2023-10-21 19:00:02
“Forgotten lives. At the heart of the 18th century”, by Arlette Farge, La Découverte, “Poche”, 324 p., €13.
“Works chosen by Apollinaire”, by Sade, preface by Andrea Schellino, Rivages pocket, “Little library”, 474 p., €11.
“What is Enlightenment? », by Immanuel Kant and Moses Mendelssohn, translated from German by Dominique Bourdel, Stéphane Piobettan and Cyril Morana, 1001 Nights, 62 p., €3.50.
History is made of falls. Some are grandiose, imperial, metropolitan (Constantinople after Rome) or military (Waterloo); the others escape any form of event pomp by their total absence of effect or consequence, but act as signs or clues. Falls, as they say about fabric, leather: news items, event trimmings. It is by using these historical sweepings, these ” waste “as archivists call them, that the historian Arlette Farge tried to shed light on the deep identity of the 18th century.
Thus emerge before our eyes, taken from orphaned texts from the police archives, from those of the Bastille, scraps of memories, “source shards” which betray the existence of “ tiny lives.” Hello to you, drunkard priest, shoemaker of whom only the tools remain, false leper, soldiers’ maid, unemployed, servant dress cutter, false sorcerer and true cuckold, page of the king on the run answering to the sweet name of Crémile des Crotins. Hello to you, Pierre Porcher, 8 years old, imprisoned for playing in the courtyard of the Palace of Versailles. Salute to the donjuanesque Jean-Paul Focard de Château, whose catalog of seduced women covers four pages. Salute to the anonymous witness who tells us on the 17th what July 14, 1789 was like. Salute especially to Arlette Farge for having orchestrated, with these scraps of facts or splinter moments, “the staging of fragile moments where tragedy borders on the fantastical, love rubs shoulders with drama, bodies confess their modesty, indecency, illnesses or beliefs”.
Read also (2019): Article reserved for our subscribers “Forgotten lives”: historian Arlette Farge finds a place for the unclassifiable
Well before 1990 and his canonization by entry into “La Pléiade”, well before the offensive launched in the 1950s by Jean-Jacques Pauvert and his biographer Gilbert Lely, or that initiated by Maurice Heine and the surrealists, the work of Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, was a literary stunner. A fabulous shadow, a shady address that was kept under wraps or a “case” that fascinated psychiatrists. From this mantle, Guillaume Apollinaire made a banquet tablecloth with the formidable anthology published in 1909, a pioneering text marked, certainly, by period erudition, but in which this unbearable statement is made: Sade is not an extreme maniac dedicated to the shed, but a writer, and above all a thinker whose black light disturbs the philosophical order of the Enlightenment. Published by the Briffaut brothers, Robert and Georges, “Les Maîtres de l’amour”, a collection entrusted to Guillaume Apollinaire, welcomed in 1909 a Sade now perceived as “the freest spirit that ever existed” and that “could well dominate the 20th century”. In the preface, Apollinaire delivers current news on Sadian knowledge, that of archives, testimonies (Nodier, Ange Pitou), analyses, and offers, the first, a sample of his key texts, of Justine (consulted on original manuscript) at Aline and Valcour. A decisive moment in literary history.
You have 13.42% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
#Arlette #Farge #Sade #Emmanuel #Kant #Moses #Mendelssohn