2024

Cosmogony and the summer solstice in the supermarket car park: Célestin de Meeûs

In Célestin de Meeûs's "Mythologie du .12" (2024), two worlds collide on a single summer solstice evening in the Belgian countryside, worlds that otherwise never meet: Théo, just turned 18 and finished with his final exams, whiles away the time with his friend Max in a shopping center parking lot, amidst beer, joints, and memories of a failed relationship, while the chief physician Rombouts returns to his villa on the edge of the forest after a long day's work, where his marriage and his role as a father have already crumbled. That evening, when Théo and Max walk into the very same recently acquired patch of woods bordering Rombouts's property, he hears voices and a glow from his terrace, mistakes them for burglars, and shoots Théo with his .12 caliber shotgun—an act of fear that the novel portrays not as a sudden outburst, but as the culmination of a long-standing imbalance of possessiveness, wounded masculinity, and the familial transmission of violence. The essay reads this narrative as an engagement with the myth announced in the title: Shortly before the shot is fired, Théo recalls the ancient succession myth of Uranus and his son Cronus, in which the son emasculates the all-powerful father to unleash a new order—but the novel reverses this pattern, for here a father figure kills a stranger, a young man, to defend his own status, so that liberating detachment becomes sterile repetition. Property, the ideal of masculinity, and the colonial legacy, as the text shows, coalesce into a self-made mythology in the sense of Roland Barthes, which makes a killing appear as self-defense, while the novel's form and syntax—the endless sentences barely interrupted by periods, the parallel presentation of the scenes, the recurring image of "nowhere"—enact this refusal of meaning on the level of language itself.

➙ To the article

Water, heat, depth: On the poetics of the French summer novel

The article was written at 37°C. It brings together sixteen recent French-language novels to create a polyphonic topography of water—from the Parisian public swimming pool to private pools and North American housing complexes, to lakes and the coasts of the Atlantic and Mediterranean. In concise scenes—the hesitation on the five-meter diving board, an old man's first immersion in the water after decades, sitting motionless at the edge of an unused pool, or surfacing exhausted after a long swim in the sea—water is experienced as an elemental bodily experience: cooling, supporting, resistant. The texts show how, in the moment of bathing, social orders shift and simultaneously become visible: bodies become legible, class differences, desires, and exclusions are laid bare, while the water momentarily creates an equality that immediately disintegrates on land. At the same time, water acts as both a repository and a trigger for memory: the smell of chlorine, salt on the skin, or the recurring blue of a pool evoke childhood, first love, or experiences of loss. The novels repeatedly return to adolescence, to the initiatory moments of a summer in which a plunge into the water determines belonging, or not jumping marks a lifeline. Other texts depict water as a site of existential boundary experiences—a space for coping with grief, illness, depression, or confronting death, where language fails and only the body can respond. Between the public swimming pool, which functions as a social microcosm, and the open sea, which embodies indifference and overwhelming power, a poetics of water unfolds that neither reduces the element to metaphor nor leaves it purely naturalistic: it is simultaneously concrete matter and a resonating chamber in which life is concentrated. Summer appears as an accelerated, heated form of time in which transitions take place in contact with the water – between childhood and adulthood, closeness and loss, control and loss of control – and in which the characters are simultaneously exposed and withdrawn from themselves for a moment.

➙ To the article

Putin's Russia, homophobia and paper Frenchmen by Sergueï Shikalov

This essay reads Sergueï Shikalov's "Espèces dangereuses" (Seuil, 2024) as a poetologically highly reflective text about homophobia in post-Soviet Russia, in which an entire generation of gay men becomes visible between a brief historical "springtime" and a renewed authoritarian ice age. At its core is less a linear narrative than a collective form of experience articulated in the indeterminate "on": a litany-like, fragmented discourse that suspends individual biography in favor of a shared existence marked by violence, shame, and precarious desire. This very refusal of the self becomes an aesthetic strategy that both documents and counteracts disappearance by transforming anonymity into a process of witnessing. The novel addresses homophobia not only as a social reality—in the form of attacks, institutional indifference, and political repression—but also as a discursive order that classifies, devalues, and excludes bodies from the realm of expression. Crucially, the novel articulates this experience in the learned French language, which, as a medium of exile, opens up a paradoxical space: distance and the possibility of articulation coincide, making the unspeakable speakable in the first place. Against this backdrop, the question of French citizenship also takes shape: while it marks a legal and existential break, it remains—as Shikalov's essay "Français de papier" (2025) demonstrates—ambivalent, insofar as belonging remains conditional and the logics of exclusion continue to perpetuate themselves in new forms.

➙ To the article

Jewish thought against itself: Concealment, assimilation and double existence in the work of Nathan Devers

Nathan Devers's "Penser contre soi-même" (Albin Michel, 2024) traces a movement that is both autobiographical and philosophical, in which Orthodox Judaism appears not merely as a heritage but as a dynamic space of thought that enables its own transgression. Starting from a bourgeois-assimilated milieu, the text leads through a phase of intense religious radicalization to a rupture that is not imposed from the outside but arises from the inner logic of faith itself—paradigmatically condensed in the reading of Ecclesiastes and in the vertigo of one's own contingency. At the same time, the narrative focuses on a Jewish life organized under conditions of latent threat: practices of concealment, "Marranic" invisibility, and situational adaptation appear as everyday strategies in an environment permeated by antisemitism. The discussion identifies this tension as constitutive and interprets Jewishness not as a stable identity, but as a movement that deliberately resists solidification into a fixed identity. Instead, it appears as an open, self-critical practice that—within its Talmudic structure—provides the means for its own questioning. Devers' transition to philosophy thus proves not to be a departure, but a transformation: a continuation of an existential search under altered epistemic conditions, in which the "broken idols" of faith continue to exert their influence in a modified form.

➙ To the article

Origin, desire and faith: Monia Aljalis

The Avicenne library now has a bit of language in the same language. Cinq ans d'arabe dans les veines et Leyla says à peine déplier a phrase sans buter sur chaque mot. The two shape, personne ne le saura ; She has a fair share of bilingual skills that have a baragouine du dialecte aux masses blanches enthousiastes. Mais ici, elle ne peut pas thunder le change – ce qui explique qu'elle a mal au bide depuis son arrivée, l'envie de courir se vider les entrailles. Elle prend un livre au hasard: الملك الضلّيل. The decoding is difficult, déjà: cela n'ira pas plus loin. Elle va dans la section pour enfants: c'est un peu plus simple, mais voyez le ridicule de l'affaire… Tous ces grands êtres ont traduit dans la langue de son Seigneur ce qui vient de la langue des Hommes - échange de bons procédés - tandis qu'elle tient dans ses bras ballants Abu Sir and Abu Kir qu'elle ne comprend qu'avec peine. Je peux vous aider? ask a monsieur sévère sous des verres fumés. Elle ne voudrait pas déranger.

Read more

This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.

New Caledonia – a damaged epic and empathy as resistance: Alice Zeniter

When "Frapper l'épopée" was published in August 2024, New Caledonia was ablaze: Just a few months earlier, uprisings against an electoral reform pushed through in Paris had claimed fourteen lives and caused billions of dollars in damage. Alice Zeniter's novel, completed in 2023, thus entered, in its "pre-crisis version," the midst of a burning reality he could not have foreseen—a coincidence that lent it an almost prophetic weight. The book tells the story of the young Caldoche Tass's return to Nouméa, where, as a substitute teacher, she investigates her unclear family origins, while a Kanak activist group led by Un Ruisseau seeks to make the experience of dispossession physically tangible for the colonizers through acts of "violent empathy." In a fantastical plunge into the "watering hole," Tass ultimately relives the colonial prehistory of her ancestor Arezki, deported to the Bagno, before the novel culminates in the present and a barely perceptible final gesture—an activist initial traced with a finger. The essay reads the work from its title, the verb "frapper" in its double meaning (to strike and to mark) as the poetics of a "damaged epic" that shatters the heroic colonial narrative and simultaneously inscribes a new, polyphonic, and anti-heroic memory. Here, narration is not meant to inform, but to sensually unsettle. This intrinsic reading is flanked by a comparison with Zeniter's "L'Art de perdre," an analysis of the French reception, and a reflection on the shift in reading perspective following the May 2024 uprisings—thus, the review profiles the book both as an aesthetic risk and as a politically explosive contemporary text.

➙ To the article

Montaigne in the dock: Philippe Desan

The novel by renowned Montaigne scholar Philippe Desan, "Montaigne – La Boétie: une ténébreuse affaire" (2024), recounts the most famous friendship of the French Renaissance as a literary crime story. Starting with the encounter between Montaigne and Étienne de La Boétie in 16th-century Bordeaux, the novel develops the provocative hypothesis that Montaigne himself may have been responsible for his friend's early death. Following the trail of a lost sonnet, hidden documents, and a modern academic investigation, Desan traces the paths of tradition to the present day, making the reconstruction of the past the central focus of his narrative. This essay demonstrates that this historical crime novel is far more than a scholarly game: it represents a fictional reflection on the possibilities and limitations of Montaigne research and, in doing so, implicitly engages with Hugo Friedrich's humanist interpretation of Montaigne. While Friedrich, in his classic 1949 monograph, emphasizes the unity of a “highly organized mind” and the consubstantiality of life and work, Desan portrays a Montaigne whose identity, texts, and memories are shaped by historical interests, editorial interventions, and social strategies. The essay argues that Desan’s novel deliberately blurs the line between scholarship and fiction in order to reveal the fundamental narrative nature of all interpretation: reading here appears as working with clues, probabilities, and hypotheses, so that the story of a possible crime simultaneously becomes a reflection on the conditions of literary scholarship.

➙ To the article

Huysmans as a seismograph of modernity: Agnès Michaux

Agnès Michaux's novel trilogy "La fabrication des chiens" (The Making of Dogs) and her later biography of Joris-Karl Huysmans together form an extraordinary double project: a literary reconstruction of the fin de siècle and, at the same time, a fresh perspective on Huysmans as a seismograph of modernity. The first volume of the trilogy (1889) follows the young provincial journalist Louis Daumale through the Paris of the Exposition Universelle, the Eiffel Tower's opening, and the enthusiasm for progress, while beneath the glittering surface, nationalism, eugenics, social anxiety, and cultural exhaustion are already becoming visible. At the heart of the story is Daumale's encounter with Huysmans, who appears not as a museum-like icon of decadence, but as a radically honest diagnostician of his time: "unjust, sometimes only, but with complete sincerity." Michaux's argument is that decadence should be read not as a pose, but as a precise diagnosis of civilization. Des Esseintes from "À rebours" is not understood as an aesthetic ideal, but rather as a symptom of a society whose sensory overload and artificiality deform humanity. This idea is reflected in the titular motif of the "fabrication" of dogs: optimization, breeding, and social conditioning become a metaphor for a modernity that standardizes all living things. In her biography, Michaux further radicalizes this approach by reading Huysmans not intrinsically, but physically and socially—as a shivering, nervous civil servant whose art arises from physical hypersensitivity, urban weariness, and uncompromising truthfulness. Thus, the result is not a nostalgic image of the Belle Époque, but an analysis of modernity itself: for Michaux, 1889 appears as that historical tipping point at which progress and decay, rationalization and spiritual yearning, surface and inner turmoil become inextricably intertwined.

➙ To the article

Concealing and revealing: the violence of art in the work of Benjamin de Laforcade

Benjamin de Laforcade's novel "Rouge nu" (Gallimard, 2022) centers on a paradoxical premise: a famous painting whose very invisibility lends it power, as it—hidden in an architecturally staged sanctuary—simultaneously enhances myth and market value while concealing a violent history. The novel focuses on the painter Andreas Mauser and the model Izabela, whose body, in the act of artistic production, becomes the scene of violence systematically concealed within the discourse of the cult of genius. This review explores this connection as a dialectical relationship between showing and concealing, interpreting the aesthetic technique of overpainting and uncovering as a metaphor for the cultural logic of the art world: visibility is selectively produced, invisibility not merely absence, but active repression. Nadeije Laneyrie-Dagen's art historical study, "Cacher/montrer: une histoire des œuvres invisibles en Occident" (Gallimard, 2024), traces from prehistory to the present day how artworks in the West were not designed for permanent visibility, but rather derived their impact precisely from ritualized practices of concealment and selective display, thus revealing visibility as a historically regulated form of power, desire, and social control. The essay intertwines the narrative structure of the novel with such considerations, demonstrating that the "invisible" artwork is less an object than a dispositif that stabilizes power relations.

➙ To the article

Political Rhetoric in Ruins: Mathieu Larnaudie and Nicolas Idier

This double review reads Mathieu Larnaudie's "Acharnement" (2012) and Nicolas Idier's "Matignon la nuit" (2024) as two complementary diagnoses of a political discourse that has lost touch with people and revolves only around itself. Both novels present highly reduced narratives: In Larnaudie's novel, a former speechwriter lives in seclusion in the provinces, writing speeches, rehearsing them, and discarding them, while real catastrophes appear only peripherally. In Idier's novel, an advisor is tasked with composing a speech in a single night at the seat of government but becomes increasingly lost in encounters, memories, and digressions. This is particularly evident in two images: the wooden platform on which Müller rehearses his speeches into the void, and the nocturnal crisis machine of Matignon, where language consists only of interchangeable "elements." The review also compares the writing styles of the two authors: Larnaudie's long, convoluted, and self-commenting prose appears as both an imitation and a critique of political rhetoric. Idier's fragmented and open style, on the other hand, seems like a sabotage of political discourse, opening up new possibilities. At the same time, the review connects this stylistic analysis with the characters, plot structures, and temporal organization of the novels: here, the endless repetition in Larnaudie's work; there, the condensed chronology of a single night in Idier's. Thus, form and political diagnosis mutually reinforce each other. The review's argument begins with an analysis of rhetorical mechanisms such as rhythm, punchline, and media staging, and then examines the position of the speaking characters: on the one hand, the dismissed speechwriter, on the other, the "sous-plume" within the government apparatus. The review also addresses the question of the audience, which is either entirely absent or appears only as a hyper-mediated mass. In the end, two hopeless options remain: either to continue writing despite the recognized meaninglessness (in Larnaudie's case) or to break out of the political discourse and look for another form of action (in Idier's case).

➙ To the article

Odysseus in Paris: An epic without a center, with James Joyce

The volume “Ulysse à Paris” (Seuil, 2024) continues the Homeric-Joycean tradition by radically pluralizing the epic structure of the wandering journey and relocating it to the socially, politically, and historically charged terrain of northern Paris. Published in collaboration with the journal Cockpit, this collective novel is not merely a loose anthology, but an aesthetically and theoretically coherent project that programmatically stages literary polyphony as a counter-model to epic unity. Instead of a sovereign hero, a network of heterogeneous voices unfolds, whose characters—from migrant subjects to feminist reformulations of mythical roles to flâneurs sensitized to the politics of memory—experience the odyssey as an event of displacement, precarity, and fragmented identity. The review explores how each contribution transforms specific Homeric episodes and Joycean techniques: be it through the emptying of the heroic (de Quatrebarbes), the ironic treatment of genealogical authority (Fiat), the politicization of mythical violence in the context of Holocaust remembrance (Comment), or the radical subjectivization of marginalized perspectives (Schavelzon, Noël). Tiphaine Samoyault emphasizes memory as a mode of a never-completed homecoming. Gabriela Vazquez condenses migration into an epistemic perspective that consistently conceives of the center from the periphery. The analysis traces the dense intertextual entanglement and reads formal techniques (polyphony, stream of consciousness, catalog technique) as carriers of historical and ideological meanings. It becomes clear that the central driving force of the volume is the deconstruction of homecoming: Ithaca no longer appears as an attainable place, but as an empty signature, replaced by provisional, often precarious forms of arrival that neither stabilize identity nor reconcile history. The review itself thus follows a twofold movement – ​​it reconstructs the genealogical depth of the project and at the same time insists on its diagnostic sharpness regarding the times – thereby revealing “Ulysse à Paris” as an epic that constantly questions its own possibility.

➙ To the article

Israel, Gaza and the French intellectual discourse after October 7: Interpretive authority according to Denis Sieffert

This review analyzes the French intellectual debate following October 7, 2023, as a deeply polarized field of discourse in which three central positions emerged: a dominant pro-Israel camp, a marginalized pro-Palestinian spectrum, and a fragile, long-silent intermediate position. At its core is Denis Sieffert's book "La mauvaise cause" (2026), which is read as a committed counter-narrative against what he sees as a hegemonic, pro-Israel discursive order. The review meticulously reconstructs Sieffert's argument—from the historical entanglement of France with Israel and the analysis of media and rhetorical mechanisms to the critique of prominent intellectuals such as Gilles Kepel and Eva Illouz—and demonstrates that his central point of departure lies in the repoliticization of the conflict as a colonial issue. In comparison with Kepel's geopolitical-religious studies approach and Illouz's sociological critique of the Western left, the review highlights the fundamental epistemic differences between these positions: While Kepel and Illouz problematize the reactions to October 7th, Sieffert focuses on the mechanisms of discursive power and the rendering invisible of Palestinian suffering. In conclusion, the review assesses the book as an important, albeit not unproblematic, intervention that exemplifies the political, media, and moral fault lines of contemporary France.

➙ To the article

Mesopotamia between archaic mythology, imperial present and postcolonial guilt: Olivier Guez

Olivier Guez's "Mesopotamia" (Grasset, 2024, German translation "Die Welt in ihren Händen," Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2026) reconstructs, in the form of historiographical fiction, the life of the British archaeologist and colonial official Gertrude Bell as a nexus of two intertwined narratives: the emancipation story of an extraordinary woman and the violent genesis of modern Iraq in the context of British imperialism after the First World War. The novel traces Bell's path from the scientific exploration of Mesopotamia to her pivotal role in the political reorganization of the region, weaving historical figures such as T.E. Lawrence, Winston Churchill, and Faisal I into a dense web of diplomacy, mythology, and power politics. Central to this is the poetic construction of Mesopotamia as a palimpsest in which archaic civilizations (Sumer, Babylon) and modern colonial interests overlap. This deep layering functions simultaneously as an ideological matrix of imperial legitimacy and as an ironic refraction of its hubris. The interpretation highlights that Guez's actual argument lies in the structural analogy between archaeology and colonial rule: both operate as forms of epistemic appropriation that translate knowledge into power and thus produce political orders whose fragility becomes evident in the postcolonial epilogue—from the fall of the monarchy to the wars of the 20th and 21st centuries. The cyclical temporal structure and the mythical overcoding are interpreted as narrative strategies that make the British project appear as merely an episode in a longue durée of imperial repetitions; in doing so, the tendency to read the Franco-British rivalry primarily as a mirror structure is emphasized. Overall, the review shows how Guez stages Bell as a tragic figure caught between knowledge and complicity, thereby formulating a fundamental critique of the illusion of imperial power.

➙ To the article

Francia as a new Marianne: Allegory of a kaleidoscopic France in Nancy Huston's work

Nancy Huston's "Francia" (Actes Sud, 2024) is a novel that is both narratively focused and thematically expansive. At its heart is the transgender protagonist Francia, originally from Colombia, whom the novel follows as a sex worker in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris on a May day. This strictly defined timeframe forms the stage for a multifaceted panorama in which seventeen male clients—from diverse social, cultural, and biographical backgrounds—appear one after another, revealing their hidden needs, traumas, and self-deceptions. Through flashbacks, Francia's own story unfolds, from her birth as Rubén, through her transition, to her self-chosen identity, which, in the name "Francia," is programmatically intertwined with the country of France. The novel thus constructs a kaleidoscopic portrait of contemporary French society, in which issues of migration, gender, masculinity, and social inequality intertwine. The interpretation suggests that Francia can be read as a "new Marianne," a modern allegory of the French Republic itself: her body, her hybrid identity, and her social position encapsulate the contradictions of a country marked by postcolonial diversity, social tensions, and collective trauma. Accordingly, the essay argues that Francia is not merely an individual figure, but a symbolic projection screen for national self-understanding. It particularly highlights the dual perspective structure—the expansive inner view of the men versus Francia's sober, professional external perception—from which an implicit critique of male self-interpretation emerges: the men appear less as autonomous subjects than as driven by desire, fear, and societal expectations. Central to the analysis is the thesis of the universalization of "prostitution" as a social principle ("tout le monde est pute"), which negates the moral distinction of sex work and instead interprets exchange, need, and performance as universal human practices. This interpretation reads Huston's methods of multiperspectivism, polyphony, and metafictional self-reflection (the character of "Griffonne") as a poetics program: literature itself appears as an act of empathy and appropriation, ethically risky but epistemologically productive. Overall, it portrays the novel as a text that is both political and profoundly empathetic, one that does not doactically resolve societal conflicts but rather condenses and makes them visible in the figure of Francia—as a "new Marianne."

➙ To the article

The flower as text, body and danger: three novels by Colette Fellous, Célia Houdart and Constance Guisset

What connects three very different contemporary French novels—Colette Fellous's "Quelques fleurs" (Gallimard, 2024), Célia Houdart's "Les Fleurs sauvages" (POL, 2024), and Constance Guisset's "Fleur de peau" (Flammarion, 2026)? At first glance, only the botanical nature of their titles; but on closer reading, a shared and multifaceted literary project: the questioning, displacement, and in some cases, radical destruction of that symbolist tradition which, since Mallarmé, has encoded the flower as a sublime, incorporeal sign—as "l'absente de tous bouquets," absent from every real bouquet, ascending into pure idea. This comparative review shows how the three authors inherit and disrupt this legacy in their own unique ways, by reclaiming the plant-like and bringing it back into the corporeal, the ecological, and the pharmacological. Fellous, whose autofictional essay operates within the formal framework of the lyrical narrative, cultivates the flower as a mnemonic device and a poetics of self-portraiture: her flowers are silent witnesses to lived experience, condensations of childhood, mother, Tunis, and Paris, and the book she is writing is literally "en ces fleurs caché"—hidden within the flowers, awaiting the act of writing that will liberate them. Houdart, on the other hand, strips the flower of any subjective claim: in the laconic polyphonic narration of her Provençal characters, wildflowers are ecological symbols of a nature indifferent to humankind and—in the case of the hallucinogenic datura, which poisons two characters—even prepared to harm them, unintentionally and without message; botanical knowledge here becomes an ethical and epistemic necessity. Finally, Guisset turns the romantic floral aesthetic on its head with a gesture of critical commentary on the system: Her florist Ava has spent thirteen years arranging the beauty of flowers, accumulating an invisible poison through pesticides in her skin – the flower, chosen as a counter-world to the financial world, turns out to be its accomplice, and the woman's body a barometer of a global commodity economy that bases beauty on toxic substances. The essay reads these three very different text projects along a common dimension of analysis: the function of the flower as a temporal figure, as a bodily figure, and as a linguistic figure. It argues that contemporary French literature uses the flower motif to span a scale ranging from mnemonic cultivation to ecological sobriety and pharmacological paradox – culminating in Ismaël Jude's concurrently published novel "Une vie de jasmin," which is used as a fourth comparative text, in a linguistically skeptical ontology of pure emanation that consistently takes Mallarmé's idealization to its logical conclusion using the means of the body and biology.

➙ To the article

The unreliable voice of colonial rule: Mathieu Belezi

Mathieu Belezi's novel "Moi, le glorieux" (2024) develops a delirious, monologic stream of memory from the fictional colonial ruler Albert Vandel, nicknamed "Bobby," who, in 1962—on the eve of Algerian independence—endures his 145-year-old, grotesquely exaggerated allegory of the entire colonial history in his fortified villa in Algiers. Starting from this besieged present, the text unfolds, in associative flashbacks, a century of colonial rule: the violent construction of the estate, the economic exploitation, the sexual control of women, the political self-presentation within the framework of colonial rituals, and finally the apocalyptic departure into the desert, which ends in the protagonist's violent death at the hands of those he had imagined as his "subjects." Central to this is the figure of Ouhrias, a young Algerian woman who, as a silent companion and resistant refuser of listening, both accompanies and subverts the monologue. The argument developed in this essay reads this novel as a radical experiment in narrative self-exposure: Belezi completely relinquishes the power of speech to the ostentatiously unreliable first-person narrator and refrains from any explicit moral commentary, so that the critique arises not from a dissenting voice, but from the exaggeration of colonial logic itself. The analysis demonstrates how this strategy operates on several levels: in the monologic narrative structure, which transforms communication into domination; in the temporal structure, which presents history as an unbroken continuity of colonial violence; in the constellation of characters, which systematically silences colonial subjects; and in the semantic fields of body, animal metaphor, and possession, which underpin the narrator's ideology. The essay particularly emphasizes the function of satirical exaggeration and the structural discrepancy between narrated self-perception and actual violence, which functions as a "satirical machine." Finally, the essay demonstrates that the novel also represents an autopoetological reflection, staging the colonizer as the author of his own story while simultaneously revealing the instability of this authorship. Taken together, "Moi, le glorieux" thus appears as a text that does not criticize colonial violence from the outside, but rather exposes it so radically in the mode of its own discourse that it discredits itself in the very act of speaking.

➙ To the article

Isis in Montmartre: Gérard de Nerval as patient and prophet in Diane Morel's film

Diane Morel's "Le Mystère Nerval" (Fayard, 2024) begins in 1841: Gérard de Nerval is admitted to Dr. Blanche's clinic, covered in blood and obsessed with the idea that an "Isis" is dead. From this scene unfolds a multifaceted narrative that intertwines criminal intrigue and a portrait of the poet. The young physician Émile Blanche investigates in literary Paris, among Gautier, Houssaye, and the radical Petrus Borel, stumbling upon the murdered journalist Flore—and a political conspiracy against the July Monarchy. But the true dynamic lies deeper: Morel integrates Nerval's motifs—the "black sun of melancholy" from the sonnet "El Desdichado," the doppelgänger motif from "Aurélia," the Valois landscapes from "Sylvie," the Egyptian Isis as a cipher for the "eternal feminine"—into the structure of the plot. The chaotic writing process, visualized as a tapestry of hundreds of scraps of paper, becomes a poetics program: fragment, dream, and vision are not symptoms, but forms of knowledge. Even the therapeutic scene in which Nerval's own translation of "Faust" releases him from catatonia stages literature as a counterforce to clinical rationality. – The review reads this novel not only as a historical crime story, but also as a poetic experiment: Morel defends Nerval's "madness" against the grasp of positivism by taking its inner logic seriously. The crime plot of this biofictional work reflects Nerval's obsession with "morte amoureuse" (lovesick death); Flore becomes the earthly manifestation of that Isis who, in Nerval's work, is simultaneously mother goddess, lover, and lost unity. Dream and reality permeate one another until, in the end, in the ruins of Chaalis—a topos from "Sylvie"—the real dead woman and the mythical Lorelei merge into one another. This creates the image of a poet whose inner turmoil is not pathologized but understood as aesthetic radicalism. In this reading, Morel's novel appears as a plea for a poetics of the unstable: against the "order" of the clinic, he sets the productive disorder of the imagination – and makes Nerval's statement about dreams as a "second life" the narrative principle.

➙ To the article

Between origin and upward mobility: Novels of class change by Moraton, Robin and Sizun

This article focuses on three French novels that explore social mobility from different literary perspectives: Gilles Moraton's "Transfuge" (Nadeau, 2025), Patrice Robin's "Le Visage tout bleu" (POL, 2022), and Marie Sizun's "10, villa Gagliardini" (Arléa, 2024). Robin's novel, told from an autobiographical perspective, recounts the educational ascent of a boy from a rural, artisan background whose near-fatal birth and his parents' harsh working conditions shaped his social starting point; his path to the intellectual sphere remains fraught with guilt and the physical imprint of his origins. Moraton depicts the development of a protagonist from a lower-middle-class or proletarian background who gains access to the cultural elite through educational institutions, yet remains a "crossover" between classes, ruthlessly analyzing his own metamorphosis. Sizun, in turn, reconstructs the childhood of a girl in postwar Paris who, through education and self-discipline, gradually emerges from the confines of the "villa Gagliardini" into a different social sphere; here, the class shift appears as a subtle, intra-familial shift closely linked to female self-empowerment. – The essay argues that these three novels not only address class change thematically but also present it as a structural problem of narration. At the center is the figure of the "transfuge" as a doubly positioned subject who retrospectively recounts an origin left behind without ever being able to completely shed it. The analysis focuses particularly on the tension between the narrating and narrated self, the linguistic problem of the shift in social register, the staging of rupture or continuity in the temporal structure, and the ethical dimension of characterization. In its comparative reading of the novels' endings, the review highlights that Robin aims for a conciliatory integration of origins, Moraton emphasizes the enduring intermediate position, and Sizun designs a quiet form of inner continuity. Thus, the review demonstrates that class change as a literary motif presents an aesthetic and ethical challenge because it sets identity, language, and narrative perspective all in motion.

➙ To the article

Art as work: Dominique Auzel on Gustave Caillebotte

In the book Ouvriers, artisans du beau selon Caillebotte In the 2024 volume of the book series "Le roman d'un chef d'oeuvre," Dominique Auzel undertakes the ambitious yet delicate task of intertwining art historical analysis, historical research, and literary imagination. His starting point is a single painting, Gustave Caillebotte's Parquet robots from 1875, but it quickly becomes clear that this painting serves less as an isolated masterpiece than as a crystallization point: for questions about modernity and realism, about work and body, about social visibility and aesthetic dignity, and finally about the inner biography of an artist whose work had long been overshadowed by his Impressionist contemporaries.

Caillebotte's painting occupies a unique liminal position within modernism. It stands in contrast to the established narratives of Impressionism because it is neither entirely dissolved by the dissolution of form nor by the pure primacy of atmosphere. Rather, Caillebotte combines a rigorous, almost classical compositional discipline with the radical choice of modern subjects. His cityscapes, interiors, and scenes of work are permeated by clear lines, precise perspectives, and unusual viewpoints reminiscent of photographic or architectural techniques. Here, modernism reveals itself less as a departure into formal indeterminacy than as a new order of seeing: urban space, private interiors, and the human body are grasped as structured yet contingent fields of experience.

Read more

This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.

From footnote to counter-narrative: Olivier Rolin on Victor Hugo

In "Jusqu'à ce que mort s'ensuive" (Gallimard, 2024), Olivier Rolin develops a consistent counter-narrative from a marginal passage in "Les Misérables." In Hugo's work, Emmanuel Barthélemy and Frédéric Cournet appear merely as exemplary figures within the barricade mythology of 1848, their fates morally resolved in a few sentences. Rolin liberates them from this symbolic function and reconstructs their lives from the June Uprising through exile in London to duel and hanging. From Hugo's miniature emerges a richly detailed chronicle in which Barthélemy appears as a product of the Bagno and Cournet as a contradictory republican—not as archetypes, but as historical figures without a logic of redemption. This review interprets Rolin's book as a demythologization through precision. Rolin does not openly contradict Hugo, but rather begins where his epic order begins to crumble. Against Hugo's condensation, he sets chronology, archival material, and narrative sobriety. Thus, the focus shifts from meaning-making to description: Jean Valjean's redemption contrasts with Barthélemy's hardening, the emphatic title "Les Misérables" with the administrative coldness of "Jusqu'à ce que mort s'ensuive." The stark ending at the gallows is read as a methodological choice: history does not generate meaning on its own. Literature can make it visible—but not redeem it.

➙ To the article