Olivier Rolin – Rentrée littéraire: contemporary French literature

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

29.12.2525.12.25

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

War as a legacy: On the systematics of transgenerational imprinting in the work of Julia Weidmann
This review presents Julia Weidmann's study "Continuum of Wars: Intergenerational Narratives of the World Wars in Contemporary French Literature" (Winter, 2025) as a fundamental, comparative investigation of a central phenomenon in contemporary French literature: the intergenerational narration of the World Wars. The starting point is the observation that subsequent generations—from the "wound" generation to the "inheritance" generation—reconstruct familial wartime experiences in literary form, mediating between archival research and imagination. To this end, Weidmann develops an original model of a "war continuum" that replaces traditional numerical generational categories with a metaphorical, trauma-oriented scale, and operationalizes this concept in a four-stage analytical method, which she applies to a broad corpus of authors (including Claude Simon, Patrick Modiano, Ivan Jablonka, and Anne Berest). The review particularly praises the methodological clarity, the nuanced close readings, and the identification of recurring narrative structures across generations, but also highlights limited weaknesses, such as a certain schematization in the comparative analysis and the relatively marginal treatment of aesthetic details. Overall, the study appears as a substantial contribution to literary memory studies, providing a viable set of tools for analyzing transgenerational memory and simultaneously opening up new perspectives for the exploration of future narrative forms.
Writing against the death of her lover: Céline Zufferey
Céline Zufferey's novel "Maxence" (Gallimard, 2026) is a fragmentarily composed writing project born from the anticipated grief for a lover, defying any conventional love narrative. In loosely connected chapters—lists, miniatures, observations, reflections—a portrait of a man emerges that is simultaneously a love story, a memory experiment, and a poetics-based self-examination, driven by the central tension between the desire to capture the ephemeral and the realization of the fundamental inadequacy of linguistic fixation. The narrator writes against the future loss by meticulously registering Maxence's body, voice, gestures, and everyday practices, while increasingly reflecting that every description remains reductive and transforms the living into a potential "tombeau." The interpretation reveals that this very insight into one's own failure becomes an aesthetic principle: the fragmentary form, the rhapsodic temporal structure, and the shifting address (between third person and intimate "you" to both the living and the anticipated dead Maxence) are not merely stylistic devices, but rather necessary responses to the text's ethical and epistemological dilemma. By systematically uncovering the four axes of reading—love narrative, critique of knowledge, autopoiesis, and reflection on time—and simultaneously uniting the semantic fields of body, archive, and prolepsis, the review reveals a poetics of pre-mourning in the novel, in which death does not appear as an event, but as a permanent inscription into the present, leading to an intensification of the everyday: the writing, intended to banish loss, thus itself becomes a medium of heightened presence, without ever resolving the fundamental contradiction between life and recording.
Francesco Petrarch and his followers: Étienne Anheim
Étienne Anheim's "Pétrarque: portrait de famille" (Minuit, 2026) reconstructs Francesco Petrarch's literary project as the result of dense familial entanglements and understands his work as a discursive "family portrait" in which genealogical construction, social embeddedness, and poetic self-stylization are inextricably intertwined. Based on a combination of textual analysis and archival research, Anheim demonstrates how Petrarch mythologizes his origins along a patrilineal notary genealogy, while simultaneously systematically marginalizing or silencing key figures—especially his mother, daughter, and the mothers of his children. The constellations of father (as a professional model to be overcome), brother (as a spiritual alter ego), Laura (as a real void, imaginary lover, and symbolic cipher of poetry), as well as children and friends, unfold as structuring relationships within which Petrarch shapes his authorial identity. Writing thus always appears as an addressed, fragmentary practice within an extended "familia" composed of relatives, correspondents, and literary successors. Anheim does not resolve the tensions between archivally reconstructible social history and literary self-presentation, but rather understands them as a productive site where Petrarch invents his own genealogy and simultaneously establishes the model of modern authorship—a model based on selective memory, symbolic reshaping, and the transformation of familial bonds into literary transmission.
Exchange and misunderstanding: Jacques Decour, Philisterburg
Jacques Decour's "Philisterburg" (1932, Éds. Allia, 2023) is paradigmatic as a text of a poetics of the "in-between": a hybrid work between diary, essay, travelogue, and political diagnosis, which, from the perspective of a young French student of German studies, explores Germany in the late Weimar Republic while simultaneously reflecting on the epistemic conditions of this observation. At its core is not a one-sided portrayal of the foreign, but rather the productive tension between proximity and distance, between participation and critical self-examination, which manifests itself both formally—in the interweaving of narrative and essayistic passages—and in terms of content. Decour's text unfolds a dense panorama of social, political, and cultural forces in which characters appear less as individuals than as bearers of structural positions within the Franco-German relationship. Particular attention is paid to the role of language and translation as sites of both misunderstanding and insight, the analysis of stereotypes and enemy images, and the comparison of different educational systems as expressions of divergent worldviews. Against the backdrop of the escalating political situation around 1930, the portrayal gains a prophetic sharpness without ever lapsing into deterministic certainty. The review highlights how Decour understands the "in-between" not as a harmonious synthesis, but as a conflict-ridden, knowledge-generating space in which cultural difference becomes visible and conceivable – and how precisely this literary stance lends the text its enduring relevance and intellectual urgency.
Building bridges, deepening ditches: Pauline Dreyfus
Pauline Dreyfus's "Un pont sur la Seine" (2025), beginning with the catastrophe of a ferry accident in 1828, unfolds the story, spanning generations, of two village communities separated by the Seine, whose fates are intertwined in the construction, destruction, and reconstruction of a bridge. Through the Vernet family and its genealogical branches, the novel traces the transformation from an agrarian milieu to an industrial society and onward into a post-industrial culture of memory, with historical turning points—wars, the Popular Front, occupation, deindustrialization—inscribed as structuring forces in the lives of its characters. At the same time, the narrative insists on its own artificiality: characters appear less as psychologically singular individuals than as typified bearers of social positions, whose conflicts—for example, between a vintner and a factory worker, a Resistance heiress and a politician of memory—make the persistence of societal divisions visible. The essay explores how the central poetic principle of the novel lies in the multidimensional construction of the bridge: as a historical object, a topographical axis, a social diagnostic tool, and a philosophical metaphor that, in the sense of a self-reflexive poetics of history, does not foster reconciliation but rather produces and makes visible difference. In this dialectic of documentation and fiction, of historical accuracy and ironic distance, Dreyfus's text proves to be both a conscious continuation and a critical break with the tradition of the historical social novel: he demonstrates that the grand narratives of progress and connection fail in the face of micro-social realities and that every form of historical narrative—in the novel as well as in the museum project he conceived—must necessarily reflect on its own logic of construction.
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-argument to what he sees as a hegemonic, pro-Israel discursive order. The review meticulously reconstructs Sieffert's argument—from France's historical entanglement with Israel and the analysis of media and rhetorical mechanisms to his 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.
Bridging the gap and self-correction: Ernst Robert Curtius
Ernst Robert Curtius's "The Literary Pioneers of the New France," a product of the immediate postwar period born from the experience of political defeat, opens up a deliberately counter-movement, a European-oriented interpretive space. By presenting key French authors (Gide, Rolland, Claudel, Suarès, Péguy) as bearers of an intellectual renewal in 1918/20, Curtius engages less in neutral literary mediation than in a cultural-political intervention against national resentments and stereotypical images of France. This review highlights that Curtius's argument rests on a twofold movement: on the one hand, the deconstruction of the German cliché of rationalist, "Latin" France through the demonstration of transnational, and especially "Germanic," influences; on the other hand, the construction of a "true France" that can serve as a pedagogical projection screen for a renewed, European-oriented Germany. The tension between documented enmity (for example, in the case of Suarès) and its programmatic overlay through the idea of Europe is not leveled, but rather read as a productive contradiction. The review critically highlights the book's selective approach and its philosophical hierarchy of values, which excludes certain currents of thought while normatively elevating others. Overall, Curtius's study thus appears as a project that is both bound to its time and methodologically groundbreaking: a rhetorically driven self-correction of national perceptions that places literary studies in the service of intellectual understanding.
The Sitcom Dictatorship: Political Thought, Literary Form, Machiavelli and Giorgia Meloni in Hélène Frappat
Hélène Frappat's novel "Nerona" (2025) portrays the rule of a right-wing populist dictator as a simultaneously grotesque and frighteningly precise model of contemporary politics: In an unnamed European nation, Nerona governs by decree and constant media staging, while a polyphonic, fragmented narrative structure – speeches, interviews, prophetic chants, film scenes – makes visible the simultaneity of power, violence, and repression; central motifs are the mythologizing of one's own origins, the systematic construction of "enemies within," the perversion of humanitarian discourses, for example in the migrant camp, and the escalation to apocalyptic self-destruction, which culminates in the figure of the Matricidium and the Nero topos. The review argues that Frappat's literary form itself generates knowledge: by modeling populism as a "sitcom"—an endless repetition of affective and rhetorical patterns devoid of learning—she combines genre poetics with political theory; at the same time, the review reads the novel as a Machiavellian parody in which classical concepts like "virtù" or "fortuna" are transformed into cynical management logics. The intertwining of discourse analysis and aesthetics is highlighted: the polyphony functions as a democratic counter-model to monologic populism, while the figure of Nerona can be read as a condensation of real political actors (especially Giorgia Meloni) without lapsing into mere satire. Overall, the interpretation shows that Frappat's novel is less a dystopian exaggeration than a diagnosis: populist rule appears as a regime of language and perception, against which literature, through its formal complexity, offers a critical counter-perception.
Brittany begins in the mind: A tribute to Jack Kerouac by Pierre Adrian
Pierre Adrian's "Le rêve inachevé de Jack Kerouac" (2026) reconstructs and reshapes Jack Kerouac's failed Brittany trip (1965) into a dual model of movement encompassing literary pilgrimage and self-discovery: Starting from Kerouac's genealogical obsession – the return to a Breton origin that proves unattainable – Adrian constructs an associatively structured, intertextually dense travel narrative that imagines Brest as a melancholic space of resonance between American Beat aesthetics and Breton culture; the "unfinished" Satori serves as a leitmotif of a poetics of failure, in which the missed enlightenment becomes productive. The essay demonstrates that Adrian's text is less a documentary reconstruction than a continuation of Kerouac's "Satori à Paris": While Kerouac's spontaneous prose records an immediate, disoriented experience, Adrian's writing appears as a reflective, centripetal approach that semantically charges the historical failure and transforms it into an elegiac narrative. Thus, the structural parallel between genealogical quest and existential uprooting is explored, and Brest is read as a topos of a "waiting possibility." The interpretation pursues the thesis that identity here is not genealogically but literarily constructed ("terre sans aïeux"). A certain tendency toward mythologizing, however, remains discernible: The interpretation affirms Adrian's reading, which, admittedly, accentuates the ruptures and ironies in Kerouac's work in favor of a coherent symbolic representation of failure. Overall, the interpretation of Adrian's transformation of a biographical failure into a literary myth shows and makes plausible that Adrian is less explaining Kerouac than productively continuing his unfinished nature.
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.
Song in Chaos: Apocalypse, Nomadism and Resistance in the work of Mathieu Belezi
Mathieu Belezi's "Cantique du chaos" depicts a post-apocalyptic world that has emerged from a biblically exaggerated flood event, and whose political and existential order is characterized by violence, emptiness, and uprooting: At its center is the aging desperado Théo Gracques, who, after a failed attempt to retreat as a hermit, flees with Chloé and her children across devastated Europe and America, while his present is incessantly intertwined with the lyrically condensed memories of his lost love Léonore and the death of their child; after further losses and increasing physical decline, his journey comes to a standstill at the Orinoco, where he dies and leaves his last poem to a young woman who keeps it in remembrance. The essay interprets this narrative arc as a triply structured poetics—between road novel, epic, and lyric cycle—in which being on the move is simultaneously spatial movement, the work of remembering, and the dying process. It precisely elucidates how Belezi, through the interweaving of a mythical opening hymn, prosaic chapters of escape, and poetic diary entries, establishes a "poetics of the end": writing here appears not as a representation of the world, but as the final autonomous act in a world without alternatives. The hybrid form is interpreted as a response to the depicted catastrophe—the baroque abundance of language against the emptiness of the devastated world, the lyrical transcendence of time against the linearity of decay, the female characters as bearers of action and tradition against the exhausted male narrator. By closely linking these formal and thematic lines, the review shows the novel not only as a dystopian narrative, but as a reflection on the conditions of literature itself: The “cantique” becomes the last, precariously continuing form of meaning-making in the face of total disintegration.
All the Guilty: The Pelicot Trial as Documentary Theatre by Milo Rau and Servane Dècle
Milo Rau and Servane Dècle have created an oratorio in 40 fragments from the trial material of the Mazan rapes, "Le Procès Pelicot," which transforms the historical criminal trial against Dominique Pelicot and his 50 co-defendants into a polyphonic theatrical document: indictments, witness statements, street interviews, psychiatric reports, feminist manifestos, perpetrator biographies, and SMS dialogues are assembled into a panorama that aims to reveal not the legal truth, but the deep social structure of violence. This interpretation traces how Rau operates on several levels simultaneously: poetically, through the choice of the oratorio as a form of meditative contemplation without scenic action; intertextually, through the framing with Petrarch's "Ascension du Mont Ventoux" as a critique of the male gaze; and dramaturgically, through the arrangement of the 40 fragments, which ranges from the external legal framework through perpetrator biographies and sociological analysis to feminist counter-arguments. The interpretation reveals that Rau's most powerful decisions are often decisions of omission: no pathos, no political class, no synthesis of open questions of justice. At the center is Gisèle Pelicot herself—not as a saint or icon, but as a political actor whose refusal to accept the hus-clos becomes the fundamental gesture of the entire piece and who, in the epilogue, beyond the 40 numbered fragments, has the last word.

When you say that you can't say anything more
Alain Robbe-Grillet with Emmanuelle Lambert: A young woman arrives [...]
So where does the joy come from?
Tanguy Viel published a vivarium, i.e., a system, in Minuit in 2024. [...]
Virgil and the Scent of the Great Fire
C'est le 16 Juillet je scrute le Journal du Ciel. Je note le nom de [...]
Free language from phrases and empty words
Paul prefers to rest all the way to the point where he is empported, [...]
These barely conceived creatures of the painters
On les distingue à peine tant ils sont petits, au fond de cette [...]
Proust himself on an old, crackling gramophone
Les mondes mettent longtemps à mourir, plus encore à disparaître tout [...]
Repairing time with the materials of time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAc5gJCDEJ4 Alice Guy, Les Résultats [...]