The article aims at suggesting the role of the Napoleonic supernatural in Balzac’s youth novel Le Centenaire (1822) as a counter-discourse to – and thus a locus of negotiation for – his later poetics of Realism. The investigation is held through a socio-poetical, close-reading based analysis of the revenant theme in both Le Centenaire and Le Colonel Chabert (1832-1844). First, the well-known political nature of Chabert as a revenant is associated to Bérigheld as his binary opposite: if Chabert embodies the uncanny persistence of the Empire during the Restauration, the centuries-old sorcerer who haunts Tullius, a young Napoleonic general, symbolizes Tullius’ monarchist temptation during the Empire. Nevertheless, the supernatural powers Tullius receives from Béringheld can be associated with the mythological features the Napoleonic soldiers accorded to their Emperor. If Chabert represent a counter-discourse to Tullius’ supernatural abilities, Balzac’s realism in the Comédie humaine can thus be considered as a reversal of the Napoleonic myth, so rooted in the authors early years.

For Edmond Rostand, dramatic writing is a medium ensuring communion between the author and the spectator, a bond questioned by Plato. This article studies how Edmond Rostand’s poetic plays illustrate the quest for the public’s understanding of the poet and how the characters thrive for their lost social recognition. His works shed light on the poet at work, each of the characters being an accomplished or budding versifier to reveal that poetry is legitimate work, which requires skills. Edmond Rostand’s poetic style deconstructs literary and social norms that have led to his contemporaries’ loss of authenticity. Misunderstood by theater goers and critics, disappointment led the playwright to improvisation and to pantomime, in which gestures could not alter the fragile and fleeting idea, making poetry easier to comprehend and bridging the gap between the author and his audience, establishing the poet as a worthy citizen again.

Our society’s utilitarian premises imply that only that which can be possessed, mastered and quantified can be said to lead to pleasure and contentment. This article contends that an alternative to this stance, which according to a number of philosophers can lead to ennui and despair, can be found in Albert Samain’s poetical and prose works. Samain’s writings suggest that things acquire more depth and aura once they are lost and poeticised through nostalgia and longing, and thus that absence can make a moment or an experience more present than it was when it was actually happening. And so, in spite of the melancholy which is almost inevitably attached to poetical reveries, the latter are more likely to lead to a certain form of quietude than the mere possession of the thing itself.

This article focuses on the figure of the poet in Apollinaire’s « Le Poète assassiné ». We try to show the connections that are established between loss and poetic glory. In the tale, the hero, Croniamantal, becomes successively Apollo and Orpheus. As in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, he is going to lost his beloved (story of Apollo and Daphne) before being slaughtered (the death of Orpheus). To reach glory, the poet has to sacrifice everything including himself.

The article demonstrates the connections between motherhood and the feeling of loss experienced by a woman and a mother in Marie Petitcuénot's autobiographical novel, Ce qui gronde (2021). Based on a feminist critical approach, on care theory and on psychoanalytic theories, the study presents how motherhood affects the feminine and maternal identity and examines how Marie Petitcuénot manages to find herself through writing. The impact of motherhood on her life and her feminine/maternal identity is analyzed through her experience of childbirth, the postpartum period and her family daily routine, which affects her the most.

The author was able to transform the story of the disappearance of Amandine Moulin, which embodyed the loss of the meaning of life, in a work of analysis and a thoughtful prospecting. In fact, working on the reconstruction of meaning leads her to boldly explain the mechanism of destruction following the influence of manipulation and narcissistic perversion. We will there fore try to demonstrate that the motif of loss in this novel outlines the path of an individuation of the self, considering that Amandine will eventually be mature and will recover her missing part of soul. We will first highlight the great moments of this plural loss experienced by the narrator and the other characters. Then, we will deepen the different dimensions of this loss of meaning and trace the course of individuation as explained by the C.G. Jung.

Étienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon (1786-1864) was the author of numerous novels belonging to different genres. However, if he wasn’t completely forgotten by the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th c., it was thanks to a long list of apocryphal memoirs attributed to famous people which in fact he wrote himself. At first, this paper shows reactions from the press in 1829 after the publication of Mémoires d’une femme de qualité sur Louis XVIII and Mémoires de la comtesse Du Barri. Although some journalists chose to perpetuate the fiction that the memoirs were authentic, others denounced them as false and heavily criticized this kind of literary enterprise. Thereafter, the article focuses on Lamothe-Langon’s response to his critics and on his vision of apocryphal memoirs in his preface to Les Après-diners de S. A. S. Cambacérès (1837).

In the poem Les Fossiles (1854), Louis Bouilhet tells the story of the evolution of life. Inspired by various naturalists, he imagines the emergence of life on Earth, the birth of species, and their extinction followed by the emergence of new forms of life. The destiny of humankind is subordinate to this law of nature: humans will be supplanted by more perfect beings. The purpose of this article is to consider the influence of Charles Bonnet's palingenetic philosophy on Bouilhet from the perspective of epistemocritical methodology, allowing the identification of epistemological transfers between the work of the naturalist and that of the poet.

In his short novel published before À Rebours, entitled À vau-l’eau, Huysmans tells a story of a protagonist unable to find good food. His quest for a passable restaurant remains unfulfilled, and joins other unfulfilled needs linked to his social life. It becomes clear that behind this quest, told with numerous details and a significant emphasis, there are other, more profound needs that Huysmans will name, more and more directly, in his post-naturalist novels. At the deepest level, the quest comes down to the impossibility to accept life’s difficulties, its duality, and to the wound of an unhappy childhood and a lost mother, so little named and therefore so present in Huysmans’ works.

What is Rachilde’s vocation? Could her life have taken another course rather than the literary way? According to what she declares in her autobiographical or semi-autobiographical texts, it turns out that this profession, chosen consciously in her early years, had saved her from madness. Drawing inspiration from the psychoanalytical observations contained in Catherine Millot’s book La Vocation de l’écrivain, the present study attempts to establish the sources of the literary career chosen by Rachilde, her own ways of exercising it and the point of achievement that she could reach by accomplishing certain choices. For Rachilde, there is no enjoyment outside of writing.

The author of the paper propounds a hollistic outlook on how French writers of the 19th century perceived the fate of Poland in the most dramatic moment of its history, when it was fighting a fierce, and almost hopeless battle for its independence, having disappeared from the map of Europe. In textes of many poets, publicists and men of letters in France one can find a unique set of motifs that not only reveal a highly consistent way of thinking with respect to the situation Poland was in at the time, but also build a parallel vision of its future, and even hold a belief that Poland was to play a special role among European countries. In this paper the author identifies and discusses six such motifs.

This paper aims to highlight the resemblances existing between the poetic art by Isidor Ducasse (Lautréamont) and the poetic and aesthetic realisations of some expressionist authors. We have mainly analysed the concept of antagonism which seems to be a cardinal component of both the Lautréamont’s poetics and most expressionist works. Another part of our analysis is dedicated to the hypertrophy of the author’s I instance, emblematic in the Lautréamont’s work, reminding the expressionist principle of irradiation of the author’s I. Furthermore, we have analysed the principle of exaggeration, so much visible in Chants de Maldoror. It aims an antinaturalistic derealisation of the poetic universe as well as a caricatured painting of the political and sociological reality. All those aspects enable some sociocritical participation of the literary work in a changing world.