Charles Nodier, le politique masqué

About this book

Bibliophile exceptional, polygraph, precursor of the romanticism, the writer Charles Nodier (1780-1844) published at the same time novels, tales, stories, allegories and articles full of irony. He sometimes did not sign his books, take pseudonyms, and multiply his masks to such an extent that the question of his relationship to the various political regimes which, from the Revolution to the July Monarchy, became constituted the historical time in which he wrote. Anne Kupiec's hypothesis is straightforwardly political: Nodier has been shocked by the revolutionary moment, despite the fact that he lived it while still a child. The political thread that opens the reading of the work then faces irreducible difficulties, that of the changing forms of Nodier's literary expression, that of the writer's multiple masks and, finally, that of an ambiguity of political positions. Indeed, Nodier praised both Bonald and Saint-Simon, Madame de Stael and Babeuf or Buonarroti, he criticized the despotism of the Empire and was disappointed by the July Monarchy. The analysis must thus rise to the grasping of the profound meaning of ambiguity, after having gone through all the forms and all the variations. Thus, the nature of a political skepticism which doubts everything without giving up anything, which uses multiple forms of writing to awaken its reader to interrogation, if not to criticism, gradually becomes clearer. of the present and elements of positivity of this present. Political thought makes the detour of the fantastic, the animal dream, the paradoxical praise, the "reflective monomania", the fiction to ward off disenchantment and to provide perspectives of distance, recoil, exile compared to disappointments that the post-revolutionary period sparked. In a surprising way Nodier is the one who, in 1835, at the time of the edition of theDiscourse on voluntary servitude by Lamennais, proposes to publish the complete works of La Boétie. This proposal is all the more significant as Nodier was the publisher of the Republican Institutions of Saint-Just ... The political thinker is not unmasked, but his mask of writing discovers its real issues.--Translation of page 4 of cover by Klincksieck.