This article examines the relationship between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution by analysing the views of the philosophe Jacques-Henri Meister in a historical context. Unlike other surviving philosophes in Paris such as Forbonnais or Saint-Lambert, Meister had greater freedom to express his critical perspectives on the Revolution's process and outcomes. He strongly opposed what he saw as democratic or republican elements but was not a royalist counterrevolutionary in the mould of Louis de Bonald. Like Jacques Mallet du Pan, Meister was a monarchist Enlightenment thinker who believed in the progress and perfectibility of human society. He evaluated the historical impact of the French Revolution without the impractical nostalgia for the Ancien Régime often expressed by émigré nobles, yet he chose to stand against the republicans and democrats of revolutionary France. Meister's position complicates and enriches our understanding of the relationship between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.
Annie Ernaux recounts her mother’s experience with Alzheimer’s disease in I Remain in Darkness. By tracing the progression of her mother’s illness, Ernaux creates a kind of ‘ethnotext’ of Alzheimer’s, illustrating how tendencies towards animalization, mechanization and infantilization reduce Alzheimer’s patients to mere corporeality. Ernaux explores the issue of memory through the lens of Alzheimer’s, revealing the fear of forgetting that manifests in both the mother and daughter through identification. The attachment to objects, intersubjective memory, intertextuality and writing are employed as methods to preserve memory. Additionally, Ernaux interrogates the social implications of Alzheimer’s: how society perceives senility and illness, how social structures either integrate or exclude the elderly, and the multifaceted challenges faced by caregivers.
As part of a broader literary trend centred on narratives of social mobility, Le Pays by Marie Darrieussecq revisits the topos of returning to one’s homeland, involving a process of spatial mapping that proves unexpectedly complex within a small and seemingly insignificant country. The narrative adopts a dual mode of enunciation – both homodiegetic and heterodiegetic – to capture the intricate entanglement of personal, familial and collective stories. This article examines this dual narrative structure and argues that the juxtaposition of voices offers a deep dive into the protagonist’s interior subjectivity, creating a narrative doubling that relativizes the scale of the country. Gradually, an expanded consciousness of the territory emerges, imbued with a sense of cosmopolitan universality and closely tied to the experience of social mobility. This consciousness may also be interpreted through the lens of Deleuze’s metaphor of the fold. Despite its modest size, the country is revealed as a stratified space, shaped by both internal and external connections, which enhances its habitability beyond mere geographical appeal.
This article responds to a recent call for increased scholarship on nature in Marguerite de Navarre’s writings. It analyses the relationship between the Spirit and nature in Les Prisons, one of the queen’s last and richest texts. Thus far, the role of nature in Les Prisons has elicited only secondary interest among scholars, with some framing the natural world as a prison due to its materiality. This study re-evaluates that framing. Taking nature as a central topic of analysis and bringing it into dialogue with the numerous biblical intertexts in Les Prisons, the analysis reveals that, far from functioning as a prison, nature constitutes God’s Creation and becomes a tool of the Holy Spirit, who employs aspects of nature to liberate the imprisoned male speaker, Amy. Moreover, this study shows that the text highlights the liberating role of nature by contrasting it with the confinement associated with built structures.
Balzac described his first meeting with Madame Hanska in 1833 as a turning point in his life and led him to proclaim the gaze to be the highest possible form of communication between two lovers; his letters henceforth denigrate language and clamour for physical proximity. This article shows how the progression of the Balzac-Hanska relationship from epistolary to physical introduces the dimension of the 'gaze' into the correspondence, demonstrating how Balzac's letter writing subverts the gaze - both from and towards the absent partner - to his own ends. The discourse of the absent gaze is a literary device that masks the writer's much more urgent preoccupation with the possibility of gazing at the correspondent unseen and curating his own (to use modern-day terms, Snapchat-worthy) version of her.
