Quêtes littéraires

Babeuf's Gospel

2025-12-30T00:37:21+01:00

It might seem strange - even shocking - to link Babeuf with the Bible. After all, he rejected Catholicism early in the French Revolution, giving up his birth name, François-Noël, and choosing the Roman names Camille and later Gracchus to better reflect his commitment to equality - a cause that eventually led to his execution in 1797. Yet, the Bible appears often in his writings, and the figure of Christ plays an important role in how Babeuf saw himself: first as an apostle, then as a martyr for Equality. Babouvism, which helped shape early communist ideas, draws from the Bible, often using parody or imitation. The Conspiracy of the Equals followed this path, aiming to create a new moral and political code - a “Decalogue of holy humanity, of sans-culottism, of inalienable equity,” as Babeuf wrote in his Manifesto of the Plebeians (1795). This manifesto became a kind of modern gospel for the oppressed.

Alphonse de Lamartine and Jacob's Ladder

2025-12-30T00:37:20+01:00

Alphonse de Lamartine, a Romantic poet deeply imbued with biblical culture, places the motif of Jacob’s ladder, drawn from the Book of Genesis, at the heart of his work. This article aims to analyze the various reformulations of this image in order to show that the writer conceives the journey toward God as a double movement: a spiritual ascent followed by a return to the human condition. For Lamartine, to pray is to climb the staircase of faith while knowing to stop at the very moment that the flames of adoration grow too intense. At the same time, the image of Jacob’s ladder becomes increasingly prominent in his work, strengthened by its integration into such diverse fields as science, religion, and philosophy. Lamartine employs all available means to emphasize the necessity of a metaphysical ascent, in which the Creator, whether near or distant, always remains the ultimate horizon.

Rewriting the Biblical Feminine. A Reading of Marie Krysinska's “Eve”

2025-12-30T00:37:19+01:00

This article presents an analysis of Marie Krysinska’s poem “Eve,” in which the poet rewrites the biblical myth in order to free the protagonist from the burden of original sin. First, the study shows how Krysinska refocuses the narrative on Eve, while creating a feminine Eden where desire and nature unite without guilt. Next, it analyzes the reformulation of the relationship with the serpent and the questioning of categories of gender, body, and voice. Finally, it highlights the erasure of male figures and the interruption of the narrative before the Fall, which transform Eve into an autonomous and innocent figure, emblematic of a poetic and feminist reinterpretation of the myth.

Postdiluvian Worlds. The Modern Legacy of the Biblical Flood Narrative: On Rimbaud's “Après le Déluge” and Supervielle's L’Arche de Noé

2025-12-30T00:37:18+01:00

This article examines how the biblical narrative of the Flood evolves in the modern era through two rewritings: Arthur Rimbaud’s “Après le Déluge” and Jules Supervielle’s L’Arche de Noé. Both authors radically transform the ethical meaning of the original text, while distancing themselves from Romantic reinterpretations such as Vigny’s “Le Déluge”. Under the influence of symbolist aesthetics and modernist “imaginaire”, the biblical message is profoundly reshaped. In Rimbaud, God and Noah vanish; the catastrophe becomes the starting point for a poetic rebirth grounded in immanence and creative renewal. Supervielle adopts a burlesque and uncanny tone, blending the marvelous with the grotesque to depict a postdiluvian world stripped of spiritual certainties. The study draws on the tools of transtextuality (Genette), Bénichou’s notion of the “sacre de l’écrivain”, Bachelard’s imaginary, and Kristeva’s semiotics to show how biblical ethics give way to a new form of spirituality, one based on language that supplants the divine Word.

The Figure of Salomé in Late 19th Century Narratives: the Biblical Hypotext Reinvested in the Age of Decadence

2025-12-30T00:37:17+01:00

The end of the 19th century - marked by a wave of melancholy and pessimism induced in part by the loss of religious sentiment, and a concomitant rejection of modernism among the Decadents - sees the intense resurgence of the myth of Salome. Perceived as a naive child (Flaubert) or a poisonous flower (Huysmans), an occult yet ever-present shadow (Lorrain) or a satirical figure (Laforgue), Salomé during this so-called decadent era displays a protean face and becomes a catalyst for the anxieties of the time. This article aims to further examine the reading of the biblical hypotext by anti-modern writers as well as the way in which it is assimilated and then reinvested in the disillusioned era of the late 19th century, in order to highlight the modalities and challenges of this hypertextuality. The examples of Lorrain, Flaubert or even Laforgue will help us understand how a fable from the New Testament reemerges in the age at the time of decadence.

Laughing with Christ: Renée Vivien and Journalistic Pastiche in Le Christ, Aphrodite et M. Pépin

2025-12-30T00:37:16+01:00

The article analyzes Renée Vivien’s Le Christ, Aphrodite et M. Pépin (1907), in which the poet rewrites Gospel episodes as satirical journalistic pastiches. Through this anachronistic rewriting, she questions the resonance of the Christian message during the Belle Époque, blending the sacred and the profane. Christ is presented in a subversive light, embodying both dissent and disillusionment with modernity. A deep tension emerges beneath the ironic surface, reflecting the author’s own spiritual journey on the eve of her conversion to Catholicism. The article seeks to highlight the complexity and paradoxes of Vivien’s approach, oscillating between irony and mystical pursuit in a subtle and critical prose.

The Religious Mysteries of O. V. de L. Milosz – or the Staging of a Work's Conversion

2025-12-30T00:37:15+01:00

This article proposes to read the three religious mysteries of O.V. de L. Milosz, Miguel Mañara, Méphiboseth, and Saul de Tarse, as a staging of the author’s spiritual, but above all poetic and stylistic journey. We will examine how the characters’ search for a simple language, inspired by that of the Bible, prepares and even brings about the shift in Milosz’s work towards mystical and metaphysical poetry. Thus, Miguel Mañara’s conversion leads the character on the path of prayer and paves the way for the birth of a new, purified language. In Méphiboseth and Saul de Tarse, the characters’ journeys through the desert become metaphors for a poetic work of language exploration, allowing the emergence of a mystical language that is also that of Milosz’s last poems. This poetry of the desert then takes as its double horizon the rhythm of the Hebrew psalms and metaphysical silence.

Palimpsest and Biblical Prosody in Saint Exupéry

2025-12-30T00:37:14+01:00

A mystic without faith, Antoine de Saint Exupéry nonetheless imbued his writing with a religious fervor by resorting to the sacred text, as he himself confided in November 1943 to his beloved Nelly de Vogüé: “Once again, I have no vocabulary other than religious to express myself.” While the thematic and aesthetic imprints of the Old and New Testaments clearly affect Saint Exupéry’s prose, it seems that the religious climate in which each of the stories is bathed is reinforced by a resolutely biblical style, thus corroborating the religious predispositions of the prophet- or evangelist-like writer. This article examines the impact of the Bible on Saint Exupéry’s text, and more specifically the prosodic conventions of the parable and the psalm that govern certain features of Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s poetics.

Salvation Under the Sun: Resonances and Echoes of Ecclesiastes in Albert Camus's La Chute

2025-12-30T00:37:13+01:00

In La Chute (1956), Camus presents Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a hybrid figure drawing on Christ, Elijah, and especially John the Baptist, yet whose discourse resonates most strongly with that of Ecclesiastes. Similar to the preacher of Ecclesiastes, Clamence underscores the vanity of existence and adopts a speech that is oral, dogmatic, and quasi preaching in tone. This article proposes to read La Chute as a subversive reversal of Ecclesiastes. Through a posture of self-deification, Clamence distorts Solomonic wisdom and claims a narcissistic authority. His paradoxical conception of salvation lies in repetition and effacement: the circularity lamented by Ecclesiastes becomes, for him, a promise of immortality. Finally, his vocation as a “judge-penitent” ridicules the idea of a divine Judge while asserting his own superiority. These subversive echoes reveal the possibility of earthly happiness after the Edenic Fall.

Description of San Marco by Michel Butor: Vademecum and Artist's Book

2025-12-30T00:37:11+01:00

Description de San Marco can be characterized as an ‘artist’s book’ in which Michel Butor is committed to textualize a thousand-year-old building: St Mark’s Basilica in Venice. Meanwhile Butor updates this complex architectural ensemble and invites the reader to take part in the reading of it as well as of the text. This study regards the second section of Description de San Marco, devoted to the vestibule, where Butor initiates a scriptural dialogue with the series of sub-titled mosaics in the narthex, all devoted to pilot scenes of the Old Testament.

God’s Broken Writing: Fiction of Ruins and Biblical Palimpsest in Alain Nadaud's Le Livre des malédictions

2025-12-30T00:37:09+01:00

This article offers a hypertextual reading of Nadaud’s novel Le Livre des malédictions, conceived as a biblical palimpsest: a fragmentary, speculative, and secular rewriting of the Mosaic episode, which gives a second narrative life to the shards of the sacred text (the Tablets of the Law broken by Moses), transforming them into material that is both novelistic and philosophical. Through the fate of David Tracher, a paleographer obsessed with the quest for the first Tablets of the Law, the narrative investigation unfolds as a fiction of ruins: broken fragments, extravagant hypotheses, and fragmentary textuality outline a writing that becomes both trace and relic. Drawing on the notion of palimpsest (Genette), Nadaud turns the text itself into a space of superimpositions, rewritings, and obfuscations, where memory and invention merge.

Parable as Legacy: The Prodigal Son and the Paths to Freedom in Armel Job and José Pliya

2025-12-30T00:37:08+01:00

This article offers a comparative analysis of Le frère du fils prodigue by Armel Job and Parabole by José Pliya, two contemporary rewritings of the Lukan parable of the Prodigal Son. Drawing on the transtextual dynamics of the biblical narrative, the study shows how these authors, shaped by distinct historical and cultural contexts, explore themes of freedom, moral responsibility, and the paternal figure. In Job’s work, rooted in the humanistic and rural heritage of French-speaking Belgium, the parable becomes an ethical space in which justice, mercy, and individual emancipation intersect. Pliya, shaped by postcolonial fractures and diasporic imaginaries, offers a darker interpretation dominated by manipulation, determinism, and the collapse of filial bonds. The analysis highlights the ways in which these playwrights shift the parable’s centre of gravity from the divine to the human, turning it into a dramatic laboratory where contemporary tensions – identity, free will, and the complexity of fraternal relations – are replayed. Thus, rewriting appears as a critical tool thatreveals the vitality of twenty-first-century Francophone theatre.

2025-12-05T00:02:11+01:00

Preface

2025-12-05T00:04:16+01:00