The dismantled republic and a whale skeleton: Aurélien Bellanger

triptych

Aurélien Bellanger's literature has been characterized from its inception by a peculiar dual drive: a yearning for a total mapping of the world and an awareness of its irretrievable loss. In 2023, the narrator—an alter ego of Bellanger—spends his time exploring caves in the French provinces, collecting the bones of a whale that died on the Normandy coast, and participating in the Parisian protests against pension reform. Grottes, baleine, révolution (Seuil, 2025) is a poetics-political triptych about failure as an ontological constant of modernity: the “grottes” represent the subterranean consciousness of the subject, the “baleine” the death drive materialized in nature, and the “révolution” the exhausted utopia of collective renewal. In this structure, Bellanger combines topographical empiricism with metaphysical reflection, creating a poetics of geology in which thought, matter, and history interlock sedimentarily. His autofiction no longer maps society, but rather the subsurface of the human, where politics merges into paleontology and memory into fossilization.

In Grottes, baleine, révolution Bellanger intertwines autobiographical exploration, geology, mythology, and political meditation into a book that is less a novel than a thought experiment. The blending of personal experience, research, and reflection characterizes the book as an essayistic narrative with strong autofictional elements. The publisher's announcement describes the work as a very strange and unique narrative in which Bellanger reveals himself as never before ("un récit très drôle et singulier, dans lequel il se dévoile comme jamais"). The text focuses on the actual experiences and reflections of the author, Aurélien Bellanger, including private details about his family, his anxieties, and his earlier works. Ultimately, it is a hybrid work that combines descriptive, quasi-journalistic elements (such as the account of the protests in Paris) with philosophical reflections on literature, history, and death (e.g., the caves as a "philosophical attraction" or the whale as "work of mourning" – "travail de deuil").

Nature, death, and politics form the programmatic triad of a new mythopoetics of the present: “I spent the year 2023 searching for caves, collecting whale bones, and trying to make the revolution, without any real reason or conscious connection between these three activities.” (“J'ai passé l'année 2023, sans raison véritable ni lien conscient entre ces trois activités, à chercher des grottes, ramasser des os de baleine et tenter de faire la révolution.”) This first sentence alone formulates the logic of the entire book: the suspension of causality, the poetic equation of the subterranean, the animal, and the political.

The narrator's three endeavors, initially occurring side by side by chance, gradually merge into an existential and symbolic quest for depth, origin, and meaning in an age of disappearance. Ultimately, he recognizes in them reflections of the same process: humanity's descent into its own vanishing. The title unites the three seemingly disparate spheres into a metaphor for the inner world. "Grottes" represents the unconscious and the depths of thought, "baleine" the body of nature and mythical death, and "révolution" the collective movement that permeates both. Together, they denote a single process: humanity's cyclical immersion, decomposition, and re-emergence within the fabric of history.

The topography of the underground

The first movement, "Grottes," unfolds an archaeological poetics. The narrator maps the caves of the Mayenne with the precision of a geologist and the tenderness of a child. The equation of geological and mental space is the fundamental figure of the book. The earth becomes the organ of thought, thought itself sedimentation. In this analogy, Bachelard's Poetics of Space just as with the speleological phantasms of Nerval or Michelet: the interior of the earth as the origin of the imaginary. For Bellanger, the grotto becomes the negative of the Enlightenment, the "underside" of Cartesian space. When he writes: "Je préférerais parfois que la terre soit une boule parfaitement lisse et sans crevasses…" ("I sometimes wish the earth were a perfectly smooth sphere without cracks…"), he simultaneously articulates the desire and the fear of the modern subject: the longing for wholeness, the fear of depth.

This passage, one of the most poetic in the book, forms the epistemological matrix of the entire text. Bellanger combines geology, epistemology, and psychology into a single conceptual framework: the Earth's interior becomes a model of consciousness. The grotto functions as a negative image of the Enlightenment—not a place of light, but of the matter of thought. The "fossil fears" refer to an unconscious collective memory resting in the Earth; the subject is not merely the bearer, but also the sediment of this history. Bellanger's formulation "creuser, c'est penser" transforms the classical image of I think into a geological principle: knowledge is no longer insight, but earthwork. Herein lies the foundation of his poetics of stratification – thinking as an archaeological, not a rational, process.

In Bellanger's poetic logic, the cartographic surveying of caves is a form of writing. Like the author Jean-Yves Bigot, whose Cavernes de la Mayenne He quotes Bellanger, who creates his own underground archive: “J'ai dressé plusieurs fois le relevé, sur mes carnets à dessin, de l'avancée de mes explorations.” (“I have recorded the progress of my explorations several times in my sketchbooks.”) Documenting the caves becomes self-writing, a diagram of existence.

At the same time, the motif of the cave alludes to the Platonic allegory. But Bellanger reverses the movement:

The path to knowledge becomes one of deepening rather than liberation. Knowledge here means not light, but obscuration – a phrase that perfectly encapsulates Bellanger's poetics of "illuminated darkness".

The whale as allegory

When the second part begins, the space opens up: from earth to sea, from rock to flesh. The stranded fin whale (Rorqual commun) appears as a titanic allegory. Bellanger describes it first with the dispassionate gaze of a journalist, then with the pathos-free wonder of a mystic. “La mer était coloriée en rouge par le sang du gigantesque animal.” (“The sea was colored red by the blood of the gigantic animal.”) The scene is reminiscent of Sebald’s natural apocalypses: the beauty of horror, the tenderness of decay. The dead whale becomes a symbol of the 21st century: a global, ecological, and simultaneously existential event.

Bellanger transforms the account into a meditation on the relationship between humanity and matter. “Fascinated, we traversed the entire beach. I built a primitive portal from two large curved ribs…” (“Nous avons parcouru, fascinés, toute la plage. J'ai fabriqué un portique primitif avec deux grandes côtes courbes…”) The act of collecting, ordering, and replicating transforms the animal into architecture, nature into culture. The narrator himself becomes the last speleologist in the world (“dernier spéléologue du monde”), exploring not earth, but carcasses. The Baleine, like the grotto before it, is an opening into the depths—this time not into the earth, but into the memory of the world.

The symbolic dimension intensifies when Bellanger asks: “Is the whale a figure of mourning?” (“La baleine est-elle une figure du deuil?”) The question remains unanswered and marks the center of the book. The whale’s death coincides with the death of the narrator’s mother-in-law; nature and biography intertwine. The whale becomes a totemic doppelganger, an organism that reflects the fragility of humanity. The scene in which the author carries two of the animal’s bones home is both grotesque and sublime. The carcass becomes a fragment of world knowledge, a fossilized memory: a “cabinet of curiosities” of the Anthropocene.

Here, Bellanger's imagery reaches an apocalyptic intensity that transforms reality into myth. The dead whale becomes the body of a cathedral, in which nature and culture become indistinguishable: Gothic arches, organs, monumentality – death is sacralized. The explosion of the body represents the moment when the order of things implodes: the material world tears apart under its own weight. Bellanger marks grief as a form of understanding of the modern experience of the world, which is now only possible as an awareness of its decay. The whale becomes the totem animal of the Anthropocene – its shattering a metaphor for the disintegration of the symbolic order.

The Revolution as Myth

In Grottes, baleine, révolution The revolution occupies a central position in the title itself and is explored intensively as a concept, both philosophically and personally. An entire chapter is dedicated to the "Révolution," in which the narrator recalls how, in the spring, he was preoccupied with pursuing the idea of ​​revolution in the streets of Paris ("poursuivre l'idée de révolution dans les rues de Paris"). This occurred within the context of the mobilization against the pension reform. The narrator describes his fascination with the "Révolution," reflects on the role of Black Blocs in demonstrations, and considers the possibility of martyrdom on a barricade. The narrative addresses the temporary possibility of an "insurrection," and the narrator, in his "delusion," sees Paris as the revolutionary capital of humanity ("capitale révolutionnaire de l'humanité"). Finally, the narrator also expresses his grief over the revolutionary idea ("Deuil […] de l'idée révolutionnaire").

In Bellangers The Last Days of the Socialist Party The revolution is treated primarily as a historical, ideological, and political-strategic concept, often in retrospect through the lens of French history and the left. The founding of the Republic is traced back to the "greatest and longest progressive sequence in world history," which began in 1789. The phrase-laden language of the revolutionary left is described as an "idiom on the verge of disappearing." Nevertheless, the revolution is seen as a possible end goal of political action: a movement could lead to the "sea of ​​revolution." Grémond, the protagonist, views the political upheavals as a quasi-geological "quasi-géologique" shaking of human history (a metaphor also found in the stone collections in Grottes, baleine, révolution (resonates). Frayère, one of the philosophers, compares the Dreyfus Affair to a “bourgeois civil war” (guerre civile bourgeoise), which prevented the left from advancing the revolution, as it had already become “subrepticement industrielle” (secretly industrial).

The topic of the demonstration (manifestation/manif) is present in both works. In The Last Days of the Socialist Party Demonstrations are mentioned as part of Grémond's political beginnings ("blockades of high schools, then fences, demonstrations against the Devaquet law, silent marches for Malik Oussekine"). Furthermore, public assemblies served as an expression of political stance: The founding of the Movement of December 9 is described as a large public assembly (“rassemblement public”) in the Place de la République, and it is the spontaneous demonstration of support after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo mentioned. In Grottes, baleine, révolution In contrast, demonstrations are described in more detail as contemporary, active experience, with the narrator preferring wild demonstrations (“manifs sauvages”) to authorized marches and vividly describing the organization and dispersion of the demonstration processions (“cortèges”) in the streets of Paris.

The third part of the latest book, "Révolution," applies the topography of the subterranean and the animal to society. The Parisian protests against the 2023 pension reform form the historical backdrop. But the revolt is conceived less politically than geologically: as a tectonic movement of the masses, as the return of the collective body. Here, the revolution is described not as an action, but as a natural process, a seismic transformation of urban space.

Bellanger, who merges the history of ideas with the topography of matter, conceives of politics as geophilosophy. The revolutionary searches the catacombs of Paris for the remnants of the Enlightenment.

This “ville négative” – one recalls the image of the Bibliothèque Nationale as an “empreinte négative de la bibliothèque” in Bellanger’s book on Walter Benjamin The 20th century – is the antithesis of the visible city of power: a symbol for subterranean thought, for the hidden rationalism of revolt. Bellanger recognizes in the anarchist inscription “1312” (ACAB) a historical accident that becomes an oracle: the simultaneity of chaos and order, of number and myth.

This excerpt condenses the book's three leitmotifs—nature, history, and language—into a parable and a birth story of the narrative. The whale and the revolution are "two corpses of reality": relics of the living, now only narratable, no longer experienceable. Here, Bellanger formulates the fundamental thesis of his poetics: that writing takes the place of action, that literature is the "replaced revolution." The media's self-observation ("written, spoken, filmed") points to the aesthetic simulation of the political in the age of digital reproduction. Yet, in this powerlessness lies a new form of solidarity: fragmentary memory as a collective body. Bellanger's narrator recognizes in failure the only possibility of community—in the shared experience of immobility.

This failure is the aesthetic core of Grottes, baleine, révolutionThe impossibility of changing the world gives rise to a need to describe it. Bellanger writes against loss. His sentences map disappearance—they are topographical evocations. The motif of the "replica," which stretches from the Lourdes grottoes to the Parisian attics, reveals the paradoxical movement of this poetics: the world copies itself in order not to die. In the artificial grottoes of the chapels, the miniature models of his office, or the reconstructed catacombs, reality is doubled. But this doubling is not consolation, but rather a "mise au tombeau" (a preparation for the tomb).

This grotesque self-doubling is simultaneously a poetics of writing: the book itself is a miniature of reality, a model that comments on its own creation. In this gesture of self-enclosure, there is an echo of Blanchot and Borges—literature as a space that swallows itself, as "grottesque" in the original sense of the word. Around 1480, Roman artists discovered a wealth of wall paintings in the subterranean ruins of the Domus Aurea, Nero's palace. These vaults resembled caves or grottos, hence the paintings were called "pittura grottesca"—literally, "grotto painting." In these subterranean spaces, distorted hybrid creatures, fantastical ornamental forms, combinations of animal, human, plant, and architecture were found—in short, the unusual, the playful, the unheard of. grotesque Ornaments defied all classical order and symmetry. They broke with what was considered "beautiful" and "reasonable".

Bellanger transforms the archaeological gesture into an ethic. Collecting, preserving, and labeling are forms of resistance against disappearance. His grottoes, bones, and barricades are the archives of a future reader. “On ne saura rien de moi mais je serai, à cet instant, enfin libéré.” (“No one will know anything about me, but I will, at this moment, finally be liberated.”) Liberation consists not in the act itself, but in the relinquishment of the self. Writing replaces the revolution without betraying it: it preserves the impulse that made it possible.

Walter Benjamin

The 20th century It is not a novel with a unified narrative voice, but a polyphonic, montaged work. The revolution is discussed in different voices, text types, and eras, and each voice shifts the meaning. Bellanger's language oscillates between empirical precision and metaphysical vision. He describes in Grottes, baleine, révolution Geological formations are described with the precision of a geographer, only to be transformed in the next moment into allegories of history. This ambivalence lends his style a peculiar tension: the realism of the surface is undermined by a mystical depth. The literary strategy resembles a katabasis ritual. Every expedition into the earth or to the whale is simultaneously a descent into the unconscious of the age. In this respect, Bellanger's book is a continuation of Benjamin's concept of "remembrance"; more than mere memory, it denotes a revolutionary form of historical consciousness—remembrance of the unfulfilled happiness of the past, which penetrates the present as a critical, redemptive force to overcome the historical injustice of history and bring about a revolutionary standstill. Benjamin's remembrance is a political and redemptive instrument for interrupting the course of history experienced as catastrophe.

Already in the second chapter of Bellangers The 20th century, “Note de la DGSI sur le Groupe Benjamin,” the word appears revolution in an administrative, technocratic context. A police report describes the "Groupe Benjamin"—a small cell of intellectuals and activists—as the bearers of a mystical, impractical form of the revolutionary idea, inspired by Walter Benjamin. Here, the state speaks of revolution as something suspicious, as a remnant of utopia that must be monitored. Revolution thus no longer appears as a political reality, but as a cultural pathology: a form of thinking that is no longer dangerous, but has become incomprehensible.

Within this police note, an apocryphal text is quoted, which the authorities found in the archives of the ZADs and the BNF. There, the revolution is reframed philosophically and theologically: "The only instance that can oppose the eternity of the state would be an eternal anarchist guerrilla that would define its true limits." ("La seule instance qui peut se dresser face à l'éternité de l'État serait une guérilla anarchiste éternelle qui en définirait la véritable frontière.") Here, an invisible, post-Benjaminian voice speaks, describing revolution as pure violence and grasps a metaphysical boundary—an eternal movement of the negative, not for conquest, but for transcendence. This voice—anonymous and apocryphal—adopts the language of Benjamin and Blanquis: revolution as a cosmic cut that perforates the order of the state.

In Messigné's posthumously quoted BNF conference, a poet speaks who translates the metaphysical tone of the revolution into the language of literature. For him, the revolution is no longer a historical act, but a ready made, which has become the library itself. Messigné understands revolution as an aesthetic and archival state: history quoting itself, the book endlessly rewriting itself. Revolution is, so to speak, the aesthetic echo of modernity, a poetic short circuit between death, quotation, and redemption.

In The 20th century No one speaks “for” the revolution, but everyone speaks of its loss: the state manages it as suspicion, the anonymous theorist transforms it into metaphysics, the poet sublimates it into literature. Thus emerges a polyphonic elegy of the revolution, in which Bellanger shows that revolutionary thought survives in the 21st century only as text, trace, or quotation—as an echo of a century that has turned itself into a myth of its own upheavals. By exploring the idea of violence divine By translating Benjamin's ideas into the logic of modern information and archive systems, he shows that the revolutionary energy of the 20th century has become petrified in the storage structures of libraries, databases, and theories.

The book's intermediality, incorporating the author's private photographs, enriches the writing, as seen here in the successive sequence of his own stone collection and Bellanger's manuscript archive:

Read intertextually, it forms Grottes, baleine, révolution the organic, introspective counter-movement to The 20th centuryWhile the earlier novel stages modernity as an intellectual network of archives, apparatuses, and discourses—the Bibliothèque nationale as an allegory of thought in the age of mechanical reproduction—the new book shifts the topology of this knowledge to the body and the landscape. The grotto in which Bellanger gropes his way downwards is the negative image of the library: instead of orderly shelves, a chaotic void; instead of collection and system, disappearance into darkness. Thought sinks into matter; knowledge becomes the physical experience of confinement, fear, and the earthy smell. The grotto, which in The 20th century What is still latently present as a conceptual figure of the archive now becomes a space for experience, a re-embodiment of history.

The three motifs of the latest book – grotto, whale, and revolution – appear like mythical transformations of the intellectual forces that are at work in The 20th century were theoretically described. The whale, in Grottes, baleine, révolution The animal, a body torn apart by the flood, has become the one that devours modernity: a natural echo of the image of cyclical history developed by Blanqui and Benjamin. And the revolution, conceived in the earlier novel as an endless textual loop and as a "ready-made" of history, returns here as a geological, almost telluric movement—as the tremor of the earth that seizes the body. Bellanger thus transforms the discourse on history and technology into a bodily, mythically charged experiment in self-experimentation.

Walter Benjamin no longer appears directly as a figure or subject of discourse, as he did in The 20th century, where he was the structural center. Yet his thinking permeates the book invisibly, as an intellectual and stylistic trace. Bellanger does not quote him by name, but he writes in a Benjaminian manner: the descent into the grotto echoes the movement in Benjamin's allegory of the "Angel of History"—a descent into the material, into the ruins of experience. The narrator himself, who descends into the depths with a flashlight and notebook, reinterprets the Benjaminian figure of the collector and flâneur: instead of wandering through passages, he traverses subterranean tunnels; instead of collecting quotations, he gathers stones and fossils.

The later book can be considered interior writing, a kind of poetic retranslation of the thinking of The 20th century They can be read in autobiographical and cosmopoetic forms. The interplay of the two books creates a dual portrait of modern thought: The 20th century It demonstrates its vertical order – modernity as a tower of writings, theories, and quotations – and Grottes, baleine, révolution It reveals its subterranean underbelly, the abysmal, the animalistic, and the non-discursive. Together, the two texts form a dialectic of knowledge in which knowledge only comes alive again through the descent into darkness, through the grotto. Thus, the most recent book proves to be a poetic-physiological response to the earlier one: it leads Benjamin's labyrinthine library back into the earth of the self.