pushing his characters to fulfil their role as heroes. It is a lack of love in the broadest sense that characterises Balzac’s spinster daughters. Deprived of romantic or marital affection, they are also incapable of developing family love: Sylvie Rogron tortures her young cousin to death, Cousin Bette manipulates her entire family to plunge them into misery and achieve her ends. The message is clear: the single woman is a danger to the family, the structure underpinning traditional society. She is thus transformed into a terrifying, even monstrous figure, and often bestialised. What is most frightening about the spinster is her independence, her profound inability to be subject to a man.</p>
<h2>A disturbing absence of sex life</h2>
<p>It is this freedom, so unsuited to women as they were thought of in the 19th century, that Balzac demonises. Under his pen, old maids lose their femininity and almost systematically acquire a form of androgyny.</p>
<p>So a woman without a man or children, without the desire to be desired, appears to Balzac to cease to be a woman at all. The debate is far from over: in France, we think of Marie Kock’s essay, <em>Spinster</em> (<em>Vieille fille</em>) published in 2022, or the essay by the writer and former porn actress Ovidie, <em>Alas, the flesh is sad</em> (<em>La chair est triste hélas</em>) or <a href="https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/lsd-la-serie-documentaire-sur-vivre-sans-sexe-du-12-au-15-avril-sur-france-culture-2161159">her documentary series on national radio France Culture</a> on her life without sex. Not having a sex life, or even claiming it, for a short period or throughout one’s life, continues to disturb society.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548342/original/file-20230914-8719-zf28te.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548342/original/file-20230914-8719-zf28te.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548342/original/file-20230914-8719-zf28te.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=961&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548342/original/file-20230914-8719-zf28te.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=961&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548342/original/file-20230914-8719-zf28te.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=961&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548342/original/file-20230914-8719-zf28te.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1208&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548342/original/file-20230914-8719-zf28te.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1208&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548342/original/file-20230914-8719-zf28te.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1208&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Embittered, ugly, dry, sickly jealous of her cousin Adeline and her beauty, Cousin Bette sets out to make her unhappy.</span>
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<p>When the Balzacian heroine is not possessed by a husband or lover, the forces are reversed, with male domination turned upside down. Mademoiselle Gamard, Sylvie Rogron and Cousin Bette subjugate the men around them in an unnatural ascension. Seen from this angle, the female celibacy portrayed in <em>La Comédie Humaine</em> takes on an anarchic, almost revolutionary quality, capable of threatening age-old institutions.</p>
<p>And while Balzac is at pains to show us his deep detestation of these dangers, we also sense a certain fascination with the profound immorality of his terrible bachelors. After all, one of his most delightful novels, <em>Cousin Bette</em>, is driven by its vicious, sapphic anti-heroine and her Machiavellian schemes, which he describes with obvious glee, making her, more or less in spite of himself, far more charismatic and memorable than her “respectable” peers.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/214781/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Loup Belliard ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.</span></em></p>In his collection of stories, “The Human Comedy”, the French 19th-century writer Honoré de Balzac turned the shaming of single women into an art.Loup Belliard, Doctorante en littérature du XIXe siècle et gender studies, Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA)Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2116312023-08-17T13:31:43Z2023-08-17T13:31:43ZSix books to read this Women In Translation month – recommended by our experts<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543043/original/file-20230816-29-p8ed5q.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=35%2C17%2C1961%2C1179&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Harvill Secker/The Feminist Press at CUNY/Amazon Crossing/Dedalus Ltd/Deep Vellum Publishing/Other Press</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Only a third of books translated into English are by women authors. August is <a href="https://www.womenintranslation.org/witmonth">Women in Translation</a> month, which hopes to address this imbalance by getting more people reading and buying – and publishers translating – books by women. In a bid to do our part we asked a few of our experts to recommend some of their favourite books.</em></p>
<p><em>This is by no means an exhaustive list, but a starting point for you to go and discover more wonderful books by women from all over the world that have been translated into English.</em></p>
<h2>1. <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/412741/little-aunt-crane-by-geling-yan/9780099569633">Little Aunt Crane</a> by Yan Geling, translated from Chinese by Esther Tyldesley</h2>
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<img alt="Book cover featuring a woman in a red scarf and holding an umbrella." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543004/original/file-20230816-31-1ytir0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543004/original/file-20230816-31-1ytir0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543004/original/file-20230816-31-1ytir0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543004/original/file-20230816-31-1ytir0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543004/original/file-20230816-31-1ytir0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543004/original/file-20230816-31-1ytir0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543004/original/file-20230816-31-1ytir0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Harvill Secker</span></span>
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<p>Little Aunt Crane shocks readers with its powerful opening. The second world war is ending and the Japanese have surrendered. The village of Sakito in north-eastern China is full of Japanese nationals and as the Chinese draw in, the elders decide to preserve their honour. The villagers embark on a mass suicide. There is only one survivor, 16-year-old Tatsuru. </p>
<p>Tatsuru, alone and in a country hostile to Japanese people, attempts to flee but is captured by human traffickers and sold to a wealthy Chinese family looking for a surrogate. Her name is changed to Duohe and she is told she must bear the children of their son while pretending to be the sister of his wife, Xiaohuan. An unlikely bond develops between the two women in this story that spans several decades of Mao’s rule.</p>
<p>Little Aunt Crane is a powerful novel about identity, love and family that also manages to trace the intricate emotional, ethical and even political challenges in post-war China. It’s a rare example of a Chinese novel that focuses on a Japanese protagonist in the post-war era, highlighting the struggles of women like Duohe and Xiaohuan. </p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Beixi Li</em></p>
<h2>2. <a href="https://www.feministpress.org/books-a-m/la-bastarda">La Bastarda</a>, by Trifonia Melibea Obono, translated from Spanish by Lawrence Schimel</h2>
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<img alt="Purple book cover featuring a white ring and text." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543006/original/file-20230816-19-f4anvz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543006/original/file-20230816-19-f4anvz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543006/original/file-20230816-19-f4anvz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543006/original/file-20230816-19-f4anvz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543006/original/file-20230816-19-f4anvz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1149&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543006/original/file-20230816-19-f4anvz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1149&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543006/original/file-20230816-19-f4anvz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1149&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Feminist Press at CUNY</span></span>
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<p>“Come on, try it. You’ll like it. You’re in the forest – the Fang forest is a free space. Now you’re free.” Freedom is not something orphaned narrator Okomo is accustomed to. Which makes this particular scene of queer sexual desire – away from the heterosexual, patriarchal traditions of the village – all the more exhilarating. Okomo’s family belong to the Fang community, the largest ethnic group in mainland Equatorial Guinea. </p>
<p>This short, sharp, addictive novel follows Okomo as she decodes and navigates the restrictive norms of Fang culture and searches for her estranged father. The narrative is laden with rules and hierarchies that structure Okomo’s existence and the characters around her are distinguished by their position, their relationships and their achievements. </p>
<p>Yet Trifonia Melibea Obono – and Lawrence Schimel, through his translation from Spanish – draw us to those who do not fit within these hierarchies. In these relationships between outcasts there is sanctuary to be found, away from the structural and physical violence, away in the shelter of the forest.</p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Olivia Hellewell</em></p>
<h2>3. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37660359-the-golden-hairpin">The Golden Hairpin</a> by Cece Qinghan, translated from Chinese by Alex Woodend</h2>
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<img alt="Book cover featuring a hand reaching for a bird cage." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543005/original/file-20230816-19-7z7nqn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543005/original/file-20230816-19-7z7nqn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543005/original/file-20230816-19-7z7nqn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543005/original/file-20230816-19-7z7nqn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543005/original/file-20230816-19-7z7nqn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1132&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543005/original/file-20230816-19-7z7nqn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1132&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543005/original/file-20230816-19-7z7nqn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1132&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Amazon Crossing</span></span>
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<p>The Golden Hairpin is a historical crime novel set during the reign of Emperor Yizong of Tang (AD859 to AD873) of China. The main character, Huang Zixia, is accused of murder. She disguises herself as a boy and infiltrates the palace to try to clear her name.</p>
<p>Huang Zixia finds herself caught up in mysteries, which must be solved against a background of treacherous court battles and intrigue. In China, Huang Zixia’s hairpin is as iconic as Sherlock Holmes’s deerstalker hat and pipe and she is an intelligent and courageous female sleuth. </p>
<p>If you are interested in Chinese culture, especially the Tang Dynasty, you will love this beautifully written and intricately plotted novel.</p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Beixi Li</em></p>
<h2>4. <a href="https://www.dedalusbooks.com/our-books/book.php?id=00000378#:%7E:text=This%20volume%20brings%20together%20six,Yugoslavia%20until%20the%20early%201990s.">Take Six: Six Balkan Women Writers</a>, translated from <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian-language">Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian</a> and Macdeonian by Will Firth, and Slovenian by Olivia Hellewell</h2>
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<img alt="Book cover featuring two paintings of women." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543007/original/file-20230816-22-63htsy.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543007/original/file-20230816-22-63htsy.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543007/original/file-20230816-22-63htsy.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543007/original/file-20230816-22-63htsy.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543007/original/file-20230816-22-63htsy.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1149&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543007/original/file-20230816-22-63htsy.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1149&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543007/original/file-20230816-22-63htsy.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1149&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Dedalus Ltd</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Anthologies can be tricky things and grouping writers together by arbitrary labels is not without its problems. But this anthology, which brings us six writers from six countries that were part of Yugoslavia until the early 1990s, is an excellent example of what a good anthology can do. </p>
<p>As one of its translators, I am biased, but this collection showcases a variety of forms and styles and provides the opportunity to dip in and discover writing that is not otherwise easy to come by in English translation.</p>
<p>Under one cover, readers can find autobiographical pieces, little-heard accounts of women’s lives in rural Bosnia, meandering travel prose, a genre-defying polyphonic story about time and space and stories connected by small objects or by settings. As a translator of the Slovenian stories, I am especially fond of the humour that Ana Svetel’s stories inject into the collection.</p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Olivia Hellewell</em></p>
<h2>5. <a href="https://fireflypress.co.uk/books/blue-book-of-nebo/">The Blue Book of Nebo</a>, written and translated from Welsh by Manon Steffan Ros</h2>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Blue book cover featuring a rabbit's head crossed out." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543010/original/file-20230816-19-elkj6x.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543010/original/file-20230816-19-elkj6x.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543010/original/file-20230816-19-elkj6x.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543010/original/file-20230816-19-elkj6x.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543010/original/file-20230816-19-elkj6x.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1206&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543010/original/file-20230816-19-elkj6x.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1206&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543010/original/file-20230816-19-elkj6x.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1206&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Deep Vellum Publishing</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Told as a series of diary entries, The Blue Book of Nebo is a moving tale of a mother-son relationship after an unspecified apocalypse devastates the UK. Rowenna and her teenage son Dylan survive alone in their Welsh village, growing their own food and raiding nearby houses for tools and books. </p>
<p>The book is a knowing take on the young adult post-apocalypse novel. It reminded me, in the best way, of nuclear novels like <a href="https://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/2243130.children-dust-louise-lawrence/">Louise Lawrence’s Children of the Dust</a> (1985) or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Children_of_Schewenborn">Gudrun Pausewang’s The Last Children of Schewenborn</a> (1983). </p>
<p>Manon Steffan Ros usually writes in Welsh. The English version is a beautiful reflection on reclaiming the Welsh language – an aspect of the novel which was, intriguingly, introduced in translation. Last year the novel became the first ever translated book to win the <a href="https://yotocarnegies.co.uk/2023-winners-announced/#:%7E:text=For%20the%20first%20time%20in,translated%20by%20Manon%20Steffan%20Ros.">Yoto Carnegie Medal</a> for children’s literature.</p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Carol O'Sullivan</em></p>
<h2>6. <a href="https://otherpress.com/product/as-we-exist-9781635422849/">As We Exist: A Postcolonial Autobiography</a> by Harchi Kaoutar, translated from French by Harchi Kaoutar and Emma Ramadan</h2>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="Book cover featuring a Polaroid picture of a woman holding a baby." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543012/original/file-20230816-23-gpnjf5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543012/original/file-20230816-23-gpnjf5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=914&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543012/original/file-20230816-23-gpnjf5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=914&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543012/original/file-20230816-23-gpnjf5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=914&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543012/original/file-20230816-23-gpnjf5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1149&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543012/original/file-20230816-23-gpnjf5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1149&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543012/original/file-20230816-23-gpnjf5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1149&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Other Press</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Harchi’s literary memoir retraces the author and sociologist’s formative years in eastern France. Born in a loving, hardworking family from the Moroccan diaspora, Harchi dispels the myth of a multicultural France to capture the injustices of a society where “the figure of the Muslim embodies the myth of the enemy within”. </p>
<p>Harchi describes various forms of sanctioned violence imposed on post-colonial citizens that fall under the banner of state racism, including marginalising women and banning religious symbols from state schools. Harchi’s elegant prose recalls the fear experienced within many communities when <a href="https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/06/29/in-2005-three-weeks-of-rioting-shook-france-after-the-deaths-of-two-teenagers_6039444_7.html">the death of two teenagers</a> fleeing from the police led to three weeks of violent riots against police brutality and increased cultural divisions in 2005. </p>
<p>Written in powerful poetic language, Harchi’s book eloquently describes how growing up as an outsider shaped her identity and awakened her political awareness. This timely translation provides a pertinent insight into contemporary French society.</p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Nicole Fayard</em></p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><em>Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/something-good-156">Sign up here</a>.</em></p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span><a href="mailto:nicole.fayard@le.ac.uk">nicole.fayard@le.ac.uk</a> has previously received funding from the British Academy.
Affiliations: Chair of Leicester Freeva; member of the Executive Board of the ASMCF (no financial interest in either) and member of staff at the University of Leicester (no financial gain).</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Beixi Li, Carol O'Sullivan, and Olivia Hellewell do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Mysteries from China, short stories from the Balkans, a French-Morrocan autobiography and more.Beixi Li, PhD Candidate, Translation Studies, University of BristolCarol O'Sullivan, Associate Professor in Translation Studies, University of BristolNicole Fayard, Associate Professor in French and Francophone Studies, University of LeicesterOlivia Hellewell, Assistant Professor in Peninsular Spanish and Translation Studies, University of NottinghamLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1936832022-11-16T20:59:25Z2022-11-16T20:59:25ZNote to Québec’s premier: French is the language of human rights, not xenophobia<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495121/original/file-20221114-26-hnnlp7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=109%2C117%2C5375%2C2666&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">‘Lamartine rejects the red flag in front of the town hall,’ a painting by Henri Félix Philippoteaux (1815–1884), captures a seminal moment in the second French Revolution in Paris in 1848, when revolutionaries demanded human and civil rights.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Les Musées de la ville de Paris)</span></span></figcaption></figure><iframe style="width: 100%; height: 100px; border: none; position: relative; z-index: 1;" allowtransparency="" allow="clipboard-read; clipboard-write" src="https://narrations.ad-auris.com/widget/the-conversation-canada/note-to-quebec-s-premier--french-is-the-language-of-human-rights--not-xenophobia" width="100%" height="400"></iframe>
<p>Faced with the new <a href="https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/index-eng.cfm">census data</a> that 23 per cent of Canadians are immigrants, Québec Premier François Legault recently warned the province remains determined to find a balance between welcoming newcomers and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/reel/CkQyxr7AczC/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link">fighting the decline of the French language</a>. </p>
<p>As a researcher in French literature and political theory, I believe Legault’s thinking is misguided. French isn’t a language of provincialism. Authors like <a href="https://www.famousauthors.org/victor-hugo">Victor Hugo</a>, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/George-Sand">George Sand</a> and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alphonse-de-Lamartine">Alphonse de Lamartine</a> — all of them studied as part of <a href="http://www.education.gouv.qc.ca/fileadmin/site_web/documents/PFEQ/qepsecfirstcycle.pdf">Québec’s core curriculum</a> — championed universalism, not xenophobia. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495123/original/file-20221114-12-eoqfpd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="An oval portrait of a dark-haired woman with flowers in her hair." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495123/original/file-20221114-12-eoqfpd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495123/original/file-20221114-12-eoqfpd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=801&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495123/original/file-20221114-12-eoqfpd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=801&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495123/original/file-20221114-12-eoqfpd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=801&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495123/original/file-20221114-12-eoqfpd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1007&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495123/original/file-20221114-12-eoqfpd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1007&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495123/original/file-20221114-12-eoqfpd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1007&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A portrait of George Sand (1804-1876). Her name was the pseudonym of Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin de Francueil, a novelist, playwright, French literary critic and journalist.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Musées de la ville de Paris)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There have been two French revolutions: <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/French-Revolution/Events-of-1789">in 1789</a>, when freedom and national sovereignty occupied popular imagination, and the lesser known uprising <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Revolutions-of-1848">in 1848,</a> when justice and human solidarity rose to the fore. French owes its modern, democratic form to the heroes of that second revolution. </p>
<p>The first triumphs of early 1848 — the ousting of the supposedly bourgeois monarch, Louis-Philippe, and the proclamation of the Second Republic — captivated French-Canadians, both young and old. Politician Louis-Joseph Papineau, leader of <a href="https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/patriotes">Lower Canada’s Patriote party</a>, saluted <a href="https://numerique.banq.qc.ca/patrimoine/details/52327/3589842">the “truths” being preached</a> across the Atlantic, and <a href="https://numerique.banq.qc.ca/patrimoine/details/52327/3456427">100 young people gathered</a> in a Montréal hotel shouting: “Liberty, equality, fraternity!”</p>
<p>In 1848, <a href="https://www.revuedesdeuxmondes.fr/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/6fa84cc0a4a2f233b2ec6dfe72668138.pdf">Sand wrote</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I dream of an ideal fraternity, and I believe I would cease to live the day I do not wish it for humanity.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The inclusive nature of her political ideal signified a shift in discourse on human rights since the first French Revolution in 1789. It soon transcended national borders. Canadians from various ancestries <a href="https://numerique.banq.qc.ca/patrimoine/details/52327/3589824?docsearchtext=L%27Aurore,%2031%20mars%201848.">celebrated the events in Paris</a> where one heard “Long live Italy!” and “Long live Ireland!” <a href="https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1848lamartine.asp">simultaneously with the French national anthem</a>. </p>
<h2>First ‘red scare’</h2>
<p>But the French and those abroad were divided on just how radical the second revolution ought to be. This was Canada’s first red scare, almost 100 years before the <a href="https://cha-shc.ca/_uploads/5c38afba549c7.pdf">Cold War-era aversion to communism that was prevalent in North America</a>. </p>
<p>The fierce advocates of the French working class — Sand, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alexandre-Auguste-Ledru-Rollin">Alexandre Ledru-Rollin</a> and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Louis-Blanc">Louis Blanc</a> among them — clashed with moderates like de Lamartine.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="A black-and-white photo of a man in a suit with grey hair." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495125/original/file-20221114-25-7zo5hs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495125/original/file-20221114-25-7zo5hs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=967&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495125/original/file-20221114-25-7zo5hs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=967&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495125/original/file-20221114-25-7zo5hs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=967&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495125/original/file-20221114-25-7zo5hs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1216&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495125/original/file-20221114-25-7zo5hs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1216&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495125/original/file-20221114-25-7zo5hs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1216&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Louis-Joseph Papineau is seen in this 1852 photo.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(National Archives of Canada)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>“M. Papineau is the Ledru-Rollin of Canada,” a Montréal-based newspaper <a href="https://numerique.banq.qc.ca/patrimoine/details/52327/4129457">proclaimed in May 1848</a> after praising Lamartine’s promises to the bourgeoisie. </p>
<p>The second French Revolution turned bleak after a three-day insurrection in <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/june-days-rebellion">June 1848</a>, when more than 4,000 French workers died and 15,000 were arrested. While most Canadian newspapers blamed the bloodshed on communist ideology and <a href="https://open.library.ubc.ca/media/stream/pdf/24/1.0068057/1">preached a moderate stance aligned with British conservatism</a>, one journalist reflected how Canadian youth still “cried with all those who suffered.”</p>
<p>What about today’s Québec conservatism? </p>
<p>Legault’s use of the French language as a tool to limit immigration is a historical inversion. </p>
<p>The Montréal youths shouting “Liberty, equality, fraternity!” in 1848 wanted to open doors to the world, not close them. They understood freedom as only one component of human rights: justice and solidarity became necessary complements <a href="http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/142/degrees-of-violence-in-the-french-revolution">following the violence</a> of the 1789 revolution.</p>
<h2>Historically ignorant</h2>
<p>In 1849, writing from exile like Hugo, Blanc reminded the French that his seemingly novel socialist ideas <a href="http://www.mediterranee-antique.fr/Auteurs/Fichiers/ABC/Blanc/R_1848/T2/R_48_2_A18.htm">repeated an old Christian motto</a>: “The first must be the servant of the last.”</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495127/original/file-20221114-21-bnsyk1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A black and white photo of a dark-haired man with his arms crossed." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495127/original/file-20221114-21-bnsyk1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495127/original/file-20221114-21-bnsyk1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=753&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495127/original/file-20221114-21-bnsyk1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=753&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495127/original/file-20221114-21-bnsyk1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=753&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495127/original/file-20221114-21-bnsyk1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=946&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495127/original/file-20221114-21-bnsyk1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=946&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495127/original/file-20221114-21-bnsyk1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=946&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Louis Blanc, who was a member of the French government during the 1848 French Revolution, is seen in this undated portrait.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Musées de la ville de Paris)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Québec government does not need to be “a servant of the last” if, as it alleges, the French language is no longer first in line. But its use of the language as an excuse for xenophobia is historically ignorant. </p>
<p>Despite my personal love of the French language, I see no value in students having to watch <a href="https://montrealgazette.com/entertainment/arts/kevin-tierney-quebec-movies-have-a-dubbing-problem">more movies dubbed in French</a> or being required to take <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/bill-96-explained-1.6460764">additional French courses at Québec’s publicly funded colleges</a>. </p>
<p>Legault is failing to understand that French has been the language of human rights for hundreds of years. He’s failing to capitalize on the fact that Canadian youth, outraged by global indifference to ongoing existential crises and showing solidarity to international protest movements, could be drawn to French, not English, for that very reason.</p>
<p>In the history of the anglophone media, it’s difficult to find an equivalent to French novelist Emile Zola’s <a href="https://www.lemanuscritfrancais.com/fr/manuscrit/affaire-dreyfus-emile-zola-laurore-du-13-janvier-1898/">trail-blazing “J’accuse!” op-ed</a> published in <em>L'Aurore</em> that railed against antisemitism, nor a <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/crac031">revolution where poets became politicians overnight</a>. </p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/reading-french-literature-in-a-time-of-terror-63036">Reading French literature in a time of terror</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>French authors have historically led the world in issuing eloquent and genuine calls for justice. To read Hugo or Sand is to discover new hemispheres in the human heart.</p>
<p>To return the French language to its rightful place as the voice of human rights, the Québec government must promote it as a tool of a human rights-based civic education, not a mandatory language. Welcoming immigrants would subsequently not be an obstacle to the French language or francophone culture — it would be a benefit.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/193683/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rayyan Dabbous does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>French has historically been a language of human rights. That’s why the Québec government should promote it as a tool of a human rights-based civic education, not force it on newcomers.Rayyan Dabbous, PhD Candidate, Center for Comparative Literature, University of TorontoLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1927902022-11-10T10:13:56Z2022-11-10T10:13:56ZWhen Marcel Proust talks physics<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/490365/original/file-20221018-6861-a9yv5y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C37%2C4981%2C3183&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Marcel Proust on a French postage stamp.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The 100th anniversary of Marcel Proust’s death gives us an opportunity to remember his masterwork, <em>In Search of Lost Time</em>, a sort of French-style <em>Divine Comedy</em> first released in 1913. Much like the way Dante’s 13th-century work forms a neat summary of Medieval wisdom, <em>In Search of Lost Time</em> attempts to cover every facet of human knowledge acquired at the dawn of the 20th century.</p>
<p>It discusses aesthetics with archetypal artists (through characters such as Vinteuil, the composer; Elstir, the painter; and Bergotte, the writer), addresses medicine by touching on Freudian psychology, and broaches the art of battle, right at the cusp of World War I. Proust refers liberally to contemporary technological developments, including the telephone, which enables him to communicate with the ghost of his beloved grandmother, the train that leaves the Saint-Lazare station, and the wondrous airplane that appears to him as a god would to an Ancient Greek. He is familiar with the theory of evolution, stating “‘Selection'… seemed to me as incompatible… as it would be if preceded by the adjective 'Natural’.”</p>
<p>Ultimately, Proust runs through the many decisive scientific breakthroughs of his time. The early 20th century witnessed two revolutions in physics that shattered our established worldview: relativity, which disputed the absolute nature of time, and quantum mechanics, whose indeterminacy challenged reality itself.</p>
<p>Here are some of the passages where Proust refers to momentous advances in his work. </p>
<h2>Humble beginnings in school day memories</h2>
<p>In <em>Purgatory</em>, Canto 15, Dante alludes to the first law of optics, which theorises light reflection and will be formalised by Descartes in the 17th century. Proust invokes the second law, which concerns refraction, in a tender description of his relationship with his grandmother:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“[My] thoughts were continued in her without having to undergo any deflection, since they passed from my mind into hers without change of atmosphere or of personality.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He also recalls other lessons from high school:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“[To] a physicist the space occupied by the tiniest ball of pith is explained by the harmony of action, the conflict or equilibrium, of laws of attraction or repulsion which govern far greater worlds.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>These passages brim with the charm of bygone schooldays, when Proust would have carried out experiments such as electrifying an ebonite rod with a cat’s pelt. Any physicist would easily spot the Doppler effect in this sentence:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“There was also a new whistle… that was itself exactly like the scream of a tramway, and, as it was not carried out of earshot by its own velocity, one thought of a single car, not endowed with motion, or broken down, immobilised, screaming at short intervals like a dying animal.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p><img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/Doppler_Effect.gif" alt="DopplerEffect.gif"></p>
<p><em><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Doppler_Effect.gif">Doleron/Wikipedia</a>, CC BY-SA 3.</em></p>
<blockquote>
<p>“It encountered in her the electric shock of a contrary will which violently repulsed it; I could see the sparks flash from her eyes.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>However, this last statement would have been disputed by Charles-Augustin Coulomb, whose law states that unlike charges attract while like charges repel each other!</p>
<h2>Proust’s X-ray vision</h2>
<p>Coming into more modern physics, Proust writes on several instances about ultraviolet and infrared rays. He also mentions X-rays, which were discovered in 1895 by Wilhelm Röntgen. To quote his character, Françoise:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Madame knows everything; Madame is worse than the X-rays.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In the book, this phrase is uttered at a time in the writer’s early youth, even though Proust was actually 24 when Röntgen made his discovery. It might therefore be suggested that the servant character of Françoise had some sort of prophetic gift. Later in the book, he returns to this physical phenomenon:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“[This] strange print which seems to us to have so little resemblance to ourselves bears sometimes the same stamp of truth, scarcely flattering, indeed, but profound and useful, as a photograph taken by X-rays.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Proust even appears to claim to have a see-through vision of reality:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“It was all very well for me to go out to dinner. I did not see the guests because when I thought I was observing them I was radiographing them.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He does not shy away, either, from the subject of radioactivity. Thought to have therapeutic properties, radioactive anti-ageing creams were popularly purchased at the time. In this regard, Proust ventures a bold metaphor when marvelling at the longevity of his character, Madame Swann, who represents:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“a more miraculous challenge to the laws of chronology than the conservation of radium to those of nature.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Madame Curie’s prized radium is an unstable element that decays over a period of 1,600 years. A long time, indeed, but other elements last even longer, given that stable isotopes have an infinite lifespan.</p>
<h2>Proust on time</h2>
<p>Naturally, time plays a fundamental role in Proust’s seminal work. The concept is present in both the opening line of the book (“For a long time I used to go to bed early”) and the closing one (“… in Time”).</p>
<p>Proust’s era saw a total overhaul in our perception of time. Of course, today, we still do not know what time really is any better than Saint Augustine, who once said: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>However, Einstein’s relativity posits a type of time that is no longer absolute and eternal, but varies according to the framework of representation, that is to say, depending on the measurement. Proust demonstrates an intuition similar to that of the eminent physicist in his description of the church in Combray:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“[All] these things made [it]… a building which occupied, so to speak, four dimensions of space – the name of the fourth being Time.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This reference to a four-dimensional space clearly echoes the concept of relativity. But was Proust familiar with Einstein’s theory? When asked this question years later, he explained himself in a letter:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Although it has indeed been written to me that I derive from him, or he from me, I do not understand a single word of his theories, not knowing algebra. And I doubt for my part that he has read my novels. It seems we have analogous ways of deforming Time.”</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>A quantum view of reality</h2>
<p>Less apparent in the text are Proust’s dabblings in quantum mechanics. The then-nascent theory based on quanta – primary corpuscles of energy – was first proposed by Max Planck in 1900.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/454158/original/file-20220324-25-1gw3huu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/454158/original/file-20220324-25-1gw3huu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=835&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/454158/original/file-20220324-25-1gw3huu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=835&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/454158/original/file-20220324-25-1gw3huu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=835&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/454158/original/file-20220324-25-1gw3huu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1049&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/454158/original/file-20220324-25-1gw3huu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1049&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/454158/original/file-20220324-25-1gw3huu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1049&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Max Planck in 1901.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Planck#/media/Fichier:Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-R0116-504,_Max_Planck.jpg">Bundesarchiv/Wikimedia</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>While attempting to comfort his sick grandmother, the narrator nods to this new idea in physics:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“[According] to the latest scientific discoveries, the materialist position appeared to be crumbling.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Which discoveries does he have in mind here? We can only assume that he is speaking of quantum mechanics. Proust’s contemporary, Paul Valéry, also born in 1871, appears to evoke this same scientific theory. In <em>Reflections on the World Today</em> (1929), he writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“[The light] is compromised… in the suit brought by discontinuity against continuity, probability against images… hidden reality against the mind that would track it down and, in a word, by the unintelligible against the intelligible.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Quantum mechanics clashed with the way we traditionally viewed the world. Classical physics is deterministic; we can use it to predict how things will happen. We can understand reality “for what it is”. However, with an electron, all we can do is calculate the probability of it making a given journey. In this way, determinism becomes collective, as we are aware of the distribution of a group of electrons but do not know where any particular one of them will end up. Quantum theory, which governs these behaviours, is a branch of physics that sometimes appears counterintuitive.</p>
<p>It relies on two seemingly contradictory postulates:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>The Schrödinger equation, which regards evolution, is deterministic in nature. It is a dynamic law governing forces other than gravity, much like a more precise version of Newton’s law of universal gravitation.</p></li>
<li><p>However, quantum theory also includes the principle of “collapse,” which applies at the moment of measurement and chooses the result from among an infinite set of possibilities.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Proust flirts with this quantum paradox, writing:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“She acquired an almost beggarly air from having (in place of the ten, the score that I recalled in turn without being able to fix any in my memory) but a single nose, rounder than I had thought, which made her appear rather a fool and had in any case lost the faculty of multiplying itself… Fallen into the inertia of reality, I sought to rebound.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He contrasts the multiple image that he keeps of this young dairymaid character with the sole reality that he offers himself, such that his vision “collapses” in the real world.</p>
<p>While quantum mechanics reveals a probabilistic material reality, Proust believes in the spiritual reality of human beings, musing that “other people exist for us only to the extent of the idea that we retain of them” and “the evidence of the senses is also an operation of the mind in which conviction creates the evidence”.</p>
<p>Quantum reality is dependent on the measurement made by the observer, similar to how any observation engenders a subjective mental translation: “[Reality] has no existence for us, so long as it has not been created anew by our mind.”</p>
<p><em>In Search of Lost Time</em> is a magnificent compendium, laden with humour, emotion, poetry and philosophy. As Proust peppers his writing with the ingredients of real life, the laws of physics nestled into his run-on sentences are more than merely decorative. He filters the world through an Impressionist vision of reality, not unlike the teachings of quantum mechanics.</p>
<p>Although many experts have regarded Proust as the greatest French writer of the 20th century, he was awarded no Nobel Prize, his ashes are not enshrined in the Panthéon, and no waxwork of him haunts the Musée Grévin. But he was ahead of his time, taking comfort in such macabre matters:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“[There] is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good… nor make the talented artist consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his body devoured by worms… All these obligations which have not their sanction in our present life seem to belong to a different world… So that the idea that Bergotte was not wholly and permanently dead is by no means improbable.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And so, too, did Proust enter this ideal realm that he had once wished for his fictional writer.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Translated from the French by Enda Boorman for <a href="http://www.fastforword.fr/en">Fast ForWord</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/192790/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>François Vannucci ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.</span></em></p>From electricity to X-rays, the Doppler Effect and even quantum theory, Proust’s writing is littered with physics references.François Vannucci, Professeur émérite, chercheur en physique des particules, spécialiste des neutrinos, Université Paris CitéLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1920842022-10-08T01:40:33Z2022-10-08T01:40:33ZAnnie Ernaux, French feminist who uses language as ‘a knife’, wins Nobel Prize for Literature<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/488711/original/file-20221007-14-cedhj0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=613%2C187%2C4378%2C3136&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Annie Ernaux</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Christophe Petit Tesson/EPA</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Annie Ernaux was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature on October 6. The 82-year-old writer, whose sociological autofiction and memoir is influenced by Simone de Beauvoir and Pierre Bourdieu, is the first French woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature since the founding of the awards in 1901. Ernaux also becomes the 17th woman (<a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/all-nobel-prizes-in-literature/">among</a> 119 Nobel Prize Laureates) to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.</p>
<p>This follows her 2019 shortlisting for the Man Booker International Prize for Literature, for <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/the-years">The Years</a> (translated by Alison Strayer, originally published in 2008), a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 – <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/oct/06/annie-ernaux-the-2022-nobel-literature-laureates-greatest-works">acclaimed in France</a> as a modern In Search of Lost Time.</p>
<p>Considered the mother of contemporary sociological autofiction, Ernaux claims to write “something between literature, sociology and history”. To write “life”, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/466267.L_criture_comme_un_couteau">she uses</a> language as “a knife”. Her short, sparse, unlyrical, minimalist writing is wielded as a sharp weapon.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/when-the-fabricated-lives-of-french-authors-are-just-as-gripping-as-the-books-they-write-139427">When the fabricated lives of French authors are just as gripping as the books they write</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Voice of freedom</h2>
<p>Her Nobel win is not a surprise. In 2021, she was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/oct/04/nobel-odds-annie-ernaux-is-the-favourite-to-win-this-years-prize-for-literature">widely named</a> as a favourite to win the prestigious award. A fake Twitter account created by an Italian writer, Tommaso Debenedetti, <a href="https://www.archytele.com/no-the-writer-annie-ernaux-did-not-announce-on-twitter-her-nobel-prize-for-literature/">had even announced</a> her win in 2021 – a hoax that misled many. And in the days leading up to her award, online bookmakers ranked her as a favourite.</p>
<p>French president Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to Ernaux as the voice of “the freedom of women and the forgotten [people] of the century”. He <a href="https://twitter.com/EmmanuelMacron/status/1577997945194123265">tweeted</a>: “Annie Ernaux has been writing the novel of the collective and intimate memory of our country for 50 years.” </p>
<p>Born Annie Duchesne in 1940 in Normandie, Ernaux grew up working-class in a small town, Yvetot, where her parents ran a café–grocery shop. Her mother wanted the best education for her and pushed her to study. Ernaux was destined to become a teacher; she taught literature. She married into a <em>bourgeois</em> (middle-class) family. Her work explores her break with the world she grew up in, as she acquired cultural capital.</p>
<p>Building on the raw material of her diaries, Ernaux’s work reflects on her social trajectory, developing the ideas of “class betrayal” and “social shame”. She excavates how constant self-monitoring (for example, of language), for fear of being stigmatised, can create permanent feelings of social and cultural insecurity. She never spares her parents – nor herself. </p>
<p>Her books provide a mirror to readers who have experienced the same social gap, allowing them to (re)compose their personal and social identity. Her style is labelled “<em>écriture blanche</em>” (which literally translates as “white language”) – a language that doesn’t betray any social trend.</p>
<p>While Ernaux’s books draw on her own experience, sensations and emotions, her stories are never just her own. Her individual experiences represent collective ones – as Macron acknowledged after her win. She’s the author of 24 books, including 18 published in the prestigious <a href="https://www.gallimard.fr/Catalogue/GALLIMARD/Blanche#">Collection Blanche</a> from French publisher house Gallimard. </p>
<p>The Swedish Academy praised her for “the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.” </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-with-men-i-feel-like-a-very-sharp-glittering-blade-when-5-liberated-women-spoke-the-truth-191496">Friday essay: 'with men I feel like a very sharp, glittering blade' – when 5 liberated women spoke the truth</a>
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<h2>Unbelonging and obscenity</h2>
<p>Ernaux made her literary debut in 1974 with a hard-hitting book, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/819956.Cleaned_Out">Cleaned Out</a>, a fictionalised account of her own illegal abortion. The opening pages present the narrator, Denise Lesur, waiting in her university room for the outcome of her abortion. </p>
<p>As she wonders how all this happened, she retraces her journey through her rather happy childhood in a regional small town, her brilliant schooling and her entrance to university. Denise is actively supported by an ambitious mother who seeks social advancement for her – but she has the growing feeling of not belonging, of being an outsider. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/399260.A_Frozen_Woman">A Frozen Woman</a> (1981) builds on the same experience, but enlarges the scope to include marriage and maternity. The narrator marries into a bourgeois family; however, the <em>bourgeoisie</em> proves to be conservative and conformist. Marriage leads to domestic subjugation, which the narrator strongly denounces.</p>
<p>The following books, less violent in tone, elaborate on her parents. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/819957.A_Man_s_Place">A Man’s Place</a> (1984), for which Ernaux was awarded the prestigious Prix Renaudot, is dedicated to her working-class father. Ernaux paints his portrait in a series of subtle touches: poverty and a rough life, a move from the countryside to the city, the semi-success of his small business. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/399254.A_Woman_s_Story">A Woman’s Story</a> (1988) traces the different faces and life of her mother, who has Alzheimer’s disease, while exploring her own ambivalence towards her.</p>
<p>Two further books complicate this parental diptych. The first lines of <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/shame-9781888363692">Shame</a> (1997), read as an echo of Camus’s <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-outsider-9780241554401">The Outsider</a>: “My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon.” <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1264267.I_Remain_in_Darkness">I Remain in Darkness</a> (1997) expands on her mother’s Alzheimer’s, and reflects on her death. It’s the work of a grieving daughter; the title is the last sentence her mother wrote. This book is the diary Ernaux wrote, expressing her pain and emotions on the spot, after each visit to her mother in the aged care home where she died.</p>
<p>Ernaux went on to explore her formative years. She revisited her abortion, this time as memoir rather than fiction, in <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/happening-9781609809485">Happening</a> (2000). She wrote about her abrupt entry into a sexual life, aged 18, in <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/a-girls-story-9781609809515">A Girl’s Story</a> (2016). And about the family secret – the death of her sister before she was born – in <em>L'Autre Fille</em> (2011) (The Other Girl). </p>
<p>A critically acclaimed film of <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13880104/">Happening</a>, directed by Audrey Diwan, won the Golden Lion at the 2021 Venice Film Festival, and premiered at the Alliance Française French Film Festival this year.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HAQVYYqj3Ro?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The film adaptation of Happening has been critically acclaimed.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In other books, she investigates sexual addiction, desire and its satisfaction. Two narrate a short liaison with A., a Russian man: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/399257.Simple_Passion">Simple Passion</a> (1992) – adapted for a 2021 film directed by Danielle Arbid – and <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/711516/getting-lost-by-annie-ernaux/#">Getting Lost</a> (2001). Simple Passion begins with Ernaux reflecting on watching her first pornographic film. That’s how we should write, she concludes – we should aim for “this impression provoked by the scene of the sexual act, this anguish and stupor, a suspension of moral judgement”.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-possession-9781583228555">The Possession</a> (2002) recounts the end of her liaison with W., and her experience of jealousy. And <em>L’Usage de la photo</em> (The Uses of Photography), co-authored with Marc Marie, comments on 14 photographs taken by the co-authors, who are lovers. Ernaux’s most recent book, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/60394737"><em>Le jeune homme</em></a> (2022), recounts her relationship with a man 30 years younger than her. </p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/intellectual-fearlessness-politics-and-the-spiritual-impulse-the-remarkable-career-of-amanda-lohrey-187354">Intellectual fearlessness, politics and the spiritual impulse: the remarkable career of Amanda Lohrey</a>
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<p>Ernaux has sometimes been branded an obscene author – sexual obscenity adding to the social obscenity of being a “class defector”. She disrupts literary hierarchies, and deliberately writes “below literature” by delving into subjects that might have been considered unworthy of literature (such as abortion, masturbation, new suburbs, or supermarkets). </p>
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<p><em>Regarde les lumières mon amour</em> (2014), for instance, offers a diary of the time she spent in her local Auchan hypermarket. The Years, considered her masterpiece, offers a synthesis, where she “put[s] the world in words”. By referring to objects, words, songs and television programs, over a span of 65 years – combined with notes from her diaries – she captures a truth of her time. “It is both the story of my life and that of thousands of women who were also in search of freedom and emancipation,” she told Agence-France Press in May 2022. </p>
<p>Ernaux is a feminist, fed by Marxism, existentialism and <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/">phenomenology</a>. She has enthusiastically observed the effects of the #metoo movement. “Women are no longer willing to let things happen to them,” <a href="https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2022/10/06/french-writer-annie-ernaux-wins-nobel-prize-in-literature_5999365_7.html">she has said</a>.</p>
<p>For Ernaux, writing is a political act. She says the Nobel prize is “a very great honour” but also “a great responsibility” – one she was given in order to bear witness, on behalf of “justice and righteousness”.</p>
<p>In May 2022, at the Cannes Film Festival, Ernaux presented <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt19758084/"><em>Les Années Super 8</em></a>, a film she co-directed with her son David Ernaux-Briot. It’s a delicate journey into the life of a French family, compiled from home movie images filmed from 1972 to 1981. </p>
<p>And it’s another way of entering Ernaux’s world – our world.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/192084/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Véronique Duché does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Annie Ernaux is the first French woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her autofiction masterpiece, The Years, has been called a modern In Search of Lost Time.Véronique Duché, A.R. Chisholm Professor of French, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1920502022-10-07T15:19:09Z2022-10-07T15:19:09ZNobel prize in literature: Annie Ernaux and writing from experience<p>The French author <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/oct/06/annie-ernaux-the-2022-nobel-literature-laureates-greatest-works">Annie Ernaux</a> has won the 2022 Nobel prize in literature at the age of 82. Of the 119 awarded, Ernaux is only the 18th woman Nobel laureate in literature and the first French woman to have won the prize.</p>
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<p>The academy praised her “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”.</p>
<p>From her first book Cleaned Out in 1973, Ernaux’s work has been closely informed by her own life experiences. She has continued to surprise and inspire readers with coverage of daring topics and her innovative approach to genres. Her body of work includes discussions on the act and art of writing, texts incorporating personal photographs, intimate and public diaries, and life-writing that refuses to be contained by categories.</p>
<h2>Class conflict</h2>
<p>Born in 1940, Ernaux was brought up in Yvetot in Normandy. She is the only daughter of working-class parents who ran a cafe-cum-grocers, and her childhood was underpinned by class tensions within the family home and outside it. Ernaux attended a private Catholic girls’ school for her secondary education, which fuelled social divisions between her and her parents – in particular her father, which she explores in her fourth publication <a href="https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/a-mans-place">A Man’s Place</a>.</p>
<p>Growing up in a socially divided environment meant Ernaux felt ashamed of the supposedly distasteful aspects of her upbringing, such as the working-class environment of her father’s cafe or her mother’s shirking of the norms of middle-class housewifery and femininity, which she writes about in <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/213938/a-frozen-woman-by-annie-ernaux-translated-from-the-french-by-linda-coverdale/">A Frozen Woman</a>. </p>
<p>Her childhood was immersed in working-class culture, popular songs and the romantic novels her mother consumed. But from an early age, she was also an avid reader of “classic” French texts. She then studied literature at Rouen university and went on to teach it at secondary school before becoming a full-time writer in the 1970s. This experience gave Ernaux knowledge of French theories and practices of writing, which is evident in her references to authors such as Honore de Balzac, Marcel Proust and Simone de Beauvoir and her self-reflexive comments on the act of writing.</p>
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<p>As a writer, she realised that her daily life was not represented in either the French literature she read at home or in the classrooms she learnt and later taught in. It was at school that she became aware of a “<a href="https://www.persee.fr/doc/polix_0295-2319_1991_num_4_14_1454">familiarity, a subtle complicity</a>” as her teachers avidly listened to the stories of her middle-class schoolmates but silenced her attempts to speak about her home life. These experiences permeate her work, which repeatedly touches on the conflict between what she calls “the dominant class” and “the dominated class”, referencing the French sociologist <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Distinction-A-Social-Critique-of-the-Judgement-of-Taste/Bourdieu/p/book/9780415567886#:%7E:text=Pierre%20Bourdieu's%20Distinction%20brilliantly%20illuminates,dissection%20of%20the%20bourgeois%20mind.">Pierre Bourdieu</a>.</p>
<p>Her first three novels, Cleaned Out, <a href="https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/do-what-they-say-or-else-annie-ernaux">Do What They Say or Else</a> and A Frozen Woman, form a trilogy of autobiographical novels. These works broadly detail the socialisation of a working-class girl who has a middle-class education and then marriage. Her protagonist is a woman who, like so many of Ernaux’s readers, identifies as a “<a href="https://www.gallimard.fr/Catalogue/GALLIMARD/Folio/Folio/L-ecriture-comme-un-couteau">class defector</a>”. </p>
<p>In subsequent works, Ernaux considered fictionalised accounts of her origins a form of betrayal because they ran the risk of <a href="https://legrandcontinent.eu/fr/2022/10/06/la-litterature-est-une-arme-de-combat-une-conversation-avec-annie-ernaux/">exoticising her family and class origins</a>. </p>
<p>Ernaux’s acute awareness of the formative influence of class underpins her entire body of work and in the wake of her win, many in France praised her work for its ongoing focus on the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/books/didier-eribon-annie-ernaux-nobel-literature.html">French working-class experience</a>. </p>
<h2>Flat writing</h2>
<p>Following this trilogy, Ernaux adopted the writing style for which she has since become well-known, typically referred to as “<em>l’écriture plate</em>” (literally “flat writing”). This pared-down, understated style is coupled with a fluid approach to genre that incorporates elements of ethnography, autobiography and sociology. As she comments in A Man’s Place: </p>
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<p>This neutral way of writing comes to me naturally, it is the very same style I used when I wrote home telling my parents the latest news. </p>
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<p>The chairman of the Nobel Literature committee, Anders Olssen, <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-63156199">described</a> Ernaux’s work as “uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean”.</p>
<p>This approach to writing is underpinned by a mission. Ernaux believes that writing about the self inevitably involves writing about a socio-political context, and thereby extends the representativeness of her own experience. By writing simply about her own experiences, she also wants to write into literature the collective experience of the French working-class.</p>
<p>That desire to give voice to marginalised experiences is further illustrated in two of her “external diaries”, Exteriors and Things Seen, which record the everyday exchanges of people in outside spaces such as the supermarket or when commuting on the Paris metro. </p>
<p>She has also published more intimate diaries composed during significant stages of her life. <a href="https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/i-remain-in-darkness">I Remain in Darkness</a> was written during her mother’s decline from Alzheimer’s. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/sep/12/getting-lost-by-annie-ernaux-review-adrift-in-desire">Getting Lost</a> is a diary she kept during a passionate affair with a married man – a love affair she also described in her work <a href="https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/simple-passion">Simple Passion</a>. The honesty with which she details her obsession with this man struck a chord with many of her female readers.</p>
<p>Her literary approach typically incorporates self-reflexive remarks where she comments on the challenges she faces in turning lived experiences into literary form. </p>
<p>It is that openness and sense of writer-reader intimacy that partly explains her popularity. Her courage in exploring and exploding generic expectations is also reflected in the content of her work. She writes about a range of taboo subjects including her backstreet abortion (Cleaned Out and Happening, which was recently made into a film), sexual intimacy and issues of consent, breast cancer and her dead sister (L’Autre Fille).</p>
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<p>Her most famous work, <a href="https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/the-years">The Years</a>, is considered to be her magnum opus. It can be read as a further example of a “public diary” in that it covers the socio-cultural history of France, mixing her own story (relayed through the representative “she”) with the collective story of her generation. Nominated for the <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/man-booker-international-prize-2019-shortlist-authors-a8862446.html">International Booker Prize in 2019</a>, The Years made English-speaking audiences aware of her work – and that attention has now happily been extended by the jury of the Nobel prize in literature.</p>
<p>Like many of the women prizewinners who have preceded her, including Toni Morrison and Alice Munro, Ernaux has spent her writing life giving voice to the experiences of those who remain under- or unrepresented in literature. This award will allow these voices to ring out all the more clearly.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/192050/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Siobhán McIlvanney does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The French writer has won the Nobel for literature for her ascetic approach to writing and fearlessness in covering the personal and taboo.Siobhán McIlvanney, Professor in French and Francophone Women’s Writing; Head of Department of French, King's College LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1748112022-01-12T15:26:45Z2022-01-12T15:26:45ZBeyond Cyrano de Bergerac’s nose – the real man behind the swashbuckling hero<p>There’s something quite striking missing in Peter Dinklage’s performance of Cyrano de Bergerac. In the upcoming musical film, Cyrano is missing his iconic large nose. </p>
<p>Cyrano’s nose has been integral to popular images of the character ever since Edmond Rostand’s swashbuckling 1897 verse drama <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1254/1254-h/1254-h.htm">Cyrano de Bergerac</a>. This connection became even more so after Gérard Depardieu’s take on the role in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099334/">1990</a>. </p>
<p>In every iteration of Cyrano’s tale till now, his large nose causes him trouble and affects how people perceive him. In the new film, Dinklage’s form of dwarfism, called achondroplasia, as <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-58678918">one critic wrote</a>, “serves the same purpose the character’s oversize schnoz originally did, lending Cyrano an outsider quality that he must overcompensate for in personality”.</p>
<p>Cyrano is a witty wordsmith and staggeringly proficient swordsman, able to defeat his opponents with both verbal and physical deftness. For instance, in one scene in the Depardieu film, Cyrano duels and vanquishes a <em>vicomte</em> who insults his nose. He does this while improvising an elaborately complex poem called a <em>ballade</em>. </p>
<p>Despite such prowess, his looks limit him. Secretly in love with his dazzling cousin Roxane, Cyrano is held back by shame at his physical appearance. He can only find selfless, vicarious satisfaction by feeding lines of passionate poetry to his rival-cum-alter-ego, the handsome but ineloquent hero Christian, who wins Roxane’s heart. </p>
<p>In each new retelling of the story of Cyrano we see the fragile romantic hero tormented by his own perceived lack – it is easy to forget that another Cyrano lurked still further in the background: the real-life playwright, satirist, novelist, and duellist <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Savinien-Cyrano-de-Bergerac">Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac</a> (1619-55). Because of his taste for bluster and grandiose self-mythologisation, we know relatively little for certain about the historical Cyrano.</p>
<h2>A colourful life</h2>
<p>As a young man, the real Cyrano was taught by the idiosyncratic polymath <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gassendi/">Pierre Gassendi</a> and mixed in free-thinking “libertine” circles. He was known to spend time with writers such as Paul Scarron and Tristan l’Hermite. It’s even believed that perhaps at the fringes of these circles was the great comic playwright Molière. </p>
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<p>In his short life, Cyrano proved himself to be a talented and adaptable writer. He never settled down to one genre for long (tragedy, comedy, letters, fiction and more) but maintained a strong intellectually satirical vein throughout. The impressive verbal ingenuity we see in Rostand’s play is also reflected in Cyrano’s various writings, perhaps most cruelly in his witty <a href="https://www2.unil.ch/ncd17/index.php?extractCode=1643">fat-shaming</a> of the actor known as Montfleury. </p>
<h2>A would-be astronaut</h2>
<p>The real Cyrano was very adept at self-construction and even self-mythologisation. As a young soldier, he fostered rumours that he had routed 100 attackers at once. He claimed some symbolic kinship to classical heroes and warriors by styling himself “Hercule” de Bergerac. Unsurprisingly, both these elements find their way into Rostand’s play. </p>
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<p>While the persona Cyrano adopts for himself as protagonist and narrator of his philosophical novel <em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comical_History_of_the_States_and_Empires_of_the_Moon">L’Autre monde</a></em> is somewhat more modest and cryptic (the name of its hero “Dyrcona”, a near-anagram for Cyrano). The first-person, pseudo-autobiographical fiction he spins here is even more outlandish. In this tale of adventure and daring, he claims to have travelled through outer space to visit the Moon and the Sun and to have conversed with the curious inhabitants of both. </p>
<p>As well as inspiring a scene in Rostand’s play, the novel also anticipates the various philosophical travel narratives of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_Letters">Montesquieu</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/eight-surprising-things-its-time-you-knew-about-gullivers-travels-88061">Jonathan Swift</a>, and <a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-voltaires-candide-a-darkly-satirical-tale-of-human-folly-in-times-of-crisis-157131">Voltaire</a> in the following century. Indeed, Dyrcona’s discussions with his various otherworldly interlocutors cover a range of theological, scientific, political, philosophical, and “libertine” topics – from theories of atomism to biblical accuracy, from cannibalistic orgies to the existence of God. Knowing that the text was philosophically and theologically contentious, he did not publish the work during his lifetime. It was published in a heavily sanitised version entitled <em>Histoire comique</em> (Comical Story) in 1657. </p>
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<img alt="Illustration of Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/440450/original/file-20220112-25-70qd7h.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/440450/original/file-20220112-25-70qd7h.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=826&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440450/original/file-20220112-25-70qd7h.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=826&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440450/original/file-20220112-25-70qd7h.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=826&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440450/original/file-20220112-25-70qd7h.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1037&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440450/original/file-20220112-25-70qd7h.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1037&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/440450/original/file-20220112-25-70qd7h.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1037&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Portrait of playwright Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrano_de_Bergerac#/media/File:Savinien_de_Cyrano_de_Bergerac.JPG">Wikimedia</a></span>
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<p><em>L’Autre monde</em> remains Cyrano’s most popular work and has various quirks to interest the modern reader. Among other things, the novel anticipates caravans (some moon-dwellers own mobile houses) and audiobooks (small boxes which read chapters out loud). Some of Cyrano’s other fabrications are rather more fantastic: hunting weapons that simultaneously cook the game they shoot, intercontinental flight with the help of bottles of evaporating dew, musical communication, and poetry as a means of currency.</p>
<p>One of the most suggestive moments of the novel for many comes when the moon-dwellers explain how a large nose is the marker of someone “spiritual, courtly, affable, noble-minded, [and] liberal”. This leads us back to Cyrano’s actual nose: was it purely Rostand’s invention? Yes and no. Contemporary illustrations of Cyrano show him to be relatively well-endowed nasally but never quite reaching the grotesque extremes we find in Rostand. Even so, in his overall encapsulation of Cyrano’s swagger, ebullience, and creative verve, it is fair to say that Rostand’s depiction was very much on the nose.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/174811/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joseph Harris does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>There was a real man behind the swashbuckling hero who was as deft at sparring with his pen and sword as Rostand’s hero.Joseph Harris, Professor of Early Modern French and Comparative Literature, Royal Holloway University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1714162021-11-09T14:58:01Z2021-11-09T14:58:01ZMohamed Mbougar Sarr: Senegalese novelist’s win is a landmark for African literature<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/430806/original/file-20211108-27-18iwrpz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Mohamed Mbougar Sarr on a TV show after winning the Prix Goncourt.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo by Eric Fougere/Corbis via Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>The <a href="https://www.academiegoncourt.com/home">Prix Goncourt</a> – the oldest and most prestigious literary prize in France – has been <a href="https://www.academiegoncourt.com/home">awarded</a> to 31-year-old Mohamed Mbougar Sarr from Senegal. He’s the youngest winner since 1976 and the <a href="https://qz.com/africa/2084805/mohamed-sarr-is-the-first-black-african-to-win-the-goncourt-prize/">first</a> from sub-Saharan Africa. Critics have been raving about The Most Secret Memory of Men, his novel about a young Senegalese writer living in Paris. The jury made a unanimous decision to award Mbougar Sarr the prize after just one round of voting, calling his work “a hymn to literature”. The prize will bring him literary fame and huge book sales, says Caroline D. Laurent, a specialist in Francophone African literature in France. We asked her more.</em></p>
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<p><strong>Who is Mohamed Mbougar Sarr?</strong></p>
<p>Author of the 2021 Prix Goncourt-winning novel <em>The Most Secret Memory of Men</em> (<a href="http://www.philippe-rey.fr/livre-11La_plus_secr%C3%A8te_m%C3%A9moire_des_hommes-504-1-1-0-1.html"><em>La Plus Secrète Mémoire des Hommes</em></a>) Mbougar Sarr is a young Senegalese author who grew up outside Dakar and moved to Paris to continue his studies. At just 31, he has already published three other novels, his first in 2015: <em>Encircled Earth</em> (<a href="https://www.presenceafricaine.com/romans-litterature-africaine-caraibes/832-terre-ceinte-9782708709119.html"><em>Terre Ceinte</em></a>), <em>Silence of the Choir</em> (<a href="https://www.presenceafricaine.com/romans-litterature-africaine-caraibes/990-silence-du-choeur-9782708709041.html"><em>Silence du Chœur</em></a>) and <em>Pure Men</em> (<a href="http://www.philippe-rey.fr/livre-De_purs_hommes-381-1-1-0-1.html"><em>De Purs Hommes</em></a>). </p>
<p>Starting his studies in Senegal, he began his doctorate at the prestigious <a href="https://www.ehess.fr/en/en/ehess-glance">School for Advanced Studies</a> in the Social Sciences in Paris, working on poet and Senegal’s first president, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leopold-Senghor">Léopold Sédar Senghor</a>. Writing got in the way and prevented him from ever finishing and graduating. He now lives in Beauvais, a city north of Paris.</p>
<p><strong>What is the novel about?</strong></p>
<p><em>The Most Secret Memory of Men</em> plays with reality and fiction. It tells the story of a young Senegalese author, Diégane Latyr Faye, who lives in Paris. In high school in Senegal he had come across mentions of a mysterious novel published in 1938 by a Senegalese author called T.C. Elimane, <em>The Labyrinth of the Inhuman</em>. Unable to find a copy, he had put his quest aside, considering it to be one of the many lost books of literature. But, by chance a few years later, he meets a Senegalese writer, Siga D, who gives him a copy of the book. The reading (and numerous re-readings) of what he considers to be a masterpiece revives his desire to find out what happened to the mysterious T.C. Elimane.</p>
<p><strong>Why does the book matter?</strong></p>
<p><em>The Most Secret Memory of Men</em> is a novel about writing and literature. It is full of literary references – like to celebrated Chilean novelist <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Roberto-Bolano">Roberto Bolaño</a> and prolific Polish author <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Witold-Gombrowicz">Witold Gombrowicz</a>. But it’s the obscure references that are probably the most interesting: the fictional T.C. Elimane’s book and his fate echoes that of real-life Malian author <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Yambo-Ouologuem">Yambo Ouologuem</a> – who Mbougar Sarr’s own novel is dedicated to. </p>
<p>Winner of the 1968 Prix Renaudot for <em>Bound to Violence</em> (<em>Le Devoir de Violence</em>), Ouologuem sparked controversy after a 1972 article in the Times Literary Supplement claimed he had plagiarised several authors, including Graham Greene and André Schwarz-Bart. He returned to Mali and never published again. Just as the narrator of Mbougar Sarr’s novel, Diégane Latyr Faye, is his alter ego, T.C. Elimane is Ouologuem’s.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/damon-galguts-booker-winning-novel-probes-white-south-africa-and-the-land-issue-171243">Damon Galgut's Booker-winning novel probes white South Africa and the land issue</a>
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<p>As much as it is about writing, <em>The Most Secret Memory of Men</em> is also about reading. The work is polyphonic (with many narrators besides Faye), it is transcultural (set in Europe, Africa and South America) and it mixes different literary genres (letters, articles, conversations), encouraging many different types of readings. Some may focus on the historical events depicted – the novel alludes to colonialism, the World Wars, Nazism and the Holocaust, the dictatorship in Argentina and recent Senegalese demonstrations against state corruption. Others may focus on the mysterious elements that recall some features of magical realism. Or on the literary references, both African and global, that punctuate the text. Or all of the above. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/431073/original/file-20211109-19-1bteed8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A book cover with a brown and black illustration of an African man with turquoise written words in old-fashioned italics behind him." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/431073/original/file-20211109-19-1bteed8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/431073/original/file-20211109-19-1bteed8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=909&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/431073/original/file-20211109-19-1bteed8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=909&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/431073/original/file-20211109-19-1bteed8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=909&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/431073/original/file-20211109-19-1bteed8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1142&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/431073/original/file-20211109-19-1bteed8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1142&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/431073/original/file-20211109-19-1bteed8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1142&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Philippe Rey</span></span>
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<p>It needs to be read for what it is – a great novel – and not because of the origin or the skin colour of its author. This is exactly why T.C. Elimane disappeared: hurt by some reviews, he felt misunderstood because his work was read through the lens of the work of others, notably that of French poet <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Arthur-Rimbaud">Arthur Rimbaud</a> (he was called a “Rimbaud nègre” or black Rimbaud). </p>
<p><strong>Why does this Prix Goncourt win matter?</strong></p>
<p>For these reasons, winning the Prix Goncourt should be viewed as African literature finally being recognised for its literary qualities. One should focus on this (late) recognition and perhaps question why, faced with the many great novels by African writers, Mbougar Sarr’s win is so rare. <em>The Most Secret Memory of Men</em> is quite subversively brilliant in denouncing, through literature, the literary capture of African writers by former colonial powers.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/nobel-prize-winner-abdulrazak-gurnah-an-introduction-to-the-man-and-his-writing-169491">Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah: an introduction to the man and his writing</a>
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<p>Jointly published by two small publishing houses, <a href="http://www.philippe-rey.fr/">Philippe Rey </a> in France and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/Editions-Jimsaan-257846464392099/">Jimsaan</a> in Senegal, the novel is truly transnational. The recognition of these publishing houses on two continents will, hopefully, enhance and help rebalance African countries’ role in publishing and distributing the works of their authors. Mohamed Mbougar Sarr is not only denouncing colonial and neocolonial practices, but also encouraging new ways of publishing and reaching readers. </p>
<p><em>The Most Secret Memory of Men</em> is a powerful text not only because of its writing, its themes, and what it says about the place of African literature in the world, but also because of how it opens up future possibilities for Francophone authors.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/171416/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Caroline D. Laurent does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>He is the first writer from sub-Saharan Africa to lift the Prix Goncourt, one of the book world’s most important prizes. And his win matters.Caroline D. Laurent, Assistant Professor, American University of Paris (AUP)Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1698552021-10-18T13:11:13Z2021-10-18T13:11:13ZI translated the Marquis de Sade’s only gothic novel into English<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/426685/original/file-20211015-26-1gdbbjc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=8%2C21%2C1457%2C969&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_de_Joannis_de_Chateaublanc#/media/Fichier:TR02_Image_03.png">Wikimedia</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 1813, a year before he died, the Marquis de Sade wrote his last published book, The Marquise de Ganges. The novel is based on a 17th-century true crime that Sade – notorious aristocrat, libertine and pornographer – probably first heard of as a young boy, and later read about while locked up in the Bastille. According to the accounts of the time, this is what happened. </p>
<p>On the afternoon of May 17 1667, Diane de Joannis, Marquise de Ganges, better known in her time in Louis XIV’s court as <em>la Belle Provençale</em>, is faced with a terrible choice. Standing before her are her two brothers-in-law – the Abbé (the abbott) and Chevalier de Ganges. The Abbé is holding a pistol in one hand and a glass filled with poison in the other. The Chevalier’s sword is drawn. “Madame,” the Abbé tells her, “you must die: you may choose fire, steel, or poison”.</p>
<p>The next few hours pass in a blur. Poison swallowed, then furtively disgorged; escape through a first-floor window; brief sanctuary amongst the women of the village; frenzied blows from the Chevalier’s sword, its blade snapping in her shoulder; and finally, the Abbé’s pistol, pressed against her chest … misfiring.</p>
<p>This is not the end of the Marquise’s ordeal, but there is some respite at least. The women of the village come to her aid once more, driving back the Abbé and the Chevalier, who take flight, never to return – and never to face justice. </p>
<p>Her wounds are dressed, and she is taken back to the Château de Ganges. Despite her extraordinary courage and resilience, however, the damage has already been done. She dies 19 days later – the autopsy confirming poisoning as the cause of death.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Book cover for The Marquise de Gange featuring woman in period dress and powdered white wig." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/426686/original/file-20211015-25-1lrk8hc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/426686/original/file-20211015-25-1lrk8hc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/426686/original/file-20211015-25-1lrk8hc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/426686/original/file-20211015-25-1lrk8hc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/426686/original/file-20211015-25-1lrk8hc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1146&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/426686/original/file-20211015-25-1lrk8hc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1146&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/426686/original/file-20211015-25-1lrk8hc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1146&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Oxford University Press</span></span>
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<p>It was one of the crimes of the century, and immediately became a <em>récit sanglant</em> or bloody tale, one to be told and retold by one generation to the next.</p>
<p>Now Sade’s version of this tragic episode is now available in English for the first time, in <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-marquise-de-gange-9780198848288?cc=us&lang=en&">my new translation</a> for Oxford World’s Classics. Sade scholars have always labelled it a “historical novel” but when I was translating it, I realised that’s not the right genre. It is, instead, Sade’s first and only truly gothic novel – inspired by English novelists like Ann Radcliffe, who wrote <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-mysteries-of-udolpho">The Mysteries of Udolpho</a>, and Mathew Lewis, who wrote <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-monk-by-matthew-lewis">The Monk</a>. </p>
<h2>Sade and the gothic</h2>
<p>Sade today is probably best known as the man who inspired the term “sadism”, and for his works of violent pornography – novels like Justine and The 120 Days of Sodom, which <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/07/marquis-de-sade-120-days-of-sodom-published-classic">he described</a> as “the most impure tale ever written since the world began”. Until now, he’s not really been considered a gothic novelist – although he is often quoted as an early commentator of this new genre, which he called “the necessary offspring of the revolutionary upheaval which affected the whole of Europe” in an <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/ncl.2011.65.4.513">essay in 1800</a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/gothic-motifs">Gothic novels</a> thrived in Britain from the 1790s to the 1820s and were highly popular across Europe. The writer <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=luFDEAAAQBAJ&pg=PR26&lpg=PR26&dq=madame+de+sta%C3%ABl+%22aim+was+to+inspire+terror+with+night-time,+old+castles,+long+corridors+and+gusts+of+wind&source=bl&ots=f9W5ca9v5U&sig=ACfU3U2M6avzEUfaNFjtgabyjrYSXveCvg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi2163hy9PzAhXThP0HHUwyAbcQ6AF6BAgCEAM#v=onepage&q=madame%20de%20sta%C3%ABl%20%22aim%20was%20to%20inspire%20terror%20with%20night-time%2C%20old%20castles%2C%20long%20corridors%20and%20gusts%20of%20wind&f=false">Madame de Staël</a> described these as stories whose “aim was to inspire terror with night-time, old castles, long corridors and gusts of wind.” They were stories of horror and suspense, of lust and love, with darkly violent and erotic undertones. </p>
<p>In the early 1790s, Radcliffe was the most influential and successful writer of this popular genre. Lewis’s The Monk, a supernatural tale of murder, incest and religion, saw the gothic take a turn from polite terror to the more shocking – think bleeding nuns and lecherous monks making pacts with demons.</p>
<p>Sade’s pornographic novels do share some features with the English gothic in terms of characters (virtuous heroines, debauched aristocrats and monks) and locations (isolated castles, dark forests, and even darker dungeons). Until now this has seemed a matter of coincidence rather than influence. When he wrote them, Sade hadn’t read Radcliffe or Lewis, and there’s no evidence that they ever read Sade either. And although The Monk was considered scandalous at the time, English gothic novels never come close to the graphic and often crude depictions of sex we find in Sade.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="Portrait of the Maquise de Ganges" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/426434/original/file-20211014-16-76vopr.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/426434/original/file-20211014-16-76vopr.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=738&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/426434/original/file-20211014-16-76vopr.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=738&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/426434/original/file-20211014-16-76vopr.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=738&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/426434/original/file-20211014-16-76vopr.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/426434/original/file-20211014-16-76vopr.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/426434/original/file-20211014-16-76vopr.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Diane de Joannis de Chateaublanc, the Marquise de Ganges.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-marquise-de-gange-9780198848288?cc=gb&lang=en&">The Marquise de Gange</a> is a very different work to Sade’s famous – or infamous – pornographic fiction. Written years later, Sade’s retelling is clearly inspired by novelists like Radcliffe and Lewis. It is his first attempt at a gothic novel – complete with its forbidding castle in keeping with “that Gothic style of architecture”.</p>
<p>Like so many other gothic novels, The Marquise de Gange is at its heart a story about predatory men and innocent women. In Sade’s part-fictionalised account of this historical murder, that violence is sexually driven, as the Marquise’s brothers-in-law take revenge for her rejection of their advances. Throughout the novel, male desire is a constant danger, a constant threat.</p>
<p>So far so gothic. But reading this novel is not quite like reading any other gothic novel, because it is impossible to forget who wrote it. Sade’s life, like his fiction, is a tale of <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=zyiEW5XZ_poC&pg=PA89&lpg=PA89&dq=Jeanne+Testard+and+Rose+Keller+sade&source=bl&ots=zqmTf2XjzK&sig=ACfU3U3DGOx3sMz3Z7AkfPAU1QwvO7Wixw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiZwvXO18nzAhUFsaQKHVEvBgMQ6AF6BAgSEAM#v=onepage&q=Jeanne%20Testard%20and%20Rose%20Keller%20sade&f=false">repeated acts of sexual violence</a> against women, from Jeanne Testard and Rose Keller, to the teenage girls he hired as servants in his castle in Lacoste one winter. As American radical feminist writer <a href="https://www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Andrea-DWORKIN-Pornography-Men-Possessing-Women-1981.pdf">Andrea Dworkin</a> put it, Sade’s “life and writing were of a piece, a whole cloth soaked in the blood of women imagined and real”.</p>
<p>Beneath the novel’s respectable surface, and behind its moralising narrator, the reader can’t help but look for glimpses of an amoral author. One wants to look for the mask to slip, as it seems to when the narrator lingers over the heroine’s “bosom of alabaster, covered only with her beautiful, dishevelled locks” in the climactic scene, or when the narrator forgets whether he should be impressed or outraged by the evil Abbé’s plotting: “Everything had been judiciously, or rather, maliciously calculated in the Abbé’s plans,” he corrects himself. Sade teases the reader, playing cat and mouse throughout this highly self-conscious and subversive version of a gothic novel.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/169855/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Will McMorran does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A story about male violence and a damsel in distress, it is based on a true crimeWill McMorran, Reader in French & Comparative Literature, Queen Mary University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1579622021-06-02T20:05:21Z2021-06-02T20:05:21ZGuide to the Classics: Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, a tragicomedy for our times<blockquote>
<p>Vladimir: Well? Shall we go?</p>
<p>Estragon: Yes, let’s go.</p>
<p>[They do not move.]</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Samuel Beckett originally subtitled his 1953 play Waiting for Godot “a tragicomedy in two acts”. Vivian Mercier, the critic for the Irish Times, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1709-waiting-for-godot-has-achieved-a-theoretical-impossibility-a-play-in">dubbed it</a> “a play in which nothing happens, twice.” </p>
<p>Two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, wait on the side of a country road. Each act begins with the pair reunited after spending the night apart. As they await their enigmatic patron, Godot, Estragon laments being beaten by nameless figures during the night, and Vladimir seeks to pass the time by stirring his companion into repartee. </p>
<p>These two are ill-starred but well-suited: Estragon’s feet are in constant pain, and Vladimir’s unspecified affliction induces frequent and painful urination. Estragon’s shoes stink, while Vladimir adheres to a diet of garlic to ease the symptoms of his condition. Vladimir remembers, and Estragon forgets.</p>
<p>Memory stretches into the deep past. The present sits on the cusp of a hopeful future. Time’s recurrence is marked by the moon and the sun. The endless wait for a rendezvous … for what, exactly? </p>
<p>To receive instructions? To be delivered from this tormented life? To relieve the tramps of their little canters, their bombastic declarations, their pleas? To relieve the steadfast audience?</p>
<p>From its first performances in the 1950s, Waiting for Godot enjoyed a positive critical reception. Yet its earliest audiences thought otherwise, ensuring the interval was the most popular part of the play by voting with their feet. Over time, though, Godot would become a celebrated avant-garde play, and a popular cultural reference for fruitless waiting.</p>
<p>This waiting is eerily prescient in a time of pandemic.</p>
<h2>From Dublin to Paris</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400691/original/file-20210514-23-c3g076.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400691/original/file-20210514-23-c3g076.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400691/original/file-20210514-23-c3g076.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=816&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400691/original/file-20210514-23-c3g076.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=816&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400691/original/file-20210514-23-c3g076.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=816&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400691/original/file-20210514-23-c3g076.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1026&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400691/original/file-20210514-23-c3g076.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1026&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400691/original/file-20210514-23-c3g076.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1026&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Samuel Beckett photographed in 1977.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Samuel Beckett was born in Dublin in 1906. As a child he boarded at the Portora Royal School in Enniskillen (Oscar Wilde’s alma mater), before a degree in Modern Languages and Literature at Trinity College Dublin.</p>
<p>His enduring relation with Paris began soon after. During his two-year position as <em>lecteur d'anglais</em> at the Ecole Normale Superiéure (1928-29) Beckett met and became close with James Joyce, who introduced him to the Parisian literary and artistic avant-garde.</p>
<p>Beckett spent two years in London (1933-35) undergoing a course of psychoanalysis under Walter Bion at the Tavistock Clinic, during which he wrote his first published novel, Murphy (1938). Following travels in Germany and Italy, Beckett settled in Paris in 1938, as war looked increasingly likely.</p>
<p>Beckett joined the French Resistance but his cell was infiltrated and he was forced to flee to Roussillon for the duration of the war, where he composed the novel Watt (published in 1953) in English. Back in Paris, Beckett embraced French and embarked upon one of modern literature’s most eccentric and fruitful monastic episodes: the “<a href="https://medium.com/illumination-curated/the-seige-in-the-room-c6c39b961f14">siege in the room</a>” which yielded the trilogy Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1953) and The Unnamable (1953).</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400694/original/file-20210514-17-2433fd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A sign." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400694/original/file-20210514-17-2433fd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400694/original/file-20210514-17-2433fd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400694/original/file-20210514-17-2433fd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400694/original/file-20210514-17-2433fd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400694/original/file-20210514-17-2433fd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400694/original/file-20210514-17-2433fd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400694/original/file-20210514-17-2433fd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The script opens with the stage directions ‘A country road. A tree. Evening.’, as in this New Orleans street art.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/derek_b/2129514892/">Derek Bridges/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Beckett’s trilogy contributed to the new wave of French postwar novels renowned for their spare style and forensic treatment of plot, a movement that came to be known as the <em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouveau_roman">nouveau roman</a></em> (“New Novel”). </p>
<p>Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot between October 1948 and January 1949. It was his first play to reach the stage — his first full playscript, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleutheria_(play)">Eleuthéria</a>, was written in 1947 but only published posthumously. </p>
<h2>Nothing, twice</h2>
<p>Despite appearances, Godot is a surprising blend of suspense and dramatic action. Themes repeat over both acts: the same waiting, the same fights. A messenger boy appears in each act — or, perhaps, two different boys in each act, brothers. The horizon of time is scanned twice, once in each act. </p>
<p>The symmetry of Vladimir and Estragon, endlessly waiting for the unseen Godot, is echoed by another pair, Pozzo and Lucky, who pass by in each act. In Act 1, Pozzo is the grand landlord — a revenant of the <a href="https://www.themodernnovel.org/movements/bighouse/">Irish Big House</a> literary tradition — whipping his servant Lucky into service. </p>
<p>Pozzo’s pomposity is matched by Lucky’s silence, and when Pozzo compels Lucky to speak, finally, Lucky’s cascade of logorrhea stands in contrast to Pozzo’s grandiloquence. </p>
<p>In Act 2 Pozzo returns, blinded, his authority diminished to the merely rhetorical. His final speech echoes Macbeth on time and the brevity of life. In Shakespeare’s play, <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56964/speech-tomorrow-and-tomorrow-and-tomorrow">Macbeth pronounces</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Pozzo’s final passionate outburst reduces life to:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the same day, the same second […] They give birth astride the grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Estragon’s complete indifference to Pozzo’s swansong has Vladimir wonder at his own dilemma, inducing an irrevocable moment of clear vision:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, he is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This <a href="https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110810104344426">burden of recognition</a> places Valdimir within a tragic mode, out of step with the farcical tragicomedy around him. He is no longer immersed in the condition of waiting, but breaks through to understand the act of waiting as a condition of life.</p>
<h2>Audible yawns – from those who stayed</h2>
<p>Godot premièred at the <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/photographs-of-waiting-for-godot-by-samuel-beckett-1953#">Théâtre du Babylone</a> in Paris in January 1953. The play drew positive attention from reviewers and from some of the biggest names in French theatre and literature. Its fame rose slowly — then abruptly, when a fistfight broke out in the interval of one performance, between the play’s defenders and those offended or shocked by its (in)action and the cruel plight of the character Lucky.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MUXtzkLTABI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Its English-language premiere in London in August 1955 was met with “waves of hostility” and audible yawning from audience members who remained after interval. </p>
<p>The play’s fate in the United States was little short of catastrophic: billed as “the laugh sensation of two continents”, its opening night in January 1956 at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami was farcical. </p>
<p>Even Alan Schneider’s expert direction couldn’t salvage the play from a disruptive rehearsal atmosphere, complicated sets and an ill-suited venue. The interval, again, turned out to be the most popular part of the performance. </p>
<p>Bert Lahr (who played the Lion in 1939’s The Wizard of Oz) played Estragon in Miami and would be instrumental in the play’s success later that year on Broadway, an event that remained one of his <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/05/18/panic-attack">career highlights</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/402539/original/file-20210525-19-1lqxjb5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Record cover" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/402539/original/file-20210525-19-1lqxjb5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/402539/original/file-20210525-19-1lqxjb5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402539/original/file-20210525-19-1lqxjb5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402539/original/file-20210525-19-1lqxjb5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402539/original/file-20210525-19-1lqxjb5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=758&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402539/original/file-20210525-19-1lqxjb5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=758&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/402539/original/file-20210525-19-1lqxjb5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=758&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Waiting for Godot played on Broadway for only 10 weeks, but Bert Lahr’s performance was immortalised by Columbia Records.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://archive.org/details/SAMUELBECKETTWaitingForGodot">Internet Archive</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>During those early years, Godot was also performed in prisons, including a landmark production by the San Francisco Actors Workshop at <a href="https://www.americantheatre.org/2019/01/22/nothing-but-time-when-godot-came-to-san-quentin/">San Quentin State Prison</a> in 1957. Inmates were astounded a playwright could capture limbo with such insight and sensitivity.</p>
<h2>All of us are waiting</h2>
<p>Over time its fame has grown to the point where Godot is a definitive meeting point of the avant-garde and popular culture. The play has inspired numerous parodies and spin-offs, perhaps most notably the 1996 mockumentary <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118111/">Waiting for Guffman</a>, in which the cast of a small-town musical production in Missouri awaits the arrival of a legendary Broadway producer.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ksL_7WrhWOc?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>The claustrophobia of Beckett’s next play, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endgame_(play)">Endgame</a> (1957), might capture the experience of lockdown in the current pandemic (“Beyond [the wall] is the other hell”), but Godot captures the distortions of time combined with the uncertainty of respite. </p>
<p>Populations across the globe have endured various kinds of waiting: waiting for published infection numbers, for hospital beds, for oxygen supplies, for borders to reopen, for opportunities to see loved ones. Running through our individual narratives, waiting has proved to be a truly global, shared experience. </p>
<p>How do we remember pre-pandemic times – that past “a million years ago,” as Vladimir pronounces in the play – and what do we forget?</p>
<p>Estragon exclaims: “Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It’s awful.” But dilatory time and static place also offer opportunities for new perception: a long moment to consider our circumstances and ourselves anew.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/157962/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mark Byron does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Samuel Beckett’s first play was once most notorious for the audible yawns, walkouts (and fights) during interval. But it is a play of great insight into the condition of waiting.Mark Byron, Senior Lecturer, Department of English, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1082492021-03-28T19:02:50Z2021-03-28T19:02:50ZHidden women of history: Hélisenne de Crenne, the first French novelist to tell her own story<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/383955/original/file-20210212-17-1vr4m8w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=3%2C38%2C624%2C822&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Vittore Carpaccio's portrait of a woman reading (1510). </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.wikiart.org/en/vittore-carpaccio/the-virgin-reading-1510">Wikiart</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In this <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/hidden-women-of-history-64072">series</a>, we look at under-acknowledged women through the ages.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>In 1538, a new author burst on to the literary scene in Paris. Published by Denys Janot, four new works appeared within five years by a writer known as <a href="https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095647244">Hélisenne de Crenne</a>. </p>
<p>The first was <em><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/26285887?seq=1">Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d'amours</a></em> (The Torments of Love), a novel that depicted the disastrous consequences of an adulterous affair. </p>
<p>In 1539 came a collection of letters that explored women’s speech, education, friendship and legal rights among its topics.</p>
<p>In 1540 she published <em><a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/helisenne-de-crenne-le-songe-de-madame-helisenne-1540-colette-winn-anne-larsen/10.4324/9781315861067-12">Le Songe</a></em> (The Dream), a moral and didactic work in which a woman and her lover reflected upon the perils of lust.</p>
<p>Her last known work was a translation into French prose of the first four books of Virgil’s <a href="https://www.academia.edu/43143329/_1998_H%C3%A9lisenne_de_Crennes_translation_of_the_Aeneid_the_pursuit_of_a_stile_h%C3%A9ro%C3%AFque">Aeneid</a> (1541), dedicated to the king, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Francis-I-king-of-France">Francis I</a>.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-virgils-aeneid-85459">Guide to the Classics: Virgil’s Aeneid</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Hélisenne de Crenne was the pen name of Marguerite Briet, the daughter of a legal family from Abbeville. Few details of her life are certain, but we know that she obtained a legal separation from her husband, Philippe Fournel, Lord of Crenne, and moved to Paris, the centre of French literary activities and publishing. There she owned several properties. It appears that her son, Pierre, was a student there in 1548.</p>
<p>Hélisenne was <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/j.ctv8pzd9w.13.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A229d2b299d35576fbbd95e9cea46e807">the first living woman of the century to be printed in France</a> and hers was <a href="https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095647244">the first autobiographical novel to be published in French</a>. The publication of her works was remarkable in several ways. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/383945/original/file-20210212-13-dyj6gb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="line drawing of royal court scene" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/383945/original/file-20210212-13-dyj6gb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/383945/original/file-20210212-13-dyj6gb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/383945/original/file-20210212-13-dyj6gb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/383945/original/file-20210212-13-dyj6gb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/383945/original/file-20210212-13-dyj6gb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=629&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/383945/original/file-20210212-13-dyj6gb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=629&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/383945/original/file-20210212-13-dyj6gb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=629&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An illustration from the translation of Virgil’s verse depicts Hélisenne presenting it to the king.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k15101304.r=helisenne%20de%20crenne%20eneydes?rk=21459;2">Bibliothèque nationale de France</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/fornication-fluids-and-faeces-the-intimate-life-of-the-french-court-71982">Fornication, fluids and faeces: the intimate life of the French court</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Speaking out</h2>
<p><a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=vHx_DwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false">Women represented less than 1% of all identifiable published authors in 16th-century France</a>. Female literacy and broader education was not as high as for men at the same social levels. </p>
<p>Women at court were producing sophisticated intellectual and creative works that circulated in manuscript. Print publication provided a more open and visible expression than manuscript circulation, but was limited to a more select few. Even women in powerful social positions acknowledged expectations that women should restrict their speech to the domestic sphere. </p>
<p>Most women writers provided lengthy justifications or apologies for their venture into print. Hélisenne <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=vHx_DwAAQBAJ&lpg=PT83&ots=Z0Z5o0h2Ks&dq=mention%20of%20immodest%20love%2C%20which%20according%20to%20the%20opinion%20of%20some%20shy%20women%20could%20be%20judged%20more%20worthy%20to%20be%20conserved%20in%20profound%20silence%20than%20to%20be%20published%20for%20a%20widespread%20audience.&pg=PT83#v=onepage&q=mention%20of%20immodest%20love,%20which%20according%20to%20the%20opinion%20of%20some%20shy%20women%20could%20be%20judged%20more%20worthy%20to%20be%20conserved%20in%20profound%20silence%20than%20to%20be%20published%20for%20a%20widespread%20audience.&f=false">claimed to hesitate</a> to make “mention of immodest love, which according to the opinion of some shy women could be judged more worthy to be conserved in profound silence than to be published for a widespread audience”. Nevertheless, she pressed on.</p>
<p>Rather than locate herself in a line of female authors, Hélisenne identified herself in a tradition of the male canon for her authority to write. The opening phrase of her <em>Le Songe</em> recalled none other than Cicero as her model: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>…in imitation of him, the desire arose in me to relate in detail to you a dream worthy of recording.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/hidden-women-of-history-enheduanna-princess-priestess-and-the-worlds-first-known-author-109185">Hidden women of history: Enheduanna, princess, priestess and the world's first known author</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Small books to carry</h2>
<p>Print publication offered a woman without elite networks access to a large pool of readers, and perhaps a way to reach potential patrons at court. </p>
<p>The dedication of her translation to Francis I and her praise of his sister, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Margaret-of-Angouleme">Marguerite de Navarre</a> (another prolific author whose works appears in print over the course of the century), in her Letters suggests that Hélisenne may have hoped for their patronage.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250622/original/file-20181214-185243-1q9dhip.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250622/original/file-20181214-185243-1q9dhip.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250622/original/file-20181214-185243-1q9dhip.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1016&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250622/original/file-20181214-185243-1q9dhip.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1016&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250622/original/file-20181214-185243-1q9dhip.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1016&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250622/original/file-20181214-185243-1q9dhip.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1277&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250622/original/file-20181214-185243-1q9dhip.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1277&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250622/original/file-20181214-185243-1q9dhip.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1277&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Le Songe de madame Helisenne Crenne (1541)</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Bibliothèque nationale de France</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The staggered release of her writings seems to have been planned to heighten their impact. Her publisher, Denys Janot, mainly published works in French, targetting a popular market and using on-trend Roman typeface rather than the heavy, old-fashioned Gothic script.</p>
<p>Most of Hélisenne’s works, like those of other female writers, were in <a href="https://www.abebooks.com/books/rarebooks/collecting-guide/understanding-rare-books/guide-book-formats.shtml">small sizes</a> such as octavo, duodecimo and sextodecimo. These were portable and cheap, unlike the larger-sized folio and quarto scholarly and religious works intended to be consulted in libraries as part of a long-lasting record, though her translation of Virgil’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12914.The_Aeneid">Aeneid</a> was produced as a folio, with extensive woodcut illustrations.</p>
<h2>A female perspective</h2>
<p>Hélisenne was one of the first women writers who sought publication of her work seemingly as a conscious contribution to contemporary popular literature. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/383959/original/file-20210212-13-kbysui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/383959/original/file-20210212-13-kbysui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/383959/original/file-20210212-13-kbysui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=934&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/383959/original/file-20210212-13-kbysui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=934&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/383959/original/file-20210212-13-kbysui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=934&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/383959/original/file-20210212-13-kbysui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1174&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/383959/original/file-20210212-13-kbysui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1174&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/383959/original/file-20210212-13-kbysui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1174&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348760867l/5412940.jpg">Goodreads</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Her novel, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5412940-torments-of-love">The Torments of Love</a>, involves an unusual structure, retelling the same events from the perspective of three different narrators: Hélisenne, her lover Guénélic, and Guénélic’s best friend, Quézinstra. Each section offers new insights to the overarching narrative, and each has its own distinctive tone and style.</p>
<p>The work’s balancing of elements from chivalric literature and a new emotional sensibility culminates in its conclusion as a battle between Athena and Venus over the book itself.</p>
<p>Her translation of Aeneid was equally radical, creatively embellishing the original from a female perspective with a highly sympathetic presentation of Dido’s plight and women’s loyalty in love.</p>
<p>She was very proud of her publication in the city that was the intellectual and publishing centre of France, <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=yorgAAAAMAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=noble+Parisian+city">saying</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>… it is an inestimable pleasure to me to think that my books are on sale in this noble Parisian city, which is inhabited by an innumerable multitude of wonderfully learned people.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/hidden-women-of-history-catherine-hay-thomson-the-australian-undercover-journalist-who-went-inside-asylums-and-hospitals-129352">Hidden women of history: Catherine Hay Thomson, the Australian undercover journalist who went inside asylums and hospitals</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A commercial success</h2>
<p>Hélisenne’s work were a commercial success, going through nine editions in a short, intense period to 1560.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/383949/original/file-20210212-23-1wfho93.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Pencil drawing on young woman" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/383949/original/file-20210212-23-1wfho93.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/383949/original/file-20210212-23-1wfho93.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=823&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/383949/original/file-20210212-23-1wfho93.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=823&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/383949/original/file-20210212-23-1wfho93.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=823&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/383949/original/file-20210212-23-1wfho93.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1034&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/383949/original/file-20210212-23-1wfho93.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1034&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/383949/original/file-20210212-23-1wfho93.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1034&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A nineteenth-century artist’s imagined Helisenne.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.dictionnaire-creatrices.com/static/uploadfolder/evidensse_creatrice/2017/09/CRENNE_H%C3%A9lisenne.jpg">Wikipedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Torments of Love is Hélisenne’s only work to be dedicated to female readers who she called “all honest ladies”. Elsewhere, she assumed her works would be of interest to everyone, including the king. </p>
<p>A later editor did not agree. Claude Colet explained in the introduction to the 1550 edition of her works that <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=yorgAAAAMAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=Claude+colet%27s+introduction">his extensive simplification of her Latinate style for young ladies</a> was “to render the obscure words or those too much like Latin into our own familiar language, so that they will be more intelligible to you”.</p>
<p>The last known evidence of this groundbreaking author is in 1552 but, in her lifetime, she had achieved a remarkable series of literary firsts.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/108249/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Susan Broomhall receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>The first French novelist wrote about an adulterous affair and moved to Paris after separating from her husband.Susan Broomhall, Director, Gender and Women's History Research Centre, Australian Catholic UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1544252021-02-04T13:03:15Z2021-02-04T13:03:15ZVoyage Around My Room: lessons on marvelling at the minutiae of our homes in isolation<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/381748/original/file-20210201-17-159gp5o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C2%2C1958%2C1461&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://images.metmuseum.org/CRDImages/es/original/DP158815.jpg">The Met</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>For those struggling with lockdown, an anti-travel book written in 1790 offers unlikely solace. Written while under house arrest in Turin, Italy, Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage Around My Room is an undervalued travelogue. <a href="https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=RodEAAAAIAAJ's%20translation">De Maistre describes</a> his travels in miniature with the enchantment of the Grand Tour: a few paces around the bed, a longing gaze at an engraving, and on to the armchair:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>My room is situated in latitude 48° east, according to the measurement of Father Beccaria. It lies east and west, and, if you keep very close to the wall, it forms a parallelogram of 36 steps round. My journey will, however, be longer than this; for I shall traverse my room up and down and across, without rule or plan. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>I stumbled across Voyage Around My Room in philosopher Alain de Botton’s <a href="https://www.alaindebotton.com/travel/">The Art of Travel</a>, a quizzical appraisal of travel writing. De Botton weighs Voyage against <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alexander-von-Humboldt">Alexander von Humboldt’s</a> 30-volume <a href="https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/personal-narrative-of-travels-to-the-equinoctial-regions-of-america/author/alexander-von-humboldt">Travels to the Equinoctial Regions</a>, a magnum opus of scientific and geographical exploration. Where von Humboldt braves rapids, scales peaks and wrestles electric eels, de Maistre stays in his room with insouciant aplomb. Von Humboldt longed “to be transported from a boring daily life to a marvellous world”. De Maistre’s insight, conversely, is that within life’s boredoms greater marvels may be discovered.</p>
<p>With wry sideswipes at the grandiosity of travel narratives, de Maistre offers vivid lessons for troubled times. </p>
<h2>Anti-travel writing</h2>
<p>In his confinement, de Maistre ponders friendship, death, philosophy, and misfortune. He delights in painting and poetry – and his breakfast. He mocks travel writing’s pedantry, itemising details along the way: furniture, engravings, contents of the bureau.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Upon opening the first drawer to the left, we find an inkstand, paper of all kinds, pens ready mended, and sealing-wax; all which set the most indolent person longing to write.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>His tongue-in-cheek tale nonetheless offers timely lessons, if we have the patience to discern them. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/308062982?book_show_action=true&from_review_page=1">One reader</a> calls de Maistre “a master of minutiae. Voyage Around My Room is his manifesto for surviving and thriving. Finding his chamber abounds in "all the riches and enjoyments of the world”, he revels in his constriction. Whenever frustration threatens, he dissolves it with attention to detail. </p>
<h2>Exemplifying minimal effort</h2>
<p>Lockdown initially ignited crazes of <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/extras/indybest/house-garden/skills-learn-lockdown-cook-photography-calligraphy-coronavirus-things-to-do-b1782514.html">mastering skills</a>, learning languages, decluttering, <a href="https://slicetheacorn.co.uk/handy-skills-to-learn/">revamping spaces</a>. For those, like me, overwhelmed by such strenuous goals, de Maistre is a patron. He exemplifies minimal effort.</p>
<p>De Maistre’s style of voyaging also suits all. The poor and rich; the sick and the idle. He admires that “capital article of furniture”, the armchair; he applauds a good fire, books and pens, immediately forgetting books to stir the fire. He allows his journey to zig-zag like <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Tristram-Shandy">Tristram Shandy’s</a> errant narrative.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I am no admirer of people who are such masters of their every step and every idea that they can say, “To-morrow I shall make three calls, write four letters, and finish this of that work.” So open is my soul to all sorts of ideas, tastes and feelings.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Portrait of Xavier de Maistre." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/381746/original/file-20210201-23-hrvdfo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/381746/original/file-20210201-23-hrvdfo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=743&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/381746/original/file-20210201-23-hrvdfo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=743&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/381746/original/file-20210201-23-hrvdfo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=743&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/381746/original/file-20210201-23-hrvdfo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=933&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/381746/original/file-20210201-23-hrvdfo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=933&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/381746/original/file-20210201-23-hrvdfo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=933&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Xavier de Maistre.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xavier_de_Maistre#/media/File:Xavier_de_Maistre.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Without Zoom, de Maistre maintains contact with the world through his long-suffering valet. He takes care to be mindful that, with such reduced human contact, he is escaping the fickle judgements of the world: “The pleasure to be found in travelling around one’s room is sheltered from the restless jealousy of men, and is independent of Fortune.” We might benefit from recasting lockdown as an opportunity to switch off from feeling judged by others. If nobody is dressing up, going out, having a better time than us, then we may forget, for a while, the latest fashions and cars, jostling for status and exchanging gossip.</p>
<p>To those who may not travel, Voyage Around my Room offers alternative explorations. We are all making such voyages perforce, equipped only with our pyjamas and capacity for noticing. If surviving in cramped circumstances seemed challenge enough, de Maistre’s wry counsel turns isolation into expedition. Consider your furniture; lose your way en route to the armchair; stand idle, indulging in behaviour we’d rather not broadcast away from prying eyes.</p>
<p>Voyage Around My Room shows the weary in lockdown that <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zb92mfr">there is much more to discover</a> on our voyages around our room. Xavier de Maistre was so encouraged by his brother’s reaction to his work that he wrote a sequel, Nocturnal Expedition Around My Room, in which our intrepid author heads for the balcony.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/154425/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>William Sutton does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>On house arrest, Xavier de Maistre took a journey around his room where he discovered there was much to wonder at.William Sutton, Novelist; lecturer and PhD candidate in Creative Writing, University of PortsmouthLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1543162021-02-04T12:41:25Z2021-02-04T12:41:25ZLupin: introducing anglophone audiences to a more socially conscious gentleman thief<p>Netflix’s immensely successful new French-language show Lupin has introduced a new generation of anglophone viewers to one of the most popular characters in French popular fiction, Arsène Lupin, gentleman thief. </p>
<p>Lupin was created in 1905 by the writer Maurice Leblanc at the behest of publisher Pierre Lafitte, who had recently launched a general interest magazine, <em>Je Sais Tout</em>. Lafitte wanted a serial that would guarantee a loyal readership for his magazine, as the Sherlock Holmes stories had for the Strand Magazine. Drawing inspiration from Conan Doyle and EW Hornung’s Raffles stories, Leblanc obliged by creating a flamboyant and ultimately always benign trickster figure. </p>
<p>Cat burglar, con artist, master of disguise, Lupin is also a brilliant detective and righter of wrongs. His appeal has proved enduring: in addition to the original 20 volumes of stories authored by Leblanc, there have been countless plays, radio shows, TV series and films, from <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0924409/">Italian pornos</a> to a <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159192/">Japanese manga franchise</a>. He has been incarnated by <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022639/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_32">John Barrymore</a>, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0136713/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_24">Georges Descrières</a>, and <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0373690/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_30">Romain Duris</a>, all with signature topper and monocle. Now he is being played by Omar Sy, wearing a more modish, but equally dashing, flat cap and trench coat ensemble. The <a href="https://variety.com/2021/tv/global/lupin-netflix-omar-sy-70-million-viewers-1234887688">most watched foreign-language series yet</a> on Netflix, this reboot shows a deep and sincere appreciation of the original while bringing to it an awareness of contemporary social concerns. </p>
<h2>A cosy caper with just enough edge</h2>
<p>Omar Sy plays Assane Diop, a grifter and thief who styles himself on Lupin. Diop is on a lifelong mission to clear the name of his father, who committed suicide in prison 25 years ago after being unjustly accused of the theft of a diamond necklace. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Y3tVDKuORi8?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Although daring and clever in many ways, Diop’s search for justice only ever lands him in mild peril. However, even though the audience can often guess how things will turn out – broadly speaking, happily – there are enough twists and turns along the way to keep us entertained. Like much good popular fiction, therefore, Lupin offers a mixture of familiarity and novelty, nowhere more so than in its representation of Paris. </p>
<p>The original stories were always heavily invested in a certain ideal of Frenchness – charming, gallant, insouciant. And the show certainly caters to international audiences’ seemingly insatiable appetite for images of Parisian sophistication. Here is the Louvre, there the Sacré-Cœur. Here are Louis XIII buildings and Louis XV interiors. Chanel jackets and croissants dunked in café au lait. But here too are crumbling council estates and dilapidated prisons, social disaffection and systemic racist discrimination. </p>
<p>In the second episode, Diop, temporarily incarcerated (voluntarily, it is all part of his plan), is shanked by a fellow prisoner (again, part of the plan). There is a shot of the discarded shiv, a bloodied blade with a white handle, the lower portion wrapped in blue tape. It unmistakably and unexpectedly brings to mind the French tricolore. Stabbed by a middle-eastern man, this poignant visual points to a marginalised France, the France of the banlieues (the working-class areas that encircle French cities), where violence and criminality are born of disaffection.</p>
<h2>A thief with a social conscience</h2>
<p>In general, though, the series wears its social conscious more lightly. </p>
<p>There is a delicious moment where Diop, masquerading as a police officer, swindles a racist woman nostalgic for empire out of the jewels her husband bought her with money made in the Belgian Congo, back in “the good old days”. “To the memory of the Belgian Congo,” smiles Diop as he accepts the booty. It’s the kind of Robin Hood gesture, redistribution through theft, that was promoted by French anarchists in the early 20th century. Most notably by the burglar <a href="https://www.marxists.org/subject/anarchism/jacob-marius/why-burglar.htm">Marius Jacob</a>, one of the inspirations for Lupin. There is a superadded irony, since Leblanc’s original stories are themselves steeped in colonialist ideology.</p>
<p>If in the 1900s Arsène Lupin used an opera cape as an invisibility cloak, a marker of respectability repelling all suspicion. Diop, however, relies on a high-vis jacket to do the same job, highlighting how the low-paid, largely immigrant workforce whose labour keeps the modern city running goes largely unnoticed by those who depend on it . Exploiting this, he can parlay a job as a cleaner at the Louvre into a multi-million-euro heist.</p>
<p>The most striking way in which Lupin departs from its source material is in its focus on Diop as a father – a loving but slightly too absent and unreliable one. In the first episode we see him meet with his exasperated ex, Claire, promising that he is going to change. Over the course of the five episodes currently available, we see him struggle to keep that promise. In this, Lupin refuses to bolster the fantasy of effortless reinvention represented by the eponymous character. Changing identity is not easy for Diop as his reality, his family, always calls him back and forces painful emotional growth. In drawing on the appeal of the character whilst acknowledging the limits, even dangers, of fantasies of omnipotence, it seems to me that Lupin has its cake and eats it – which is, after all, the point.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/154316/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Emma Bielecki does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A french classic has had a thoroughly modern update, meditating on themes of class, race and colonialism.Emma Bielecki, Lecturer in French Studies, King's College LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1507472021-01-25T18:53:56Z2021-01-25T18:53:56ZMy favourite detective: Jules Maigret, the Paris detective with a pipe but no pretence<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/375006/original/file-20201215-13-14yi1e4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=2%2C14%2C1914%2C1126&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNGZjZmRkOTUtNmI2Zi00ZWUwLThhMmEtYzkyNDNkMDEzM2I3XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjExMjk0ODk@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_">IMDB</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/my-favourite-detective-95869">this series</a>, writers pay tribute to fictional detectives on the page and on screen.</em> </p>
<hr>
<p>When I first heard that Rowan Atkinson was to put on Maigret’s velvet-collared overcoat, I wondered if it was <em>une farce</em>. Johnny English in the role of Paris’s best-known detective, a bulky, stocky and rather taciturn policeman! What a terrible miscast, I thought. </p>
<p>When I watched the film, I was expecting at any time for Mr Bean to take over – sticking out his tongue or exploding his pipe.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/380097/original/file-20210122-19-270pic.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/380097/original/file-20210122-19-270pic.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/380097/original/file-20210122-19-270pic.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380097/original/file-20210122-19-270pic.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380097/original/file-20210122-19-270pic.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380097/original/file-20210122-19-270pic.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380097/original/file-20210122-19-270pic.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380097/original/file-20210122-19-270pic.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/IMA/inspector-maigret/">Penguin</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I grew up with <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/series/67800-inspector-maigret">Maigret</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/9693.Georges_Simenon">Georges Simenon</a>’s character. I was introduced to him via television, with actors such as Jean Richard or Bruno Cremer. Then I hungrily read his books. Not all of them – the writing of the Maigret saga extends over more than 40 years, presenting the <em>commissaire</em> in 103 novels and short stories, swiftly translated into 41 languages. </p>
<h2>Prolific and ambitious</h2>
<p>A prolific writer, Simenon published on average six novels per year. He could write a book in 11 days: eight days for the composition and three for the correction. (Simenon, prolific in more ways than one, claimed to have slept with more than 10,000 women.)</p>
<p>Simenon wrote accessible texts, with short sentences and simple vocabulary. He explained in a 1975 interview: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is better to use as few words as possible and especially as few abstract words as possible.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/380099/original/file-20210122-15-nqr4i8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Man with pipe" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/380099/original/file-20210122-15-nqr4i8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/380099/original/file-20210122-15-nqr4i8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380099/original/file-20210122-15-nqr4i8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380099/original/file-20210122-15-nqr4i8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380099/original/file-20210122-15-nqr4i8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380099/original/file-20210122-15-nqr4i8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380099/original/file-20210122-15-nqr4i8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">French author Georges Simenon in 1965.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Georges_Simenon_(1965).jpg">Jac. de Nijs/Nationaal Archief/Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>He employed a classic trick to catch the reader: stopping a chapter in the middle of the action, to keep them reading the following chapter.</p>
<p>Born in 1903, Simenon died more than 30 years ago, but his books are still selling. He started as a journalist in 1930s Belgium and wrote pulp fiction. Then the Maigret books became a bridge between popular potboilers and the more serious books he aspired to write, what he called his <em>romans durs</em>, or hard novels. </p>
<p>He was mentored by French author and trailblazer <a href="https://theconversation.com/colette-writer-feminist-performer-and-metoo-trail-blazer-109971">Colette</a>. André Gide was a lifelong fan, as were William Faulkner and Muriel Spark. All up, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/9693.Georges_Simenon">he wrote</a> nearly 200 novels, over 150 novellas, autobiographical works, articles, in addition to his early pulp fiction under pseudonyms. Roughly 550 million copies of his works have been printed.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-meaning-of-food-in-crime-fiction-98005">Friday essay: the meaning of food in crime fiction</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>An intuitive investigator</h2>
<p>“<em>Comprendre et ne pas juger</em>” (understand and judge not), was said to be <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/if-only-georges-simenon-had-been-a-bit-more-like-maigret#:%7E:text=Ordinary%20people%20are%20driven%20to,triumphantly%2C%20a%20search%20for%20understanding.">Simenon’s motto</a>. Accordingly, he built his oeuvre around psychological investigations. The motto can be applied as well to his detective hero. Biographer <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/140595.Georges_Simenon">Lucille Becker</a> notes Simenon writes “impressionistic notations of subtle psychological states, sensory impressions, and minute details of everyday life”. </p>
<p>Sucking on his pipe, Maigret observes from a distance, inhaling the soul of people and places. Then he slowly closes in. He does not use forensic science and is more intuitive than procedural — to the disappointment of a Scotland Yard detective wanting to study “Maigret’s methods”. </p>
<p>“<em>Je pense si peu vous savez</em>,” he confesses, meaning “I think so little”. </p>
<p>When he is ready to confront the killer, he invites them to his office at the Police judiciaire, 36 quai des Orfèvres and prepares six pipes which he aligns on his desk in preparation for a long exposition. </p>
<p>While <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/IMA/inspector-maigret/">Penguin Classics</a> just finished the six-year project to reissue the Maigret series in its entirety — all fresh new translations — radio plays and comics continue to promote the investigations of the legendary sleuth. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">No sign of Mr Bean in Rowan Atkinson’s Maigret.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The movie industry from the start was interested — with directors such as Jean Renoir or Claude Autant-Lara, and actors such as Jean Gabin and Brigitte Bardot involved. But it is in television that Maigret gives the best of himself, in a “happy alliance between genre and medium” writes <a href="https://www.otago.ac.nz/languagescultures/people/otago063272.html">academic Barbara Stone</a>. </p>
<p>In France as well as in UK, Italy or Germany, and Japan, the Maigret series are successful. Actors Jean Richard (92 episodes), Bruno Cremer (54 episodes), Michael Gambon (12 episodes), Rupert Davies (52 episodes), Jan Teulings (12 episodes), Gino Cervi (16 episodes), Kinya Aikawa (25 episodes), and even Rowan Atkinson (4 episodes) have introduced the audience to the guilty secrets of Paris and small-town France.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/my-favourite-detective-why-vera-is-so-much-more-than-a-hat-mac-and-attitude-149530">My favourite detective: why Vera is so much more than a hat, mac and attitude</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>So Frenchy, so simple</h2>
<p>Screen adaptations rarely modernise the setting. Apart from the French director <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0055303/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0">Claude Barma</a> who translated Maigret in the contemporary 1970s, they offer period pieces of picturesque nostalgia set in the 1950s. </p>
<p>Simenon’s <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/if-only-georges-simenon-had-been-a-bit-more-like-maigret">world</a> “of second-class hotels and third-class railway carriages, of drifters, bargemen, tarts and luckless creditors” is rendered in a misty and gloomy atmosphere where ambiguity reigns.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/380095/original/file-20210122-19-7jjezc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/380095/original/file-20210122-19-7jjezc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/380095/original/file-20210122-19-7jjezc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380095/original/file-20210122-19-7jjezc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380095/original/file-20210122-19-7jjezc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380095/original/file-20210122-19-7jjezc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1162&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380095/original/file-20210122-19-7jjezc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1162&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380095/original/file-20210122-19-7jjezc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1162&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/IMA/inspector-maigret/">Penguin</a></span>
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<p>Maigret shifts chameleon-like between a broad range of social groups. A defender of bourgeois values, he acts as a mediator and arbitrator between conflicting social classes. </p>
<p>Social criticism however is limited to individual cases and Maigret demonstrates a real empathy for the victim and for the <em>petites gens</em> (small people). That’s why Maigret is still relevant today. </p>
<p>Writer and critic Ian Thomson <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/if-only-georges-simenon-had-been-a-bit-more-like-maigret">positions him</a> as the “archetypal fictional detective of the 20th century and a template for Inspector Morse, Kurt Wallander and any pensive sloggers on the beat”.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/my-favourite-detective-kurt-wallander-too-grumpy-to-like-relatable-enough-to-get-under-your-skin-149277">My favourite detective: Kurt Wallander — too grumpy to like, relatable enough to get under your skin</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Maigret has an avuncular role as patron to his underlings, is a good husband to Madame Maigret and enjoys a beer with his preferred meal, veal stew, at the <em>Brasserie Dauphine</em>. Nothing flamboyant or exuberant about him. Maigret, the French detective.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/150747/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Véronique Duché does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Created by a prolific French author, Inspector Jules Maigret observes without judgement and moves like a chameleon between social classes.Véronique Duché, A.R. Chisholm Professor of French, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1394272020-05-29T11:14:18Z2020-05-29T11:14:18ZWhen the fabricated lives of French authors are just as gripping as the books they write<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/337714/original/file-20200526-106853-msd5u4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=77%2C38%2C5098%2C3406&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Stéphane Bourgoin fabricated his life story, including a murdered wife.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/St%C3%A9phane_Bourgoin_-_Livre_sur_la_Place_de_Nancy_%2821138194879%29.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The French true crime writer <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/13/serial-killer-expert-admits-serial-lies-stephane-bourgoin">Stéphane Bourgoin’s</a> trained at the FBI’s profiling school in Virginia and had interviewed 77 murderers, including Charles Manson and Ted Bundy. He had advised the FBI and Scotland Yard on difficult cases and his own wife had been murdered by a serial killer. He even had a short stint as a professional footballer for the Parisian team Red Star. His life seemed as interesting as one of his 40 books. Except none of it was true. </p>
<p>Following an investigation by the anonymous collective 4ème Oeil (Fourth Eye) Corporation in February on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNbsv2tTRRk_xTMauUhKhvJ9sygw3gYZE">YouTube</a>, Bourgoin was forced to admit he had fabricated much of his life story and CV.</p>
<p>This is not the first time a French author has fabricated a wild and interesting life. Some have done it to make a book more attractive to readers and awards committees. Others have done it to distance themselves from lowly roots and a back catalogue of pulpy fiction. </p>
<h2>Embroidering the truth</h2>
<p>Bourgoin <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/13/serial-killer-expert-admits-serial-lies-stephane-bourgoin">has since admitted</a> that the fictitious wife was based on a woman he met “five or six times” and “liked”. He did briefly meet Charles Manson, but only walked past him and never got to speak to his. And, instead of 77 murderers, he had only spoken to around 30.</p>
<p>In <a href="http://www.leparisien.fr/video/video-stephane-bourgoin-expert-auto-proclame-des-tueurs-en-serie-j-ai-menti-je-m-excuse-10-05-2020-8314347.php">a series of interviews</a> with <a href="https://www.parismatch.com/Actu/Faits-divers/Stephane-Bourgoin-Serial-Menteur-Dans-Match-il-passe-aux-aveux-1684548">French newspapers</a>, Bourgoin now says he should have let his real knowledge stand for itself – that his books were good enough to sell without such a fantastical back story.</p>
<p>Writers have long used false histories and fabricated public personas to their own ends, especially if that’s what it takes to get a publishing deal or public recognition. </p>
<p>One of the most notorious incidences involves the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize, which is awarded to “the best and most imaginative prose work of the year”. Previous winners include Marcel Proust and Simone de Beauvoir. </p>
<p>It can only be won once. But the prolific writer <a href="https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180619-romain-gary-the-greatest-literary-bad-boy-of-all">Romain Gary</a> managed to win it twice through a feat of deception, first in 1956 for <em>Les racines du ciel</em> (The Roots of Heaven), and then as the supposedly Algerian writer Émile Ajar in 1975 for <em>Gros-Câlin</em>. </p>
<p>His deception was only confirmed posthumously in the publication of a confession <em>Vie et mort d’Émile Ajar</em> (The Life and Death of Émile Ajar). Throughout his lifetime, Gary wrote under several names, including Fosco Sinibali, Shatan Bogat and Roman Kacew (his birth name).</p>
<p>Even one of France’s most revered writers, Honoré de Balzac, was not immune to a certain propensity for exaggerating the truth when crafting his public and private image. </p>
<p>Balzac is perhaps best known as one of the founders of literary realism. However, he started his career churning out potboilers under <a href="http://registryofpseudonyms.com/honore_balzac.html">pseudonyms</a> (one of which was Lord R’Hoone, an anagram of Honoré, and Horace de Saint-Aubin). </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/337716/original/file-20200526-106848-8nudi9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/337716/original/file-20200526-106848-8nudi9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=545&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/337716/original/file-20200526-106848-8nudi9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=545&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/337716/original/file-20200526-106848-8nudi9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=545&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/337716/original/file-20200526-106848-8nudi9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=685&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/337716/original/file-20200526-106848-8nudi9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=685&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/337716/original/file-20200526-106848-8nudi9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=685&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Honoré de Balzac.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor%C3%A9_de_Balzac#/media/File:Honor%C3%A9_de_Balzac_(1842)_Detail.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Later, to disassociate himself from these early publications, he had his assistant write a preface to his novel <em>La Dernière Fée</em> (<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13557849-la-derni-re-f-e">The Last Fairy</a>, 1823) in which Horace de Saint-Aubin meets the new, successful Balzac and, upon reading a few pages of the latter’s writing, is so depressed that he sets his own novels on fire. </p>
<p>To complete the transformation, he added an aristocratic-sounding particle to become “de” to Balzac. The surname itself was a creation, changed by his father from the more <a href="http://authorscalendar.info/balzac.htm">common-sounding Balssa </a> in an attempt to move the family on from its peasant roots, and hinting at an illusory connection with the illustrious <a href="https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIOG146546">Balzac d’Entragues</a> family.</p>
<p>It also so happens that it was a French writer, Serge Doubrovsky, who in the 1970s coined the term “<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/vill15080.9?refreqid=excelsior%3Ab07ea5c4ef22a661a3a144a3979be0fd&seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">autofiction</a>” (fiction of the self) to describe his 1977 novel <em>Fils</em> (Son). The protagonist of <em>Fils</em> shares the author’s name and certain key characteristics, yet exists in an essentially fictional space. Doubrovsky <a href="https://agnionline.bu.edu/review/writing-memory-writing-the-self-autofiction-in-aubrys-no-one">described autofiction</a> as “fiction, made up of events and facts that are strictly real”. </p>
<p>The term creates a problem from the not-so-straightforward relationship between autobiography and truth. In the words of the academic <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3737492#metadata_info_tab_contents">Alex Hughes</a>, autofiction allows the author to transmit biographical facts “in a narrative format whose novelistic tenor permits him not to assume responsibility” for the truthfulness of his statements. Were he claiming to write within this genre, Bourgoin might have a leg to stand on. As things are, his books are on the wrong shelf.</p>
<h2>Moral outrage</h2>
<p>What is perhaps most interesting about Bourgoin’s story is the keenness with which his fabrications were seized on. His exaggerations enhanced his credibility and opened doors for him. It’s as if Bourgoin sensed that by exaggerating certain specific details, and thereby producing a particular kind of narrative, he was giving the public what he knew they really wanted to hear all along.</p>
<p>As the critic <a href="https://www.persee.fr/doc/arss_0335-5322_1986_num_62_1_2317">Pierre Bourdieu</a> pointed out in 1986, one problem with autobiography is that we all have been so exposed to the narrative conventions of fiction that we will almost inevitably reproduce them in the life story we write – even though this is likely to lead to misrepresenting the historical reality. </p>
<p>In writing himself into his books as the bereaved hero, Bourgoin was tapping into powerful patterns of storytelling that his readers were already attuned to. In <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/16/science-of-storytelling-will-storr-review">The Science of Storytelling</a>, the writer Will Storr suggests that the brain is primed to react with interest to stories of “moral outrage”, which Storr calls “the ancient lifeblood of storytelling”. When we see heroes squaring up to face baddies, our tribal instinct for justice kicks in and we root for Bourgoin’s fictitious alter-ego.</p>
<p>With Bourgoin’s confession, his narrative now unfolds anew. “When you’ve broken a character you can begin to build their story,” writes Storr. We want to see the bad guys punished, or at least remorseful. Bourgoin, and the organisation that exposed his fabricated claims, have unwittingly provided just that to our story-hungry brains. We readers have been had. And, to borrow Storr’s expression, “we’re fucking outraged.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/139427/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ewa Szypula previously received funding from the AHRC and the MHRA. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Richard Bates receives funding from the AHRC. </span></em></p>For a handful of French writers, the best fiction they wrote was their life story.Ewa Szypula, Teaching Associate in French, University of NottinghamLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1292112020-01-10T13:44:12Z2020-01-10T13:44:12ZWe’re living in the bizarre world that Flaubert envisioned<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/309128/original/file-20200108-107231-19814z9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=32%2C25%2C2132%2C1476&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">'I want to produce such an impression of utter weariness and ennui that my readers will imagine the book could only have been written by a cretin,' Flaubert wrote.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/gustave-flaubert-gustave-flaubert-schriftsteller-frankreich-news-photo/537138071?adppopup=true">Photo by Nadar / ullstein bild via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Are we all trapped in a live-action version of Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary”?</p>
<p>The Jan. 3 assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani was followed by a torrent of contradictory narratives.</p>
<p>Was <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/01/06/trumps-order-kill-soleimani-is-already-starting-backfire/">Soleimani planning to attack Americans</a>? What about Vice President Mike Pence’s <a href="https://apnews.com/eba793fad25f603b0fbdfa31d59118db">erroneous assertion that Soleimani was involved in 9/11</a>? Or was the plan all along to withdraw troops, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/leaked-letter-sparks-concerns-of-us-troop-withdrawal-from-iraq-2020-1">as a letter accidentally sent</a> to the Iraqi government suggested?</p>
<p>Was Trump simply trying <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/warren-reasonable-to-ask-if-trump-s-iran-strike-is-a-distraction-from-impeachment-1.8370699">to distract from his impeachment trial</a>? Was the attack <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/04/us/politics/trump-suleimani.html">the knee-jerk decision</a> of <a href="https://twitter.com/gtconway3d/status/1214715575622086657">a malignant narcissist</a>? Or was it a reasonable response <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/e293ad92-d894-11e9-8f9b-77216ebe1f17">following months of Iranian provocations</a>?</p>
<p>Were Democrats <a href="https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/1214890596135030785">mourning Soleimani’s death</a>? Or were <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/3/21048098/iran-qassem-soleimani-ndaa-2019-vote-ro-khanna-aumf">they also responsible for the attack</a>? </p>
<p>Each burst of accusations and justifications has elicited a flood of public responses, expert opinions and efforts to correct a record full of hostilities and absurdities. </p>
<p>Many might feel bewildered and demoralized. But fans of the 19th-century French novel have seen this before.</p>
<p>In a 1852 letter, French author Gustave Flaubert <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=0DBGvhtXUzoC&printsec=frontcover&dq=a+world+abandoned+by+god&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiUt7qv4LzmAhWaBs0KHQFyD_wQ6AEwAHoECAQQAg#v=onepage&q=a%20world%20abandoned%20by%20god&f=false">mused</a>, “When will we write the facts from the point of view of a cosmic joke, that is as God sees them from on high?”</p>
<p>He answered his own question in his 1857 novel, “<a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Madame_Bovary.html?id=Cg5CwY-GAl0C">Madame Bovary</a>,” which he published during the regime of Napoleon III – the French president whose autocratic ambitions were aided by a swirl of misinformation and warring political factions.</p>
<h2>When language loses all meaning</h2>
<p><a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/A_World_Abandoned_by_God.html?id=0DBGvhtXUzoC&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button">As I’ve previously written</a>, “Madame Bovary” traffics in deliberate meaninglessness, or, as literary critic Leo Bersani <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=P9NBAAAAIAAJ&q=bersani+balzac+to+beckett&dq=bersani+balzac+to+beckett&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwii6JuJg9TmAhXmtlkKHf88ABUQ6AEwAHoECAIQAg">put it</a>, the “arbitrary, insignificant, inexpressive nature of language.”</p>
<p>The main character, Emma Bovary, has devoured romantic novels and is disillusioned by a provincial existence that has proven dull. Her search for excitement and escape leads to adulterous disasters and financial ruin.</p>
<p>That’s a common enough premise, but what makes “Madame Bovary” unique is its insistence on the unreliability of narratives, phrases, descriptions and words. All the characters, from the callow manipulators to the well-meaning dullards, are awash in cliché. Emma and her future lover, Léon, declare that they love sunsets by the seaside, though neither has been to the ocean. The pharmacist Homais counsels prudence to others, though no one listens, and he himself is ruthlessly ambitious; the novel ends with him receiving the cross of the Legion of Honor. Léon tells Emma that he wanted to be buried in a rug she gave him, though the narrator reveals that this is false. </p>
<p>It isn’t even that everyone in the novel lies; some earnest characters really mean what they say. The problem is that language itself has had the meaning drained out of it by a combination of insincerity, repetition and bombast. In a famous scene at an agricultural fair, the audience of attentive townspeople hangs on every word of <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=WtomKs0j8kUC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Madame+ovary&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjZ7uLyw-vmAhVDrp4KHbw7CLwQ6AEIJzAA#v=snippet&q=Tigers&f=false">a mind-numbing, meandering speech about crops</a>: “Here we have the vine, there we have the cider apple, further on we have cheese, and flax!” </p>
<p>When the fireworks planned for the event’s grand finale sputter out, the newspaper nonetheless reports that they went off without a hitch, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=WtomKs0j8kUC&printsec=frontcover&dq=madame+bovary&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiav9eb8N3mAhXNKs0KHeDrBzQQ6AEwAHoECAMQAg#v=snippet&q=transported%20into%20the&f=false">describing them</a> as a “veritable kaleidoscope, a true stage-setting for an opera.” No one cares that the description is made up. </p>
<p>The ultimate punchline of Flaubert’s cosmic joke is that the narrator himself is a master of subtle confusion. He starts the story in the first person, positioning himself as a schoolmate of Emma’s husband, before changing abruptly to the third person. Some of his accounts are straightforward and dispassionate. Others are entirely confounding. Descriptions of a boy’s cap, a wedding cake and a medical device are so detailed – and yet so baffling – that readers find themselves unable to even imagine what they might look like.</p>
<p>“I want to produce such an impression of utter weariness and ennui,” <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=rAoaAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA393&lpg=PA393&dq=I+want+to+produce+such+an+impression+of+utter+weariness+and+ennui+that+my+readers+will+imagine+the+book+could+only+have+been+written+by+a+cretin&source=bl&ots=y2K9xXAaPQ&sig=ACfU3U2dChMqif5i4DALvljbYSmpsjyMDw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjY49GW3bzmAhUvWN8KHalbC7cQ6AEwAHoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=I%20want%20to%20produce%20such%20an%20impression%20of%20utter%20weariness%20and%20ennui%20that%20my%20readers%20will%20imagine%20the%20book%20could%20only%20have%20been%20written%20by%20a%20cretin&f=false">Flaubert later wrote</a> in the plans for a subsequent literary project, “that my readers will imagine the book could only have been written by a cretin.”</p>
<h2>France in political turmoil</h2>
<p>Flaubert didn’t write “Madame Bovary” in a vacuum. As he was starting the novel in 1851, elected President Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte was staging the coup d’état that would transform him from president to emperor. </p>
<p>Bonaparte gave his followers important positions, reminded soldiers of their oath of “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=j9lZAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA436&dq=napoleon+soldiers+%22passive+obedience%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi_6rOe-_HmAhWm1FkKHZOKBXIQ6AEwAHoECAAQAg#v=onepage&q=napoleon%20soldiers%20%22passive%20obedience%22&f=false">passive obedience</a>” and crushed <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=JbnWCwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=napoleon+coup+parliamentarian+revolt&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjrhsy1-_HmAhULzlkKHUeHBrUQ6AEwAXoECAEQAg#v=onepage&q=napoleon%20coup%20parliamentarian%20revolt&f=false">parliamentarian revolts and rural insurrections</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/309146/original/file-20200108-107261-lrejtx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/309146/original/file-20200108-107261-lrejtx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=936&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/309146/original/file-20200108-107261-lrejtx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=936&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/309146/original/file-20200108-107261-lrejtx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=936&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/309146/original/file-20200108-107261-lrejtx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1176&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/309146/original/file-20200108-107261-lrejtx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1176&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/309146/original/file-20200108-107261-lrejtx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1176&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Portrait of Napoleon III.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/99/Franz_Xaver_Winterhalter_Napoleon_III.jpg/384px-Franz_Xaver_Winterhalter_Napoleon_III.jpg">Napoleonic Museum</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Roughly 10,000 political opponents <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=5cSEpZMwFp4C&pg=PA111&dq=napoleon+coup+victor+hugo&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiVysPE-_HmAhUwwFkKHYF_ALgQ6AEwBnoECAkQAg#v=onepage&q=napoleon%20coup%20victor%20hugo&f=false">were deported to penal colonies</a>. Victor Hugo, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=X9_nxmc4QJAC&pg=PA135&dq=napoleon+coup+victor+hugo&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiVysPE-_HmAhUwwFkKHYF_ALgQ6AEwA3oECAEQAg#v=onepage&q=napoleon%20coup%20victor%20hugo&f=false">a staunch opponent of the coup</a>, fled to Brussels, while Alexis de Tocqueville retired from political life <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=UXkJ0gvjS0AC&pg=PA903&dq=Alexis+de+Tocqueville+retired+from+political+life+to+avoid+joining+the+regime&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi17dav_PHmAhVKrVkKHfLGBgQQ6AEwA3oECAEQAg#v=onepage&q=Alexis%20de%20Tocqueville%20retired%20from%20political%20life%20to%20avoid%20joining%20the%20regime&f=false">to avoid joining the regime</a>. </p>
<p>French citizens found themselves bewildered and disoriented. Journalist and politician Eugène Ténot, writing an account of the coup in 1868, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=XJTSAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=Paris+in+December,+1851:+Or,+The+Coup+D%27t%CC%81at+of+Napoleon+III.&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjz_tGsmdnmAhXBVt8KHVjrB1sQ6AEwAHoECAAQAg#v=onepage&q=Paris%20in%20December%2C%201851%3A%20Or%2C%20The%20Coup%20D't%CC%81at%20of%20Napoleon%20III.&f=false">warned readers</a> that “no truthful narrative of that event has been published in France.” He also remarked that “narratives written in troubled times are always imbued with partiality, exaggeration, injustice, even bad faith.” </p>
<p>In an open letter published in December 1851, Bonaparte announced the dissolution of the National Assembly, <a href="https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k4492967/f1.item.r=napoleon.zoom">which he called</a> a “hotbed of conspiracies.” In January 1852 he put in place a new constitution, <a href="https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5688240b/f4.item.r=%22fausses%20nouvelles%22">all the while accusing</a> “démagogues” of spreading “fausses nouvelles” (“fake news”). In December 1852, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte became Napoléon III. France’s Second Empire commenced. </p>
<p>Described as “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&id=OLwOAQAAMAAJ&dq=second+empire+burchell&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=modern+dictator">the first modern dictator</a>” and “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=W0ktX_xI1fYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Events+that+Changed+the+World+in+the+Nineteenth+Century&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj06vOnsdHmAhWHjVkKHQtxBBoQ6AEwAHoECAYQAg#v=onepage&q=Events%20that%20Changed%20the%20World%20in%20the%20Nineteenth%20Century&f=false">one of the first modern leaders to rule by propaganda</a>,” Bonaparte went from being France’s first elected president to its last emperor. The Second Empire lasted until 1870, when the emperor, conscious of his declining popularity, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Franco-German-War">declared war on Prussia</a> – and lost. </p>
<h2>Echoes today</h2>
<p>France’s political upheaval, misinformation wars, sporadic uprisings and public confusion likely left a deep impression on Flaubert.</p>
<p>Americans today might sympathize with his characters, who exist in an endless vortex of repetition, insincerity and stupidity.</p>
<p>Recent technological advances are partially to blame.</p>
<p>Over the past decade, abundant research has emerged on <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/digital-altruism/201308/media-saturation-your-health">media oversaturation</a>, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=K4r6DAAAQBAJ&pg=PA151&lpg=PA151&dq=narrative+overload&source=bl&ots=4-UwMgpxoy&sig=ACfU3U2pVePHN_qYqHF3JRliGnRKeU0VqA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj89-LfsbvmAhVNpFkKHRyEDm4Q6AEwEnoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=narrative%20overload&f=false">narrative overload</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/exposed-to-a-deluge-of-digital-photos-were-feeling-the-psychological-effects-of-image-overload-52562">the deluge of digital images</a> – and what this does to the brain. Incessant stimuli and distractions lead to memory impairment, confusion and troubles with retention.</p>
<p>These conditions are ripe for political warfare.</p>
<p>In his 2014 book “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=STtuBAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+contradictions+of+media+power&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwitm7mqn9zmAhWFylkKHawiAS0Q6AEwAHoECAQQAg#v=onepage&q=the%20contradictions%20of%20media%20power&f=false">The Contradictions of Media Power</a>,” media studies professor Das Freedman wrote that, in times of political instability, “existing narratives are under stress and audiences themselves are actively seeking out new perspectives.” Information wars and fake news seem to be endemic during times of political upheaval.</p>
<p>In many ways, we’re living out an extreme version of the cosmic joke Flaubert envisioned. </p>
<p>A continual stream of tedious lies, meaningless clichés and empty grandstanding has disillusioned Americans just as much as it confounded Emma Bovary. Lieuvain’s boring, bizarre address at the agricultural fair has its modern equivalents – think of Trump’s <a href="https://factba.se/transcript/donald-trump-speech-kag-rally-battle-creek-mi-december-18-2019">meandering rally speeches</a>, or his complaints about <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/12/27/791707318/trump-vs-toilets-and-showers-dishwashers-and-light-bulbs">toilet flushing</a> and <a href="https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2019/apr/08/donald-trump/republicans-dismiss-trumps-windmill-and-cancer-cla/">cancer-causing windmills</a>. Republican Congressman Devin Nunes <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/19/ridiculousness-devin-nunes-suing-devin-nunes-cow-what-it-really-signals/">is currently suing a fictitious cow for defamation</a>, while the president’s supporters applauded the statement that there was <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/11/27/trumps-claim-war-thanksgiving-is-absurd-also-sinister/">a war on “Thanksgiving</a>.” </p>
<p>With the assassination of Soleimani, disregard for truth and reality – and examples of Madame Bovary-esque word salad – remains as blatant as ever. Mike Pence’s reference to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/01/03/pences-problematic-tweet-tying-qasem-soleimani/">Soleimani’s involvement in 9/11</a> is as detached from reality as Emma’s vision of Roman ruins bordering a forest of tigers, camels, swans, sultans and English ladies. </p>
<p>The flood of narrative confusion continues unabated. Only time will tell if Iran becomes the Prussia of 21st-century America.</p>
<p>[ <em><a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=expertise">Expertise in your inbox. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter and get a digest of academic takes on today’s news, every day.</a></em> ]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/129211/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Susanna Lee does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Is a 19th-century French author’s cosmic joke turning into a real-life global nightmare?Susanna Lee, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, Georgetown UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1188742019-10-30T13:29:36Z2019-10-30T13:29:36ZWhy French poet Charles Baudelaire was the godfather of Goths<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299348/original/file-20191029-183120-jqdut2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The poet in a picture by Gustave Courbet.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Goths are typically regarded as being on the fringes of society – members of a subculture which finds beauty in the darker elements of human experience. And while their dress code is much imitated – and <a href="https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/people/the-25-best-photos-from-whitby-goth-festival-2019-1-10071521">celebrated</a> – over Halloween, they have a proud history that stretches far beyond a seasonal horror festival. </p>
<p>In fact, the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) could easily qualify as the template goths (and other bohemians) aspire to. He often dressed in black, dyed his hair green, and rebelled against the conformist, bourgeois world of mid-19th century Paris in both his personal life and his art. </p>
<p>His first collections of poems, <a href="https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo3618002.html">Les Fleurs du Mal</a> (The Flowers of Evil, 1857), was prosecuted for offending public morals, challenging its audiences with its startling treatments of sex, Satanism, vampirism and decay. No wonder his words would one day be <a href="https://www.baudelairesong.org/the-a-z-of-baudelaire/">set to music by The Cure</a>. </p>
<p>Aside from his writing, Baudlaire’s dissolute life was a checklist of boho credentials. He fell out with his family. He went bankrupt. He pursued reckless sexual experiments and contracted syphilis. He developed a drug habit. He associated with artists, musicians, writers and petty criminals rather than “respectable” people.</p>
<p>He outraged his family by having a mistress who was mixed race and probably illiterate. He refused conventional employment and made a precarious living as a writer, critic and occasional art dealer. </p>
<p>He wrote poetry which was prosecuted for obscenity and was adored by like-minded souls throughout Europe while being hated, even feared, by “straight” society. And then he died young, after years of serious illness and addiction, at the age of 46.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299349/original/file-20191029-183120-1z5h2o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299349/original/file-20191029-183120-1z5h2o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299349/original/file-20191029-183120-1z5h2o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299349/original/file-20191029-183120-1z5h2o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299349/original/file-20191029-183120-1z5h2o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299349/original/file-20191029-183120-1z5h2o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299349/original/file-20191029-183120-1z5h2o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Baudelaire, photographed by Étienne Carat in 1863.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Baudelaire was also a dandy, clean-shaven in an age of whiskers and dressed immaculately despite squalid domestic circumstances. Never ostentatious, he wore sombre black in mourning for his times. </p>
<p>Considering nature to be tyrannical, he championed everything which fought or transcended it, while being, like many of his contemporaries, overtly misogynistic. “Woman is natural. That is to say, abominable,” <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=riWFCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA61&lpg=PA61&dq=Woman+is+natural.+That+is+to+say,+abominable&source=bl&ots=Yho_FQ1Ih6&sig=ACfU3U1Bpwtnk8j-0yUzTVQTpiiVLi6Yzw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwig853g5cPlAhVwRxUIHcmXAIkQ6AEwEnoECAUQAQ#v=onepage&q=Woman%20is%20natural.%20That%20is%20to%20say%2C%20abominable&f=false">he wrote</a>. </p>
<p>Nevertheless, he recognised how both genders were trapped within their fleshly prisons and urged resistance to such incarceration through costume and cosmetics, recreational sex, drugs and alcohol.</p>
<p>Baudelaire sounds like many later writers, actors and rock stars, but it is unfair to suggest his cultural importance resides only in his delinquent mannerisms. What makes Baudelaire so significant, and so relevant today, is his recognition in Les Fleurs du Mal, his prose poetry, and essays, that the urbanised, industrial and increasingly godless modern world is radically different from any earlier epoch. </p>
<p>Artists responding to these new conditions of existence cannot cling to outworn traditions. They need instead to cast off convention and rethink their relationship to their culture and surroundings. </p>
<p>Baudelaire’s <a href="https://library.brown.edu/cds/baudelaire/translations1.html">translations of Edgar Allan Poe</a> brought the American writer to a new audience – and the morbidity of many Baudelaire poems suggests the two men were kindred spirits. In <a href="https://fleursdumal.org/poem/126">Une Charogne</a> (A Carcass, 1857) for example, he recounts finding a woman’s maggot-infested body, cataloguing her obscene decay in hideous detail before telling his lover that one day, she too will be rotten and worm-eaten. </p>
<p>Like his contemporary, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gustave-Flaubert">Gustave Flaubert</a>, Baudelaire felt stifled and alienated by the bombastic hypocrisy of <a href="https://www.history.org.uk/secondary/resource/475/napoleon-iii-and-the-french-second-empire">Napoleon III’s Second Empire</a>. He despaired at the gulf between public morality and private vice, and was sickened by the rise of bourgeois respectability, the protestant work ethic, and the sweeping modernisation of Paris itself. </p>
<p>Disdaining realism’s preoccupation with appearances, his writing examined the mental states his surroundings produced: boredom, an aggressive self-lacerating melancholy, and <em>ennui</em> – the listlessness and depression which left sufferers joyless and blasé. </p>
<p>He depicted himself as being like the king of a rainy country gripped by an unending despair, prematurely aged, impotent and sorrowful with no clear cause. “Life is a hospital,” <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/782454-this-life-is-a-hospital-in-which-each-patient-is">he wrote</a>, “in which all the patients are obsessed with changing their beds. One would prefer to suffer beside the fire, another thinks he’d recover sooner if placed by the window.” </p>
<h2>A series of unfortunate events</h2>
<p>More than 150 years after his death, Baudelaire remains a challenging figure – not least for his <a href="https://www.baudelairesong.org/should-feminists-read-baudelaire-3/">sexual attitudes</a>. Nevertheless, his influence is undeniable. <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2929192.pdf?seq=1/subjects#page_scan_tab_contents">T.S. Eliot hailed him</a> in <a href="https://www.bl.uk/works/the-waste-land">The Waste Land</a> (1922), borrowing his line: “<em>Hypocrite lecteur – mon semblable – mon frère!</em>” (Hypocrite reader, my likeness, my brother), for his dissection of the post-1918 world. </p>
<p>More recently, English author Angela Carter’s <a href="https://www.angelacarter.co.uk/black-venus/">Black Venus</a> (1985) gave a voice to Baudelaire’s mistress, Jeanne Duval, who rages at how “his eloquence denied her language”. And How Beautiful You Are, by Gothic rockers The Cure (1987) <a href="https://twostorymelody.com/literary-brilliance-cures-beautiful/">adapted his prose-poem</a> Les Yeux des Pauvres (The Eyes of the Poor). </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VHKiYPjjMWA?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Baudelaire’s rich musical heritage is being currently documented by the <a href="https://www.baudelairesong.org">Baudelaire Song Project</a>. His notion of the “<em>flaneur</em>”, the aimless urban idler, influenced the German philosopher Walter Benjamin and the explorations of modern <a href="https://theconversation.com/psychogeography-a-way-to-delve-into-the-soul-of-a-city-78032">psychogeographers</a>. His presence even lurks in the young adult fiction of <a href="https://www.lemonysnicket.com">Lemony Snicket</a>, where the Baudelaire children suffer a series of unfortunate events.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, black remains one of the uniforms of teenage disaffection from London to Tokyo, shaping the subcultures of the past four decades. Baudelaire’s existential anxieties and refusal to capitulate to the forces of conformity make him a continued inspiration.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/118874/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nick Freeman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>His legacy connects a great swathe of modern popular culture.Nick Freeman, Reader in Late Victorian Literature, Loughborough UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1156122019-04-16T17:17:19Z2019-04-16T17:17:19ZNotre-Dame de Paris: From searing emotion to the future rebirth of a World Heritage Site<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/269631/original/file-20190416-147499-pne2w6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C16%2C3648%2C2566&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">April 15, 2019, 7:34 p.m.: Notre-Dame de Paris in flames. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Leighton Kille</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>On the night of April 15, 2019, in Paris, the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWWVD-hZ9h0">emotions were raw</a>.</p>
<p>“Notre Dame is burning, the whole of France is crying, the whole world is crying,” said Archbishop Michel Aupetit of Paris. “It’s terrible, frightening, painful, a tragedy, a nightmare.”</p>
<p>“This place leaves no one untouched. When you enter this cathedral, it inhabits you,” said Anne Hidalgo, the Mayor of Paris, in front of the burning monument. </p>
<p>“We will rebuild,” said the Rector of Notre Dame, “we will rebuild.”</p>
<p>In the light of the day, the extent of the destruction was stunning. The cathedral’s 93-metre spire had collapsed, two-thirds of the roof was destroyed and parts of the interior were grievously damaged. But thanks to the efforts of 500 firefighters, the structure of the cathedral itself was <a href="https://www.nouvelobs.com/societe/20190415.OBS11614/notre-dame-de-paris-victime-d-un-impressionnant-incendie.html">“saved and preserved in its entirety”</a>, according to Jean-Claude Gallet, commander of the Paris Fire Brigade. Two towers with their immense bells still stand and many of the cathedral’s <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/notre-dame-cathedral-what-could-be-lost-inside-1.5099419">priceless treasures</a> survived.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/269562/original/file-20190416-147518-j6qu1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/269562/original/file-20190416-147518-j6qu1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=379&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269562/original/file-20190416-147518-j6qu1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=379&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269562/original/file-20190416-147518-j6qu1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=379&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269562/original/file-20190416-147518-j6qu1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269562/original/file-20190416-147518-j6qu1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269562/original/file-20190416-147518-j6qu1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">At about 7:20 p.m. on April 15, 2019, smoke from the burning cathedral obscured the sun.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jennifer Gallé</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Immense emotion</h2>
<p>Of all the historic monuments on earth, Notre-Dame de Paris is one of the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/41810662?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">“superstars”</a>: its unique history, exceptional architecture and renowned artefacts attract millions of visitors to Paris. Indeed, the cathedral can be described as an <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0148296316302569">intangible strategic resource</a> with few global equivalents.</p>
<p>Notre-Dame de Paris is first and foremost an exceptional place of Christian and Catholic worship, dating back nearly 1,000 years. It’s a jewel of Gothic art with countless treasures, including radiant stained-glass windows, the <a href="https://metro.co.uk/2019/04/16/notre-dame-crown-thorns-st-louis-tunic-saved-cathedral-fire-9219579/">crown of thorns and tunic of Saint Louis</a>, and the <a href="http://www.notredamedeparis.fr/en/la-cathedrale/linterieur/les-orgues/lorgue-de-choeur/">choir organ</a>. It is collectively classified as a <a href="https://whc.unesco.org/en/documents/111415">Unesco World Heritage Site</a>.</p>
<p>As the <a href="https://www.cairn.info/revue-la-pensee-de-midi-2008-2-page-226.htm">“eldest daughter of the church”</a> in France, Notre Dame is a national and cultural symbol, and has witnessed a large part of the country’s history: all its kings have stepped inside, and Napoleon crowned himself emperor there. Here the funerals of Charles de Gaulle, Georges Pompidou and François Mitterrand took place…</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/269567/original/file-20190416-147483-mavbcp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/269567/original/file-20190416-147483-mavbcp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269567/original/file-20190416-147483-mavbcp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269567/original/file-20190416-147483-mavbcp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269567/original/file-20190416-147483-mavbcp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269567/original/file-20190416-147483-mavbcp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269567/original/file-20190416-147483-mavbcp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"><em>The Coronation of Napoleon</em>, by Jacques-Louis David, 1808. Louvre Museum.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacre_de_Napol%C3%A9on_Ier#/media/File:Jacques-Louis_David,_The_Coronation_of_Napoleon.jpg">Wikipedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Millions of people who’ve never been to Paris have breathed the air inside the cathedral by reading Victor Hugo’s famous novel. While commonly known in English as <em>The Hunchback of Notre-Dame</em>, the original title is <em>Notre-Dame de Paris</em>, putting the cathedral front and centre in title and the narrative. Hugo delivered a romantic vision of the cathedral, as well as passage that describes a fire that took place only in readers’ imaginations: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“All eyes were raised to the top of the church. They beheld there an extraordinary sight. On the crest of the highest gallery, higher than the central rose window, there was a great flame rising between the two towers with whirlwinds of sparks, a vast, disordered, and furious flame.”</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/269564/original/file-20190416-147522-qurfqu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/269564/original/file-20190416-147522-qurfqu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/269564/original/file-20190416-147522-qurfqu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=842&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269564/original/file-20190416-147522-qurfqu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=842&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269564/original/file-20190416-147522-qurfqu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=842&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269564/original/file-20190416-147522-qurfqu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1058&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269564/original/file-20190416-147522-qurfqu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1058&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269564/original/file-20190416-147522-qurfqu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1058&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The spire of Notre-Dame de Paris in flames.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Guillaume Levrier</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As a direct consequence of Notre Dame’s history, architecture and art, of its place in culture and literature, the cathedral is the leading monument in Europe, with approximately 14 million visitors in 2018. It is one of France’s “primary assets”, the “cathedral of cathedrals”, a <em>must</em> – the actual word is used in French.</p>
<p>World Heritage Sites <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/RIOLP">arouse emotions</a> and emotions reveal <a href="https://journals.openedition.org/lectures/837">shared values</a>. Such emotions were on the faces of all those gathered in front of Notre Dame, the countless messages from heads of state, the flood of heartfelt sentiments on social networks – Notre Dame’s place in the collective imagination and worldwide influence is undeniable.</p>
<p>Speaking in front of the still-burning cathedral at 11:30 pm, French president Emmanuel Macron stated: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Notre-Dame de Paris is our place, it is our history, our literature, our imagination, the place where we have lived all our great moments […]. It is in so many books and paintings […] Even for those who have never been there, this is our story.” </p>
</blockquote>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/yWWVD-hZ9h0?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Such monuments encourage us to identify with them emotionally. They’re keystones to national identity, and can even further <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Heritage-Affect-and-Emotion-Politics-practices-and-infrastructures/Tolia-Kelly-Waterton-Watson/p/book/9781472454874">international relations</a>. The agonised reaction to the fire at the cathedral mixes sentimentalism, nostalgia and nationalism in a way that is deeply linked to the past, as related by historian David Lowenthal in his study <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/past-is-a-foreign-country-revisited/B6FA38F2EB08FB3E35183EE6DEBB81F4"><em>The Past is a Foreign Country</em></a>.</p>
<h2>Creative reconstruction</h2>
<p>Continuing his speech in front of the cathedral, President Macron was unequivocal: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“We have built this cathedral and over the centuries we have made it grow and improved it. So I say to you solemnly this evening: we will rebuild this cathedral, all of us together […]. We will rebuild Notre Dame.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Into the evening of April 15 and through the next day, an exceptional effort began to take form: The French president launched a national donation effort, Unesco pledged its support and mayors of towns large and small throughout France stood up as one. The wealthy Arnault and Pinault families have promised to donate a total of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/fashion/notre-dame-reconstruction-pledges.html">300 million euros to the future restoration</a>, and thousands of individuals have pledged their support. </p>
<p>Before the path to cathedral’s rebirth can be mapped out, we need a serious assessment of how the tragic destruction of such a priceless monument was even possible. It was undergoing renovation at the time of the fire broke out, and this raises questions about the requirements for work on historic monuments, and also the level of resources allocated. Art historians such as Alexandre Gady and Didier Rykner have stated that the fire could and should <a href="https://www.linternaute.com/actualite/societe/1789662-notre-dame-de-paris-polemique-sur-l-incendie-de-nouvelles-images/">have been avoided</a>. They state that even if Notre Dame is “repaired”, we have already in a sense “lost it”.</p>
<p>It is near certain that the cathedral cannot be rebuilt exactly as it was before. The fire started deep within the roof, which was under repair at the time. The oak frame dates from the 13th century, and according to experts, reproducing it would require a forest of 1,300 oak trees. One alternative is to use innovative techniques, as architect Henri Deneux did when he <a href="http://www.culture.gouv.fr/Regions/Drac-Grand-Est/Actualites/Actualites-archivees/Monuments-historiques/Cathedrale-de-Reims-restauration-des-couvertures-du-choeur">rebuilt the cathedral of Reims</a> after it was nearly destroyed during the First World War. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/269571/original/file-20190416-147511-15dqej2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/269571/original/file-20190416-147511-15dqej2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269571/original/file-20190416-147511-15dqej2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269571/original/file-20190416-147511-15dqej2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269571/original/file-20190416-147511-15dqej2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=615&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269571/original/file-20190416-147511-15dqej2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=615&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269571/original/file-20190416-147511-15dqej2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=615&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The cathedral of Reims in 1914.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cath%C3%A9drale_Notre-Dame_de_Reims#/media/File:Cath%C3%A9drale_de_Reims_en_1914.jpg">Wikipedia, anonymous.</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Monuments in general and religious monuments in particular are fragile. Against all odds, Notre Dame survived periods of immense turbulence in French history, and was touched by neither bombardments nor significant fires, a constant threat prior to the 1752 invention of the <a href="http://scihi.org/benjamin-franklin-lightning-rod/">lightning rod</a>. Until April 15, it had come to us remarkably preserved, and millions of visitors paid tribute every year. Yet the risk of the unimaginable still remained. </p>
<p>“It’s in our nature to mourn when we see history lost – but it’s also in our nature to rebuild for tomorrow, as strong as we can,” former US president Barack Obama said the night of the fire. Notre-Dame de Paris is the heart of the city and of France, and an inspiration for the world. We are all cathedral builders, in a moment of sacred union in a secular society.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/269563/original/file-20190416-147487-1dkvtxf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/269563/original/file-20190416-147487-1dkvtxf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/269563/original/file-20190416-147487-1dkvtxf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=191&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269563/original/file-20190416-147487-1dkvtxf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=191&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269563/original/file-20190416-147487-1dkvtxf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=191&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269563/original/file-20190416-147487-1dkvtxf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=241&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269563/original/file-20190416-147487-1dkvtxf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=241&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/269563/original/file-20190416-147487-1dkvtxf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=241&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Before the fire, during, and after.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Leighton Kille</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p><em>Translation from the original French by Leighton Kille.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/115612/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anne Gombault ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.</span></em></p>The fire that devastated the Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral on April 15 is a historic event that reminds us of the symbolic power of national monuments.Anne Gombault, Professeur de management, directrice du centre de recherche Industries créatives Culture, Kedge Business SchoolLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1150922019-04-09T12:55:38Z2019-04-09T12:55:38ZNobel Prize in literature: Annie Ernaux – an uncompromising author who writes from experience<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/268336/original/file-20190409-2924-gsmyos.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Annie Ernaux. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J5LZoB_leA">YouTube</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>It was 1974 when the French writer <a href="https://www.annie-ernaux.org/">Annie Ernaux</a> published her first book, <a href="http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/product/cleaned-out/">Les Armoires Vides</a> (Cleaned Out). It is a fictionalised account of her illegal abortion ten years earlier, as a student gradually moving away from a working-class upbringing in Normandy. The book came out 25 years after Simone de Beauvoir’s landmark feminist text <a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/de-beauvoir/2nd-sex/">The Second Sex</a>, yet French society <a href="https://343sluts.wordpress.com">remained</a> judgemental – and often hypocritical – about women’s reproductive rights. Cleaned Out acknowledged the many working-class women who had to resort to clandestine, often life-threatening procedures before the laws <a href="https://www.ukessays.com/essays/french/abortion-laws-france.php">were changed</a> in 1975. </p>
<p>From the beginning, Ernaux’s stark prose helped establish her as an uncompromisingly honest writer. In the 1980s and 1990s, she would rise to greater prominence through autobiographical works such as <a href="https://www.sevenstories.com/books/2833-a-man-s-place">La Place</a> (A Man’s Place), an account of her father’s life, which won her the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/Prix-Renaudot">Renaudot Prize</a> in 1984. She is now seen as one of France’s major writers and her texts are widely taught in schools and universities.</p>
<p>But, until relatively recently, she was unknown to most of the English-speaking world. That started to change changing thanks to two translations. <a href="https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/the-years">Les Années</a> (The Years, 2008) is a “collective autobiography” <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/22/the-years-annie-ernaux-review">spanning</a> six decades of personal and collective history, and was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/09/man-booker-international-shortlist-dominated-by-women-authors-and-translators-olga-tokarczuk-annie-ernaux">shortlisted</a> for the Man Booker International Prize. In <a href="https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/happening">L'Événement</a> (Happening, 2000), Ernaux returned to the subject of illegal abortion, but this time tells her own non-fictionalised story. </p>
<h2>Two memoirs</h2>
<p>The Years gained almost unanimous recognition when it was published. It sits at the junction between autobiography, sociology and collective memoir, highlighting the profound socio-cultural changes that Ernaux witnessed from her childhood in the 1940s to the end of the century. The book was praised for its original narrative form, using “she” or “we” instead of “I” to tell Ernaux’s story. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/268333/original/file-20190409-2924-gu5d1x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/268333/original/file-20190409-2924-gu5d1x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/268333/original/file-20190409-2924-gu5d1x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=903&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/268333/original/file-20190409-2924-gu5d1x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=903&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/268333/original/file-20190409-2924-gu5d1x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=903&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/268333/original/file-20190409-2924-gu5d1x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1135&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/268333/original/file-20190409-2924-gu5d1x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1135&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/268333/original/file-20190409-2924-gu5d1x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1135&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Years, 2008.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>To trace the inescapable passing of time, The Years draws in everything from popular phrases to songs to advertisements, from iconic objects to historical events to personal anecdotes. Along the way, the book tells the evolution of women’s place in French society and their fights for sexual freedom and independence.</p>
<p>When <a href="https://www.pendoramagazine.com/book-reviews/2019/2/11/book-review-happening-by-annie-ernaux">Happening</a> was published in 2000, the French media reacted much more cautiously. It is likely that some critics were not comfortable with the subject matter and the raw style of writing. Here’s an extract, for example, about the woman carrying out the abortion:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Only now can I visualise the room. It defies analysis. All I can do is sink into it. I feel that the woman who is busying herself between my legs, inserting the speculum, is giving birth to me. At that point I killed my own mother inside me. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ernaux <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Xy90DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT227&lpg=PT227&dq=%22There+was+a+sort+of+void+between+the+moment+the+girl+learns+she+is+pregnant+and+the+moment+it's+all+over.%22&source=bl&ots=H87ESdJ7D8&sig=ACfU3U2X1NdQ78xAGG_VJ56AI2I39ZKWKw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjt87nh38DhAhW5ShUIHWPaAwYQ6AEwAHoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22There%20was%20a%20sort%20of%20void%20between%20the%20moment%20the%20girl%20learns%20she%20is%20pregnant%20and%20the%20moment%20it's%20all%20over.%22&f=false">said that</a> part of her intention with the book was to lift the lid on what the French abortion laws had meant in practice:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Although abortion was mentioned in many novels, no details were given about what actually took place. There was a sort of void between the moment the girl learns she is pregnant and the moment it’s all over.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/268337/original/file-20190409-2912-1b756z2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/268337/original/file-20190409-2912-1b756z2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/268337/original/file-20190409-2912-1b756z2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=857&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/268337/original/file-20190409-2912-1b756z2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=857&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/268337/original/file-20190409-2912-1b756z2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=857&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/268337/original/file-20190409-2912-1b756z2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1077&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/268337/original/file-20190409-2912-1b756z2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1077&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/268337/original/file-20190409-2912-1b756z2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1077&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Happening, 2000.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>With precision, but without pathos, Happening details the prevailing atmosphere of moral judgement of 1960s France – and Ernaux’s isolation and despair at a time when the word abortion “had no place in language”. She describes the gruesome conditions in which she nearly died: after finally finding a back-street abortionist, Ernaux had a probe inserted and was told it would cause her to miscarry in a few days. This then happened at her student residence and she was taken to hospital with a haemorrhage. </p>
<p>Happening is not only an account of this intrinsically physical, traumatic and personal experience. It is also about society’s attitudes to women at the time – particularly working-class women – explored through the reactions of various men to her predicament. The father of the unborn child, a middle-class student at the Sciences Po university in Bordeaux, leaves her to her own devices. Doctors show her little sympathy for fear of the laws of the time. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/268332/original/file-20190409-2912-1blwiqp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/268332/original/file-20190409-2912-1blwiqp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/268332/original/file-20190409-2912-1blwiqp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=655&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/268332/original/file-20190409-2912-1blwiqp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=655&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/268332/original/file-20190409-2912-1blwiqp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=655&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/268332/original/file-20190409-2912-1blwiqp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=823&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/268332/original/file-20190409-2912-1blwiqp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=823&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/268332/original/file-20190409-2912-1blwiqp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=823&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ernaux in the 1960s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.inventoire.com/ecrire-a-partir-de-memoire-de-fille-de-annie-ernaux/">Inventoire</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Male students that she talks to are fascinated by her “condition”, and one even tries to take advantage in the knowledge that there’s no danger of getting her pregnant. Having been admitted to hospital, Ernaux is humiliated by a junior doctor, who on seeing her bleeding shouts that he’s “no plumber”. When he discovers that she is a university student, he becomes much more sympathetic. </p>
<p>Nearly 20 years after it was originally published, Happening has come to be seen as a landmark piece of writing about abortion. The text is now often mentioned during debates on the subject. On the day of the <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-44256152">Irish abortion referendum</a> in 2018, the radio station France Culture <a href="https://www.franceculture.fr/litterature/annie-ernaux-levenement">devoted</a> a feature to Ernaux. </p>
<h2>Distasteful truths</h2>
<p>Ernaux <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=P2Qd7lauvaIC&pg=PA44&lpg=PA44&dq=%E2%80%98this+account+may+exasperate+or+repel+some+readers;+it+may+also+be+branded+as+distasteful.%E2%80%99&source=bl&ots=bDn2iPWxzZ&sig=ACfU3U1mZNzh2xOqVNslJhJGPmg0fzW3YQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjl-cK94sDhAhW_SxUIHU5kBwwQ6AEwAHoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=%E2%80%98this%20account%20may%20exasperate%20or%20repel%20some%20readers%3B%20it%20may%20also%20be%20branded%20as%20distasteful.%E2%80%99&f=false">acknowledges</a> in Happening that “this account may exasperate or repel some readers; it may also be branded as distasteful”. The same could be said of much of her other work. Ernaux has written from the same direct perspective about numerous issues not deemed “<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/398362">literary</a>”, including sex, stains, illness, the ageing body, dementia and drunkenness. </p>
<p>Writing is for Ernaux a matter of making lived experience visible, especially that of women – and not taking their rights for granted. As she writes in Happening:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If I failed to go through with this undertaking, I would be guilty of silencing the lives of women and condoning a world governed by the patriarchy.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Giving a voice to those being silenced lies at the heart of Ernaux’s writings. She spoke of her support for the #MeToo movement in a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/06/annie-ernaux-interview-the-years-memoir-man-booker-international">recent interview</a>, but has also <a href="https://www.liberation.fr/france/2018/12/09/annie-ernaux-il-n-y-a-pas-de-nouveau-monde-ca-n-existe-pas_1697006">expressed affinity</a> with the <em>gilets jaunes</em>, which she sees as a manifestation of deep social injustice and the elite’s contempt towards the working class and unemployed. In 2018 this made her “arrival” in the English-speaking world particularly timely at the age of 78. </p>
<p>When French politician Simone Veil died in 2017, many “<a href="https://www.ulule.com/merci-simone/">merci Simone</a>” tags were left on walls, not least for the crucial role she played in shaping the country’s modern abortion laws. Many readers <a href="https://www.questia.com/library/102309781/annie-ernaux-an-introduction-to-the-writer-and-her">have written</a> to Ernaux to say “merci Annie” in acknowledgement of her feminist writings. She deserves to be recognised in the international canon of great French writers, and hopefully we are now finally seeing this starting to take place.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/115092/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Elise Hugueny-Léger receives funding from The Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland.</span></em></p>From the Archives: Ernaux’s English translation, Happening, has come to be seen as one of the great pieces of writing about abortion.Elise Hugueny-Léger, Senior Lecturer, School of Modern Languages, University of St AndrewsLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1121152019-03-06T11:18:22Z2019-03-06T11:18:22ZFive books on work by French authors that you should read on your commute<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/261417/original/file-20190228-106371-3bw5gr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>An emerging genre of fiction in France is providing an unlikely brand of escapism. Growing numbers of French writers are choosing work as their subject matter – and it seems that readers can’t get enough of their novels.</p>
<p>The prix du roman d'entreprise et du travail, the French prize for the <a href="https://www.prixduromandentreprise.fr/">best business or work-related novel</a>, is testament to the sustained popularity of workplace fiction across the Channel. The prize has been awarded annually since 2009, and this year’s winner will be announced at the Ministry of Employment in Paris on March 14. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.placedelamediation.com/">Place de la Médiation</a>, the body which set up the prize, is a training organisation specialising in mediation, the prevention of psychosocial risks, and quality of life at work. Co-organiser <a href="https://www.technologia.fr/">Technologia</a> is a work-related risk prevention consultancy, which helps companies to evaluate health, safety and organisational issues.</p>
<p>The novels shortlisted for the prize in the past ten years reflect a broad range of jobs and sectors and a whole gamut of experiences. The texts clearly strike a chord with French readers, but English translations of these novels suggest many of the themes broached resonate in Anglo-Saxon culture too.</p>
<p>The prize certainly seeks to acknowledge a pre-existing literary interest in the theme of work. This is unsurprising in the wake of the global financial crisis and the changes and challenges this has brought. But the organisers also express <a href="https://www.prixduromandentreprise.fr/">a desire to actively mobilise fiction</a> in a bid to help chart the often choppy waters of the modern workplace: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Through the power of fiction, [we] want to put the human back at the heart of business, to show the possibilities of a good quality professional life, and to relaunch social dialogue by bringing together in the [prize] jury all the social actors and specialists of the business world.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>What better way to delve into this unusual genre than by reading some of the previous prize winners. Below are five books to get you started.</p>
<h2>1. Underground Time</h2>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/261412/original/file-20190228-106347-8okghu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/261412/original/file-20190228-106347-8okghu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261412/original/file-20190228-106347-8okghu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261412/original/file-20190228-106347-8okghu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261412/original/file-20190228-106347-8okghu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1149&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261412/original/file-20190228-106347-8okghu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1149&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261412/original/file-20190228-106347-8okghu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1149&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
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<p>The first prize was awarded to Delphine de Vignan for <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/underground-time-9781408811115/"><em>Les heures souterraines</em></a>. In this novel, the paths of a bullied marketing executive and a beleaguered on-call doctor converge and intersect as they traverse Paris over the course of a working day. A television adaptation followed, and an English translation was published by Bloomsbury in 2011. Work-related journeys and the underground as a symbol for the hidden or unseen side of working life have proved enduring themes, picked up by several subsequent winners.</p>
<h2>2. The Man Who Risked It All</h2>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/261413/original/file-20190228-106371-1olll8x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/261413/original/file-20190228-106371-1olll8x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=926&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261413/original/file-20190228-106371-1olll8x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=926&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261413/original/file-20190228-106371-1olll8x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=926&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261413/original/file-20190228-106371-1olll8x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1164&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261413/original/file-20190228-106371-1olll8x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1164&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261413/original/file-20190228-106371-1olll8x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1164&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Laurent Gounelle’s <a href="https://www.hayhouse.co.uk/catalog/product/view/id/21204/s/the-man-who-risked-it-all-1/"><em>Dieu voyage toujours incognito</em></a>, winner of the 2011 prize, takes us from the depths of the underground to the top of the Eiffel Tour, where Alan Greenmor’s suicide attempt is interrupted by a mysterious stranger. Yves promises to teach him the secrets to happiness and success if Alan agrees to do whatever he asks. This intriguing premise caught the attention of self-help, inspirational and transformational book publisher Hay House, whose translation appeared in 2014.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/five-books-by-women-about-women-for-everyone-92816">Five books by women, about women, for everyone</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>3. The Reader on the 6.27</h2>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/261414/original/file-20190228-106341-hrcilz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/261414/original/file-20190228-106341-hrcilz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=965&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261414/original/file-20190228-106341-hrcilz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=965&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261414/original/file-20190228-106341-hrcilz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=965&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261414/original/file-20190228-106341-hrcilz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1213&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261414/original/file-20190228-106341-hrcilz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1213&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261414/original/file-20190228-106341-hrcilz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1213&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/jean-paul-didierlaurent/the-reader-on-the-6-27/9781509836857"><em>Le liseur du 6h27</em></a> by Jean-Paul Didierlaurent, the 2015 winner, tells the story of a reluctant book-pulping machine operative. Each day, Ghislain Vignolles rescues a few random pages from destruction, to read aloud to his fellow-commuters in the morning train. The novel crystallises the fraught relationship between intellectual life and manual work. </p>
<p>It also illustrates the tension between culture and commerce, arguably at its most pronounced in France, where cultural policy has traditionally insisted on the distinction between cultural artefacts and commercial products. <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-reader-on-the-627-by-jean-paul-didierlaurent-book-review-set-to-woo-british-readers-and-become-a-10300236.html">The Independent review of the English translation</a> describes the book as “a delightful tale about the kinship of reading”.</p>
<h2>4. Undersea View</h2>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/261410/original/file-20190228-106365-10erww0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/261410/original/file-20190228-106365-10erww0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=891&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261410/original/file-20190228-106365-10erww0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=891&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261410/original/file-20190228-106365-10erww0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=891&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261410/original/file-20190228-106365-10erww0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1120&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261410/original/file-20190228-106365-10erww0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1120&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261410/original/file-20190228-106365-10erww0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1120&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
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<p>Slimane Kader took to the belly of a Caribbean cruise ship to research <a href="https://www.allary-editions.fr/publication/avec-vue-sous-la-mer/"><em>Avec vue sous la mer</em></a>, which claimed the 2016 prize. His hilarious account of life as “joker”, or general dogsbody, is characterised by an amusing mishmash of cultural references: “I’m dreaming of <em>The Love Boat</em>, but getting a remake of <em>Les Misérables</em>” the narrator quips. The use of “<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1892853.stm">verlan</a>” – a suburban dialect in which syllables are reversed to create new words – underlines the topsy-turvy feel. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, there’s no English version as yet – I imagine the quickfire language play would challenge even the most adept of translators. But translation would help confirm the compelling literary voice Kader has given to an otherwise invisible group.</p>
<h2>5. Woman at Sea</h2>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/261409/original/file-20190228-106341-ykvetd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/261409/original/file-20190228-106341-ykvetd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/261409/original/file-20190228-106341-ykvetd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=964&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261409/original/file-20190228-106341-ykvetd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=964&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261409/original/file-20190228-106341-ykvetd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=964&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261409/original/file-20190228-106341-ykvetd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1212&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261409/original/file-20190228-106341-ykvetd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1212&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261409/original/file-20190228-106341-ykvetd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1212&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
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</figure>
<p>Catherine Poulain’s <em><a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/111/1112907/woman-at-sea/9781911214588.html">Le grand marin</a></em>, the 2017 winner, is a rather more earnest account of work at sea. The author draws on her own experiences to recount narrator Lili’s travails in the male-dominated world of Alaskan fishing. </p>
<p><em>Le grand marin</em> (the great sailor) is ostensibly the nickname Lili gives to her seafaring lover. The relationship is something of a red herring though, as the overriding passion in this novel is work. But the English title perhaps does Lili a disservice – she is less a floundering Woman at Sea, and more the true <em>grand marin</em> of the original.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.placedelamediation.com/prix/?service=la-selection-2017">This year’s shortlist</a> includes the story of a forgotten employee left to his own devices when his company is restructured, a professional fall from grace in the wake of the Bataclan terrorist attack, and a second novel from Poulain, with seasonal work in Provence the backdrop this time. </p>
<p>The common draw, as in previous years –- and somewhat ironically, given the subject matter –- is escapism. We are afforded either a tantalising glimpse into the working lives of others, or else a fresh perspective on our own. English readers will be equally fascinated by French details and universal themes – and translators’ pens are sure to be poised.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/112115/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Amy Wigelsworth does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>An emerging genre of fiction in France is providing an unlikely brand of escapism.Amy Wigelsworth, Senior Lecturer in French, Sheffield Hallam UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1099712019-01-16T15:25:55Z2019-01-16T15:25:55ZColette: writer, feminist, performer and #MeToo trail blazer<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/254145/original/file-20190116-163274-16lew65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C3%2C371%2C378&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Colette, photographed by Henri Manuel.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The French writer Colette was indifferent and even hostile to the feminist movement in the early 1900s. But both her writing and the way she lived her life represent a vibrant and radical feminism in tune with the #MeToo spirit of today.</p>
<p>Born in rural Burgundy in 1873, Sidonie Gabrielle Colette (the abbreviated pen name came later) belonged to a middle class but unorthodox family. Raised by a mother who was as sceptical of religion as she was of bourgeois respectability, she was 20 when she married Henri Gauthiers-Villars (“Willy”), the 33-year-old charming but dissolute writer son of a family friend. </p>
<p>The marriage was both a good and a bad move for Colette. Willy introduced her to the rich Bohemian culture of the Parisian demimonde, and launched her career by insisting (despite her reluctance) that she write down memories of her schooldays. </p>
<p>But his serial infidelities distressed and depressed her. And as an unscrupulous literary entrepreneur, Willy cheerfully sold his wife’s semi-autobiographical <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Complete-Claudine-School-Paris-Married/dp/0374528039">“Claudine” novels</a> under his own name. </p>
<p>The stories of a spirited, tomboyish heroine rapidly became a <a href="https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/books/isbn/9781786941565/">publishing sensation</a>, with profitable sales of related merchandise including Claudine cigarette holders. But the profits were all Willy’s. </p>
<p>When, in her early 30s, Colette decided to leave the marriage, she had to find a way to support herself. Energetic and resourceful, she began to publish under her own name and took classes in dance and mime. She trained in the gym and went on stage, becoming the only great French author (to my knowledge) to have alternated writing with dancing semi-nude on stages all over France. </p>
<p>She combined her careers, writing both fiction and non-fiction set behind the scenes of the music hall, giving a voice to the underpaid women performers who featured so often from a male perspective in paintings and novels of the time. She also began a passionate affair with a cross-dressing lesbian aristocrat, Missy, and scandalised the nation by sharing a passionate kiss with her on stage. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/254095/original/file-20190116-163283-j1tj8i.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/254095/original/file-20190116-163283-j1tj8i.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/254095/original/file-20190116-163283-j1tj8i.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/254095/original/file-20190116-163283-j1tj8i.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/254095/original/file-20190116-163283-j1tj8i.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=688&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/254095/original/file-20190116-163283-j1tj8i.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=688&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/254095/original/file-20190116-163283-j1tj8i.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=688&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In the 1907 pantomime which included a kiss with a woman.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Director <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5437928/">Wash Westmoreland’s recent film</a> about Colette takes us to this point in her colourful career. She would go on to write prolifically as a journalist, novelist, essayist and innovator in the blended genre of “autofiction”. </p>
<p>She would nurse in World War I, marry twice more, bear a daughter at the age of 40, bolster her flagging finances by opening a beauty parlour – and finally become, for the French, “our great Colette”. But a whiff of scandal was still attached to her name, and acceptance of her as a great writer was slow. </p>
<p>The Catholic Church even refused to grant her a religious funeral (although she would have agreed with the Church, for religion formed no part of her passionate love of life.)</p>
<h2>Sex and sensuality</h2>
<p>Westmoreland’s film, starring the British actor Keira Knightley, shines a deserved spotlight on an important feminist figure. From the Claudine series on, Colette gives us a serenely irreverent perspective on a patriarchal culture. </p>
<p>She reverses the gaze of heterosexual desire to provide sensual, detailed descriptions of male bodies, and writes with equal sensuality and precision of same-sex desire. She writes movingly of romantic love and motherhood but insists, in her novel <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/BREAK-DAY-Sidonie-Gabrielle-Colette/dp/0374528322">Break of Day</a> that both are also peripheral to a woman’s life:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Once we’ve left them both behind, we find that all the rest is gay and varied, and that there is plenty of it. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>In life, as in writing, she places female friendship centre-stage, sometimes subverting the eternal triangle by making its primary focus the relationship between a man’s wife and his mistress. She often published in women’s magazines, right up to her death in 1954 (Elle serialised her final books), and wrote comically and caustically of trying to make her own robust, food-loving body fit into the willowy fashions of the inter-war years. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BZdh6Aax7KE?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>In a very public life, as in her fiction, she exemplified financial and social independence and shame-free sexuality – what we would now call “gender fluidity”. She possessed a generous optimism that went against the grain of the angst and despondency which characterised so much male literature of the 20th century.</p>
<p>She remained, throughout, a popular writer. An author read for pleasure, for the sensuality of her prose, the dry note of humour that peppers her eloquence, the lightness of touch that means her seriousness is never heavy or self-important. </p>
<p>One of France’s greatest – and certainly most unconventional – writers, she has been translated – often brilliantly – into other languages. Her appearance on cinema screens should bring her even more readers.</p>
<p>
<section class="inline-content">
<img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/249588/original/file-20181210-76968-jfryp4.png?h=128">
<div>
<header>Diana Holmes is the author of:</header>
<p><a href="https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/books/id/43097/">Middlebrow Matters: Women’s reading and the literary canon in France since the Belle Époque</a></p>
<footer>Liverpool University Press provides funding as a content partner of The Conversation UK</footer>
</div>
</section>
</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/109971/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Diana Holmes is affiliated with the UK Labour Party (as a member).
Diana Holmes received a LEVERHULME Fellowship grant in 1999-2000 to work on a book on the author Rachilde, and has received British Academy Small Grants for conferences /workshops on French literature, cinema, popular culture.</span></em></p>The French writer’s work and life make perfect cinematic subjects.Diana Holmes, Professor of French, University of LeedsLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1029242018-09-12T09:02:04Z2018-09-12T09:02:04ZMarcel Proust can tell us a lot about political echo chambers in the age of Donald Trump and Brexit<p><em>Note: This article has been updated since it was first launched. The author has changed several paragraphs to clarify the reason why the Duc de Guermantes changed his mind about Albert Dreyfus’s guilt.</em></p>
<p>For many people in the West, the past couple of years can be defined as a period of bitter social and political division. Two of the most important manifestations of this division, at least in public discourse, have been Trumpism and Brexit. </p>
<p>If you needed any sense of the bitterness of the divisions, just take a look at social media where the two camps slug it out, too often resorting to insult and abuse – the net result being that both sides are driven further apart by this dialogue, rather than being drawn together.</p>
<p>Of course, this is nothing new. What is Trumpism or Brexit now was the “Dreyfus Affair” for the French public in the late 1890s. Dreyfus was an artillery officer who was given a life sentence for treason in 1894. Half of French society defended him, pointing at the very weak evidence that supported this verdict, the other half attacked him and insisted he was guilty. While the Dreyfus Affair lasted, pro-Dreyfus and anti-Dreyfus people ended up at bitter loggerheads. Close friendships and even marriages broke up and some of the most prestigious salons split in two over it.</p>
<p>Sound familiar? The political divisions these days may be more obvious (you could not read someone’s political views on their Twitter feed at the end of the 19th century) but the poisonous atmosphere is the same. And this is where the author Marcel Proust, a supporter of Dreyfus, comes in. </p>
<p>Hidden deep in his <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/nov/14/proust-a-la-recherche-novel-big-world">À La Recherche du Temps Perdu</a> (In Search of Lost Time), is a telling anecdote of an aristocrat, Duc de Guermantes, who had slight anti-Dreyfus leanings – like most aristocrats apparently did. He met at a spa a couple of very nice, well-educated and friendly ladies who were pro-Dreyfus.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Whenever any revelation came out that was ‘damning’ to Dreyfus, and the Duc,
supposing that now he was going to convert the three charming ladies, came to inform them of it, they burst out laughing and had no difficulty in proving to him, with great dialectic subtlety, that his argument was worthless and quite absurd. The Duke had returned to Paris a frantic Dreyfusard.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The punchline of the Proust story is that the ladies did not change the Duc’s mind with their rational argument, but because of their social status. They were “an Italian princess and her two sisters-in-law” – fashionable representatives of the good society. The Duc, descendent of one of the oldest aristocratic families of France, was “delighted to be asked to play bridge by the Princess”. And fashionable ladies have fashionable views. If the Princess says that Dreyfus is innocent, then this is clearly the view du jour. </p>
<h2>Suspicious minds</h2>
<p>At this point, I can reveal an important aspect of the Dreyfus affair: Dreyfus was of Jewish origin. Many of his opponents were clearly driven by <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/41299017">latent or not so latent antisemitism</a>. Their reason for thinking that Dreyfus committed treason was not based on the (as it turns out, <a href="https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4354457,00.html">forged</a>) documents presented to the court and discussed at length in the papers. Their reason was that a soldier of Jewish origin couldn’t be trusted with issues of national importance.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235967/original/file-20180912-133880-16lnr0d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235967/original/file-20180912-133880-16lnr0d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=485&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235967/original/file-20180912-133880-16lnr0d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=485&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235967/original/file-20180912-133880-16lnr0d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=485&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235967/original/file-20180912-133880-16lnr0d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=610&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235967/original/file-20180912-133880-16lnr0d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=610&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235967/original/file-20180912-133880-16lnr0d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=610&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Perceptive eye on a divided societey: Marcel Proust.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Dutch National Archives, The Hague</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Antisemitism among the French aristocracy at the turn of the century <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/4464787.pdf">was rampant</a> and Proust’s fictional characters reflected this very clearly. He gives an especially vivid description of the cousin of Duc de Guermantes, a prince, who was “antisemitic as a matter of principle” and who justified his friendship with one of the main characters, the half-Jewish Charles Swann, by claiming that he is not in fact half-Jewish, because he is the illegitimate child of a royal. </p>
<p>This is eerily familiar these days. The reason people demanded to see Obama’s birth certificate was not because of a well-founded doubt about where he was born, but the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/04/emerging-consensus-birther-movement-was-always-about-race/350097/">clearly racist idea</a> that a black person is not suitable to be the president of the United States of America. </p>
<p>How can we respond to this? Duc de Guermantes had been surrounded by slightly (or not so slightly) antisemitic anti-Dreyfus aristocrats all his life. The fashionable people in his circles were all anti-Dreyfus. But when he met the unquestionably fashionable Princess and her two friends, who were pro-Dreyfus, the tables have turned. Being pro-Dreyfus in his circles had not been an option – at least not a socially viable option. And the three ladies convinced the Duc that it was. Not because of what they said, but because of who they were. </p>
<p>Fashion is a powerful persuasive tool. It was the snobbery of Duc de Guermantes that made him appreciate the (as it turns out, correct) views he heard from the Princess. But these days, it is often difficult to tell whose opinions are to be followed. Given how little meaningful communication exists between Republicans and Democrats or between Brexiters and Remainers, no matter how cool or fashionable someone is, the ‘other side’ will not be moved by what they say. </p>
<h2>Heart of the matter</h2>
<p>There is a very general lesson here. We do not form our beliefs because we have rational arguments supporting them. We form these beliefs because they satisfy an emotional need. This emotional need may be an unsavoury one (to say the least) – as in the case of the Birthers or the opponents of Dreyfus. But we should also acknowledge that this is true of both sides of the political spectrum. Left-leaning liberals hold their beliefs for equally emotionally infused and non-rational reasons.</p>
<p>The question is how we can change these emotionally infused beliefs. And Proust’s lesson is that the old emotion vs. reason dichotomy is not what is at work here. Rational arguments can achieve very little. But we do change our minds in response to perceived peer pressure. The best way to stop someone from spreading a view (or even believing in it) is to make it uncool. The problem is that what is cool and what is uncool is becoming very relative in these politically divided times.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/102924/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Bence Nanay receives funding from the European Research Council and the Flemish Research Foundation.</span></em></p>Proust’s masterpiece À La Recherche du Temps Perdu reveals how people’s irrational beliefs become entrenched.Bence Nanay, Senior research associate, University of CambridgeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/810392017-07-17T10:08:19Z2017-07-17T10:08:19ZJane Austen and Germaine de Staël: a tale of two authors<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178272/original/file-20170714-14248-172m48c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Chawton House Library</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Two prominent writers died in July 1817. The first was arguably the most famous woman in Europe. The other was a country clergyman’s daughter whose life had revolved around her family and her home county. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.theambulist.co.uk/words-and-musings/heroines-seven-women/germaine-de-stael">Germaine de Staël</a> travelled widely and her work had been translated into several languages. She was the only daughter of wealthy Swiss banker Jacques Necker, who became finance minister to Louis XVI, and was brought up in the stimulating environment of Parisian society. She published major treatises on the influence of passions on individuals and nations, on literature and its relationship to society, not to mention on Germany (1813). She wrote on Marie Antoinette’s trial, on peace, on translation, on suicide. </p>
<p>Her novels <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/v18/n07/margaret-anne-doody/never-mind-the-neighbours">Delphine</a> (1802) and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Corinne">Corinne or Italy</a> (1807) were bestsellers throughout Europe. She was also a commentator on, and historian of, the French Revolution in texts which only appeared after her death. Most periodicals felt that anything she penned, fact or fiction, political or philosophical, was worthy of a mention – whether to praise or to condemn it.</p>
<p>Unlike Staël’s father, George Austen encouraged his daughter Jane’s literary pursuits: he bought her notebooks for her early stories, gave her a mahogany writing desk and attempted (unsuccessfully) to get her work into print in 1797. Jane Austen’s first published book, Sense and Sensibility, “a new novel by a lady”, which came out in 1811, bore no author’s name on its title page. The same would go for the other novels published in her lifetime – all sold well and brought a welcome income but, to the outsider, nothing could connect them with the discreet woman who, through her richer brother’s generosity, lived with her mother and sister in a cottage on his estate.</p>
<h2>Death notices</h2>
<p>Staël’s death in Paris was widely reported. The Monthly Magazine, before commenting at length on the funeral arrangements, opened a “<a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=emU-AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA154&lpg=PA154&dq=Further+Notice+of+Madame+de+Sta%C3%ABl&source=bl&ots=zcDN71fMUU&sig=jgO3qBjXnFcLi3wYyzZgM-yMLEw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiV9sbN-I_VAhULBsAKHZ1BCPEQ6AEIJjAA#v=onepage&q=Further%20Notice%20of%20Madame%20de%20Sta%C3%ABl&f=false">Further Notice of Madame de Staël</a>” with the following assertion: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>To speak of the literary celebrity of Madame de Staël, of the elevated talent which distinguished her, of all the talent which placed her among the first writers of the age, would be to speak of all things known to all France and to all Europe … To speak of her generous opinions, her love for liberty, her confidence in the powers of intelligences and of morality, confidence which honours the soul which experiences it, would be, perhaps, in the midst of still agitated parties, to provoke ill-disposed impressions. </p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178395/original/file-20170717-6046-12fzzq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178395/original/file-20170717-6046-12fzzq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178395/original/file-20170717-6046-12fzzq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=942&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178395/original/file-20170717-6046-12fzzq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=942&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178395/original/file-20170717-6046-12fzzq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=942&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178395/original/file-20170717-6046-12fzzq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1184&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178395/original/file-20170717-6046-12fzzq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1184&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178395/original/file-20170717-6046-12fzzq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1184&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Germaine de Staël: her thoughts on the French Revolution.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Online Library of Liberty</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Staël had been reviled for her political ideas, caricatured by the gutter press for her unconventional looks and lifestyle, exiled by several regimes, and treated by Napoleon as a personal enemy, to the extent that <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/feb/13/biography.features">it was said</a> that the emperor recognised three powers in Europe: England, Russia and Madame de Staël.</p>
<p>When the unmarried “Miss Jane Austen” died in Winchester four days after Staël, the announcement her family (probably) wrote recalled she was the daughter of a clergyman and acknowledged that she was the author of Emma, Mansfield Park, Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. It added: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Her manners were most gentle, her affections ardent, her candour was not to be surpassed, and she lived and died as became a humble Christian.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Future biographical notes, including the one penned by her nephew – <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17797/17797-h/17797-h.htm">A Memoir of Jane Austen</a> – developed this image. He wrote of his aunt: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Of events her life was singularly barren: few changes and no great crisis ever broke the smooth current of its course. Even her fame may be said to have been posthumous: it did not attain to any vigorous life till she had ceased to exist. Her talents did not introduce her to the notice of other writers, or connect her with the literary world, or in any degree pierce through the obscurity of her domestic retirement.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178394/original/file-20170717-6091-n24411.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178394/original/file-20170717-6091-n24411.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=982&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178394/original/file-20170717-6091-n24411.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=982&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178394/original/file-20170717-6091-n24411.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=982&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178394/original/file-20170717-6091-n24411.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1234&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178394/original/file-20170717-6091-n24411.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1234&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178394/original/file-20170717-6091-n24411.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1234&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Bestseller: but who is it by?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Lilly Library, Indiana University via Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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<p>To this day, in the only authenticated portrait of her – a sketch by her sister Cassandra – she looks the part in her simple cap and dress, so unlike Staël’s flamboyant turban and scarlet gown. More than “Miss Austen”, she is “Jane Austen”, someone to whom we feel we can relate. Her admirers, readers but also cinephiles who have enjoyed the adaptations, come from all the corners of the earth, are known as “Janeites”.</p>
<p>Many of Staël’s works have long been out of print or available only in pricey scholarly editions. She is recognised as one of the forerunners of 19th-century liberalism but does not have the common appeal and widespread recognition that time has brought to Austen.</p>
<h2>Contrasting legacies</h2>
<p>The seeds for the “fickle fortunes” – to borrow the <a href="https://chawtonhouse.org/whats-on/exhibition-fickle-fortunes/">title of the current exhibition at Chawton House</a> (the “Great House” lived in by her brother Edward Austen-Knight which is now home to a library of early women’s writing) – of the international literary superstardom of Austen and the waning of Staël’s fame are partly present in these obituaries. </p>
<p>Austen’s family cleverly crafted a reputation for demureness and devotion to both God and family as a way of deflecting from the sometimes ambiguous contemporary attitude towards women authors. Her life was presented as quintessentially English and uneventful and her character as modest and self-effacing – in many ways the opposite of Staël’s.</p>
<p>In a late addition to his biographical sketch about his sister, 15 years after the death of both women, Henry Austen claimed that when invited to a party Staël was due to attend, Austen “immediately declined”. </p>
<p>This probably imaginary anecdote illustrates an essential reason for Austen’s success: yes, she is a great writer, but so too is Staël. Austen’s existence threatened nobody. Staël’s championing of republican ideals, consideration of the role of emotion in politics and use of fiction to promote geopolitical and societal reflections meant her life could be discussed and her works forgotten. Considering them jointly can help us question what shapes our canon of great writers.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/81039/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Catriona Seth does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Two women writers died in July 1817. One was Jane Austen. The other was much more famous.Catriona Seth, Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/807012017-07-12T13:51:54Z2017-07-12T13:51:54ZWhy French president Emmanuel Macron is a gift for would-be sleuths everywhere<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177837/original/file-20170712-9330-126vgs5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mme Soazig de la Moissonniere/Elysee.</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Newly elected French president, Emmanuel Macron, conceives of his role as that of a master purveyor of narratives and signs. His recently unveiled official portrait is just the latest in a series of symbolic stagings, which started the very night he was elected. </p>
<p>Macron dramatised his accession to power by <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUGNQWtXEpw">slowly processing across the Louvre Square</a> to the accompaniment of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. The ceremony offered a profusion of symbols to be deciphered. The same piece of music was also performed when former socialist president François Mitterrand was enthroned in a <a href="http://www.ina.fr/video/DVC8108256301/investiture-francois-mitterrand-l-apres-midi-video.html">ceremony at the Pantheon</a> in 1981 – and Macron’s pace even seemed to mimic that of the late statesman. </p>
<p>The Louvre is also a symbol of the continuity of French power, from the monarchy to the Republic: its history starts in the 12th century under King Philip Augustus, and was still the seat of the French Ministry of Finance until the late 1980s. And then there is its famous pyramid, a distinct sign of modernity, another of Mitterrand’s legacies, but also a symbol of transcendence. This was a good night for <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/semiology">semiologists</a> (those who seek the hidden meanings of communication); and in every French person lies a hidden semiologist.</p>
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<p>Books hold a special place among the many symbols used by Macron. He constantly refers to them as shaping his vision of France and of himself. This is a testament to the enduring prestige of literature in the French public space. In his book <a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/emmanuel-macron-revolution/">Revolution</a>, Macron speaks of the formative role played by his childhood readings in developing his adult vision of the world. </p>
<p>He also casts his move from his native town of Amiens to Paris as a rewriting of the similar journeys made by characters in Balzac and Flaubert’s novels. And in a <a href="http://bibliobs.nouvelobs.com/idees/20170703.OBS1567/la-part-maudite-d-emmanuel-macron-president-en-ordre-de-bataille.html">speech</a> at Versailles on July 3, he mentioned Georges Bataille, the philosopher of violence, sacrifice and eroticism. Could you imagine that in the British Queen’s speech?</p>
<h2>Literary politics</h2>
<p>The relationship between politics and literature is immemorial in French politics. In the Fifth Republic two presidents were celebrated as writers: Charles De Gaulle, author of the <a href="http://www.slate.fr/story/22525/de-gaulle-bac-litterature">War Memoirs</a>, and Mitterrand, whose letters to his mistress are now part of leading French publisher, Gallimard’s prestigious <a href="http://www.gallimard.fr/Catalogue/GALLIMARD/Blanche/Lettres-a-Anne">Collection Blanche</a> imprint. Pompidou published an <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=lKsgAQAAMAAJ&">anthology of French poetry</a> and another former president, Giscard d'Estaing and now a member of the French Academy, dabbled in <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/diana/6214463/Valery-Giscard-dEstaing-novel-hints-at-affair-with-Princess-Diana.html">novel writing</a>. Macron wants it all and more: he wants to be seen both as the hero of a modern <em><a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/bildungsroman">Bildungsroman</a></em> – a novel of maturation – and as an intellectual descending into the philistine world of politics. </p>
<p>This is what his use of books reveals in his <a href="https://qz.com/1018296/emmanuel-macrons-official-portrait-is-a-symbolic-celebration-of-centrism/">portrait</a>. Macron appears steadily anchored to a desk on which three sizeable volumes of literary works are displayed. One is opened in the middle, as if the president had been abruptly interrupted in his reading; two others are waiting, just in case.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"880374825784619008"}"></div></p>
<p>To the French reader, these books are as familiar as Penguin or Ladybird editions are to the British: they are volumes of the Pléiade collection, an institution that doesn’t have an equivalent in the English-speaking world. Being published in the Pléiade means you have become canonised as a writer – which usually happens posthumously – but the Pléiade is also a beautiful object in its own right: soft, leather-bound volumes printed on bible (scritta) paper. They are objects of choice on the bookshelves of the wealthy and cultured middle classes and on the desks of literary academics. They are objects of status as much as study – somewhere between an Oxford World Classic and a Louis Vuitton bag. It is, in a word, the ultimate fetishisation of literature.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://twitter.com/SibNdiaye/status/880381431603658752">a video</a> posted on Twitter by his communication team, Macron can be seen skimming the open volume to find the exact page he wants to appear on the official portrait. At one point he seems so engrossed in his reading that the photographers have to beg to get his attention back.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"880381431603658752"}"></div></p>
<p>Official portraits are an important part of the official pageantry: they set the tone of a presidency for the next five years. François Hollande never really recovered from <a href="http://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2012/06/04/portrait-du-president-hollande-un-clin-d-il-a-la-photo-amateur_1712447_823448.html">looking like he’d got lost</a> in the garden of the Elysée palace. In this picture, Macron harks back to another president: again, Mitterrand, whose <a href="http://www.elysee.fr/la-presidence/francois-mitterrand/">portrait</a> showed him holding Montaigne’s <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3600/3600-h/3600-h.htm">Essays</a>, as if forcefully distracted from his reading by the necessities of his public function.</p>
<h2>From de Gaulle to Gide</h2>
<p>The reference to this aspect of political memory is only one of the facets of the French cultural unconscious Macron summons here. His communication team was quick to let everyone know that the open book was de Gaulle’s War Memoirs, while the two others were Stendhal’s <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Red-and-the-Black">The Red and the Black</a> and Gide’s <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1035290/fruits-of-the-earth/">Fruits of the Earth</a>. </p>
<p>This is factually untrue, as the Pléiade volumes usually publish the complete works of an author: Gide and Stendhal’s tomes, then, would have been a collection of their prose rather than a specific work. But what really mattered was the immediate questions this would prompt: was he referring to the famously enigmatic opening lines of the <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2010/07/france-gaulle-british-europe">War Memoirs</a>, “All my life I have had a certain idea of France”? But then what idea of France exactly? And what, exactly, was being alluded to in this choice of The Red and the Black (a story of social mobility and a love affair between an ambitious young man and an older married woman)? And could the reference to Gide have had something to do with the author’s ode to youth and energy?</p>
<p>This is why literature gets fetishised in this way. Macron’s use of it portrays the him as a reader and turns journalists, commentators and citizens into readers of his readings. They have to try to figure out what he means, what network of symbols he’s reactivating, and for what purpose. His appearances at Versailles and the Louvre showed that the symbols are so numerous and varied that they might be little less than an invitation to frantically interpret an ever-elusive presidential psyche. </p>
<p>This is politically astute, as the amount of time given over in public debate to making sense of the Macronian smorgarsbord of symbols and cultural references (including that taken up by this article) is time away also from the unprecedented neoliberal rewriting of the labour code <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-election-labour-idUSKBN18X23L">announced recently</a> by France’s prime minister, Edouard Philippe. What better dream, indeed, for a literary statesman, than to preside over a nation of semiologists.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/80701/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Maxime Goergen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Macron’s portrait and taste in literature are full of political symbols to be sussed.Maxime Goergen, Lecturer in French Studies, University of SheffieldLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/745612017-03-17T10:38:22Z2017-03-17T10:38:22ZBeauty and the Beast was originally a feminist fable disguised as marriage guidance<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161161/original/image-20170316-10913-1n27mkr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Diane de Joannis de Châteaublanc, Madame de Ganges, the original Beauty.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_de_Joannis_de_Chateaublanc#/media/File:Diane_de_Joannis_de_Chateaublanc.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Though it is more commonly known these days for its part in the Disney Princess franchise, Beauty and the Beast is an enduring tale which has sparked film adaptations and novelisations across centuries. Though <a href="http://humanitiesresource.com/ancient/articles/Beauty_and_Beast-Final.pdf">originally published</a> in 1740 by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, the <a href="http://www.pitt.edu/%7Edash/beauty.html">most famous version of the tale</a>, La Belle et la Bête, was produced by <a href="https://chawtonhouse.org/_www/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Leprince-de-Beaumont2.pdf">French writer Jeanne-Marie le Prince de Beaumont</a> in the 1750s.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161135/original/image-20170316-10898-5z7lzr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161135/original/image-20170316-10898-5z7lzr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161135/original/image-20170316-10898-5z7lzr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161135/original/image-20170316-10898-5z7lzr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161135/original/image-20170316-10898-5z7lzr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=597&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161135/original/image-20170316-10898-5z7lzr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=597&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161135/original/image-20170316-10898-5z7lzr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=597&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">French writer Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont (1711-1780).</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>De Beaumont published approximately 70 volumes during her literary career and was celebrated as a writer of fairy tales. But rather than just fantasy or fable, her rendering of Beauty and the Beast is actually more a critique of women’s rights of the time, hidden behind layers of marital guidance.</p>
<p>Surprising though it may seem – more modernly, some have interpreted Beauty and the Beast as <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/april-wilson/emma-watson-beauty-and-the-beast_b_15152304.html">a tale of Stockholm Syndrome</a> rather than romance – when you look at de Beaumont’s other work it makes sense. </p>
<h2>The original Belle</h2>
<p>Before her Beauty adaptation, the writer translated the tragic tale of Madame de Ganges, based on the real-life tragic history of <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00397709.1987.9958156?journalCode=vsym20">Diane-Elisabeth de Rossan</a>. The protagonist has an unfortunate story: a wealthy, beautiful and virtuous young woman remarries after becoming widowed. She makes a poor choice, however, and marries a jealous husband with two villainous brothers, both of whom fall in love with her. When neither succeeds in corrupting her virtue, their anger is so great that they decide to murder her – with the endorsement of her husband. </p>
<p>The heroine is ordered to choose the method of her own death: poison, stabbing or shooting. But in a twist in the tale, Madame de Ganges ends up the victim of all three: she is not only forced to swallow the poison, but when she attempts to escape, she is stabbed by one of the brothers, and shot. Ultimately, it is the poison which finishes her off: details of the character’s autopsy in a <a href="http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=evans;idno=N27243.0001.001">later translated version</a> reveal that it had “burnt the coats of her stomach, and turned her brain quite black”. The beauty of the young woman was transmuted into the beast of a blackened husk.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161146/original/image-20170316-10890-1bagmto.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161146/original/image-20170316-10890-1bagmto.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=701&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161146/original/image-20170316-10890-1bagmto.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=701&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161146/original/image-20170316-10890-1bagmto.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=701&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161146/original/image-20170316-10890-1bagmto.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=881&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161146/original/image-20170316-10890-1bagmto.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=881&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161146/original/image-20170316-10890-1bagmto.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=881&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Appearances matter.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Walter_Crane,_illustration_from_Beauty_and_the_Beast,_1875.jpg">Walter Crane/Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Interestingly, in de Beaumont’s version of Madame de Ganges’s tale, written as a moral for young women, she seemingly attributes some culpability to the Marchioness in her own downfall. Her husband’s jealousy arises because she “gad[s] about so much”, enjoying being admired for her beauty. This incurs the wrath of her jealous husband who chides her “to stay more at home”. </p>
<p>But de Beaumont almost seems dissatisfied with concluding that Madame de Ganges should have complied with her husband because “lions and tygers are tamed at last; a man must be of a fiercer nature than those animals, not to be gained by a complying, prudent, and discreet wife”. And so she rewrote the tale again, this time as a fairy tale: <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7074">Beauty and the Beast</a>.</p>
<h2>Beauty’s judicious choices</h2>
<p>In this version, the “Beauty” is distinctly comparable to the too-beautiful Madame de Ganges. Like the Marchioness, Beauty willingly goes to, but then is forced to submit to the will of a ferocious beast. Unlike the Marchioness, however, Beauty is able to tame the beast by being a “complying, prudent, and discreet wife”, and effect the beast’s transformation into a prince. </p>
<p>It is the conclusion of the tale which is most interesting in de Beaumont’s version, for it is here that she hints at the unsatisfactory nature of the place of women in her society and <a href="http://www.pitt.edu/%7Edash/beauty.html">uses her story as feminist critique</a>. Beauty, the youngest of three sisters, is portrayed as “a charming, sweet-tempered creature” who loved the Beast even though his deformity scares her. Her sisters, on the other hand, are proud and wealthy and refuse to marry anyone less than a duke or earl. The “wicked creatures” are so cruel to Beauty that they rub onions into their eyes to feign crying when she leaves their family home to live in the Beast’s castle.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Beauty, (said this lady,) come and receive the reward of your judicious choice; you have preferred virtue before either wit or beauty, and deserve to find a person in whom all these qualifications are united: you are going to be a great Queen; I hope the throne will not lessen your virtue, or make you forget yourself. </p>
<p>As to you, ladies, (said the fairy to Beauty’s two sisters) I know your hearts, and all the malice they contain: become two statues; but, under this transformation, still retain your reason.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>During de Beaumont’s time, “couverture” was law for women, <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10509580600816710?journalCode=gerr20">meaning that, in Anne Mellor’s words,</a> “all women were legally ‘covered over’ or absorbed into the body of their husbands, fathers, brothers, or sons”. She might yet still retain … reason, but she is as a statue, effectively silenced and unable to act for herself".</p>
<p>The writer seems to be implying, that for the majority of women in the 18th century marriage market, there was little potential for “happy ever afters”, and only the exercise of “judicious choice” would ensure the attainment of one. For Beauty’s sisters, they chose to value wealth and status above all else, making them beasts within and ultimately becoming their downfall.</p>
<p>Like de Beaumont’s Beauty, <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-traditional-tale-with-titillating-twists-beauty-and-the-beast-gets-reinvented-again-72674">Emma Watson’s new iteration</a> has become one that reflects the <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/11/16/beauty-and-beast-goes-feminist-as-emma-watson-gives-belle-a-care/">rights and powers of women</a> – but the feminist aspects of the tale really are as old as time. De Beaumont wanted to teach women then that they have more value than just as a wife, and it is a lesson that rings true nearly 300 years on – though now a woman’s “judicious choices” can give far more freedom than an 18th-century Beauty could ever imagine.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/74561/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Valerie Derbyshire receives funding from WRoCAH (AHRC).</span></em></p>There was more than meets the eye to one of the most famous versions of Beauty and the Beast.Valerie Grace Derbyshire, Doctoral Researcher, School of English, University of SheffieldLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.