L’ESPACE DANS LES PIÈCES HÔTEL DES DEUX MONDES D’ÉRIC-EMMANUEL SCHMITT ET HUIS CLOS DE JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

Dans notre article, nous nous proposons d’analyser le rôle de l’espace dans la pièce Hôtel des Deux Mondes (1999) d’Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt en la comparant avec la pièce Huis clos (1944) de Jean-Paul Sartre. La pièce sartrienne nous servira de repère et de point de départ à l’analyse de l’espace chez Schmitt vu les nombreuses relations intertextuelles qui les relient. Cette intertextualité est visible sur le plan du contenu ainsi que sur le plan des idées exposées : l’existence humaine et la mort, la condition humaine, Dieu, le mysticisme. L’espace y joue un rôle essentiel. Il s’agit d’un espace fermé, clos, mais actif : dans Huis clos c’est un salon style Second Empire qui représente l’enfer, dans Hôtel des Deux Mondes une clinique qui se trouve entre la vie et la mort. À partir de différentes classifications de l’espace théâtral d’Hélène Laliberté, nous chercherons à déterminer la fonction mimétique de l’espace, c’est-à-dire le rôle de l’espace figuratif dans le déroulement de l’action. Pour mieux comprendre le rôle que joue l’espace fermé dans les deux pièces, nous utiliserons dans notre analyse les recherches de l’espace théâtral d’Anne Ubersfeld, surtout les deux types d’espace : le lieu scénique, ce même espace scénique « en tant qu’il est matériellement défini » (Ubersfeld, 1996a : 37), et l’espace dramatique, une abstraction qui « comprend non seulement les signes de la représentation, mais toute la spatialité virtuelle du texte, y compris ce qui est prévu comme hors scène » (Ubersfeld, 1996a : 37). Le but de notre article sera d’analyser ces deux types d’espace dans la pièce de Schmitt, leurs points communs et différences avec ceux de la pièce sartrienne.

Music, Theatre, and Diplomacy: The Paris Opéra during the Second Empire

One of the first accomplishments of the Second Empire (1852–70) was to bring the Opéra under the control of a committee of the most highly placed politicians in the land. While this had far-reaching consequences for the development of repertory in the capital and beyond, it also opened up the possibility of using the Opéra as a locus of diplomatic activity, and major works and productions were made to work for diplomatic purposes. The Opéra emerged as a site of four types of diplomatic activities: the spectacle of state visits, the celebration and monumentalizing of military victories, the restoration and maintenance of good relations, and the promotion of Napoléon’s imperial project. Occasionally, as at the end of the “Crimean war,” the Opéra served as one of the sites for a series of prolonged negotiations that would lead to formal treaties.

Zola and the Science of Painting

The article explores a paradox in Zola's writing: the resistance to advances in scientific theory by the author of Du Progrès dans les sciences et dans la poésie (1864), as the first of many such assimilations of scientific progress and artistic trends. This is exemplified by the challenge posed to his Naturalist aesthetic by Michel-Eugène Chevreul's seminal De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs (1839), popularised during the period of Zola's most sustained art criticism. This radical revision of the science of optics is increasingly accommodated in contemporary painting, from 1880 onwards, at the very moment of Zola's disenchantment with Impressionism. Although L'Œuvre, his novel of 1886, is set in the Second Empire (consistent with the historical limits of Les Rougon-Macquart), Zola inserts into his narrative the theory of complementary colours, the awkward anachronism notwithstanding, to explain his fictional painter's creative impotence. In relation to the latter, the article looks in detail at the genesis and textual details of a key passage in the novel in which Zola's irony at the expense of Chevreul's theories is almost explicit. At least as telling is his response to unsolicited advice about them: ‘J’ai plus de confiance dans l'observation directe que dans la théorie’. One could hardly conjure up a more succinct summary of Zola's unreconstructed approach to the science of painting which simultaneously testifies to his own principles of representation.

Émile Zola and the Literary Language of Climate Change

On 7 February 1861, John Tyndall, professor of natural philosophy, delivered a historical lecture: he could prove that different gases absorb heat to a very different degree, which implies that the temperate conditions provided for by the Earth's atmosphere are dependent on its particular composition of gases. The theoretical foundation of climate science was laid. Ten years later, on the other side of the Channel, a young and ambitious author was working on a comprehensive literary analysis of the French era under the Second Empire. Émile Zola had probably not heard or read of Tyndall's discovery. However, the article makes the case for reading Zola's Rougon-Macquart as an extensive story of climate change. Zola's literary attempts to capture the defining characteristic of the Second Empire led him to the insight that its various milieus were all part of the same ‘climate’: that of an all-encompassing warming. Zola suggests that this climate is man-made: the economic success of the Second Empire is based on heating, in a literal and metaphorical sense, as well as on stoking the steam-engines and creating the hypertrophic atmosphere of the hothouse that enhances life and maximises turnover and profit. In contrast to Tyndall and his audience, Zola sensed the catastrophic consequences of this warming: the Second Empire was inevitably moving towards a final débâcle, i.e. it was doomed to perish in local and ‘global’ climate catastrophes. The article foregrounds the supplementary status of Tyndall's physical and Zola's literary knowledge. As Zola's striking intuition demonstrates, literature appears to have a privileged approach to the phenomenon of man-induced climate change.

Ludwik Wołowski and His Contribution to the French Credit Revolution of the 19th Century

Ludwik Wołowski was a Polish November emigrant in France. There, he gained recognition as an outstanding economist, banker and republican politician. The article focuses on the issue of mortgage loan, which is extremely important for Wołowski. It presents both the theoretical concepts of the Pole from 1834, his political activity in the years 1848–1851 aimed at changing the provisions of the mortgage law in France, and finally the moment of co-creation by Wołowski Crédit Foncier, the first modern mortgage bank in France, and the further history of the bank managed by Wołowski, in the board of which he sat until his death in 1876. In the first part, the text presents not only the criticism of the French mortgage system by Wołowski (primarily the so-called secret mortgages), but also his draft changes and the loan and mortgage model proposed by him and the companies that may grant it. In the second, it shows the parliamentary activity of Wołowski, an attempt to force through appropriate changes in the banking law and the reasons for its defeat. In the third, the most extensive, the article describes not only the very moment of establishing Crédit Foncier and the two-year period of management by Wołowski, but also the further, controversial operation of the bank until the second half of the 1870s. All this against the backdrop of the changing French Monarchy of July, the Second Republic and the Second Empire.

„Notre génération est consolée!“

Selon le Trésor de la langue française, le substantif ‚libertaire‘ apparaît pour la première fois dans l’essai philosophique de Pierre-Joseph Proudhon De la justice dans la Révolution et dans l’Eglise paru en 1858, dans lequel il revendique une société juste où les individus seraient des sujets libres. Mais l’œuvre de référence aurait pu aussi renvoyer à une revue qu’un „précurseur de l’anarchisme“ (Maricourt), Joseph Déjacque, édite à New York et qui s’appelle Le Libertaire (1858-1861), même si cette revue était certainement peu connue et lue dans la France du Second Empire (Asholt 1998: 351-363). Déjacque avait dû s’exiler en 1851 et l’étude citée a fait condamner Proudhon et l’a obligé à s’exiler. Vallès, grand lecteur de Proudhon, avait publié un an plus tôt une première œuvre avec laquelle il se fait remarquer: L’Argent (1857) qui est un hypertexte du Manuel du spéculateur de Bourse de Proudhon paru en 1856, où celui-ci revendique de remplacer „l’anarchie industrielle“ du capitalisme par la „République industrielle“, c’est-à-dire le fédéralisme et le mutuellisme (Asholt 1984: 5-15). Si deux représentants du début de l’anarchisme en France se servent de cette notion de ‚libertaire‘, elle doit faire partie de leur vocabulaire philosophique et idéologique. Mais, malgré ce contexte, cette notion ne devient véritablement une référence pour l’anarchisme que vers la fin du XIXe siècle où des auteurs comme Zola ou Anatole France s’en servent.

The Aesthetics of the Human Beast: A Comparative Study of Zola’s L’Assommoir, Galdós’ La Desheredada and Crane’s Maggie

The concept of the human beast is assigned to the French novelist, Émile Zola, who is the first to codify principles of Naturalism, against which all future naturalist works would be compared. In his novels, especially in the saga Les Rougon-Macquart, the human beast, «la bête humaine», appears as a literary character embedded in the lower social strata, who, due to harsh working and living conditions in the French capital during the Second Empire, acts according to its most basic instincts. The actions of a human beast are violent and brutal and its behavior conditioned by limited education. In his novels, Zola applies the doctrines of biological determinism as well as the laws of heredity attained from scientific readings that were very popular among the intellectuals of the period. However, the theoretical principles recollected in Le roman expérimental (G. Charpentier et Cie Éditeurs, 1880) were not equally applied in other countries due to different literary precedents as well as diverse socio-historical and philosophical backgrounds. This paper aims to examine the nuances in the aesthetic representation of the human beast in Zola’s L’Assommoir (1877), Galdós’ La Desheredada (1881) and Crane’s Maggie, a Girl of the Streets (1843), delving into the behavioral patterns which shape the unique characteristics of their human beasts.