‘La Sorcière’ de Jules Michelet: l'envers de l'histoire
2005; Oxford University Press; Volume: 59; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/fs/kni246
ISSN1468-2931
Autores Tópico(s)Renaissance Literature and Culture
ResumoSous la direction de Paule Petitier. Paris, Champion, 2004. 270 pp. Hb €45. Michelet's study of witchcraft and demonology remains to this day a perplexing work. The division of the text into two contrasting sections disrupts the reader's expectations. Another problem is the apparent mismatch between Michelet's desire to write an objective form of history and his manifest eagerness to mythologize the figure of the witch. Even readers well acquainted with Michelet's other writings find it hard to get to grips with La Sorcière. In his concluding remarks, Max Milner tellingly describes the text as ‘un livre unique, inclassable, magnifique’ (p. 260). The essays contained in the present volume go a long way to pinpoint the difficulties and identify the challenges posed by the text. What makes this such a consistently good volume is a commonality of approach among the contributors. By this I do not mean that they follow a shared or identical methodology. It is rather that most contributors practise a form of close reading that pays particular attention to language and metaphor. An example of this is Muriel Louâpre's demonstration of how Michelet uses the image of contagion in order to rethink the idea of transmission. Attention to detail and an acute awareness of nuance characterize Paule Petitier's exploration of individual and collective subjectivity. In a densely argued piece, she draws on Foucault and Girard in order to demonstrate the manifold inversions and reversals that reverberate through the text. A number of essays do an excellent job in relating La Sorcière to Michelet's other writings of the Second Empire, not only to his grandiose, on-going project of the Histoire de France but also to his natural history studies, notably La Mer, as well as to his popular, moralizing works such as La Femme and L'Amour. We should recall that about the same time as he was glamorizing woman as both rebel and victim in La Sorcière, in these other books he was happily condemning contemporary women to a domestic destiny and a life of subservience. Michelet's use of his sources is examined by Nicole Jacques-Lefèvre, while Pierre Laforgue compares Michelet's witch with a near contemporary, Hugo's satyr. In an innovative piece, Eric Bordas — pace Barthes — rehabilitates Michelet as a writer with a talent for humour, satire and irony. A particularly impressive contribution is the multi-layered essay by Philippe Régnier that investigates Michelet's obsession with woman as a redemptive figure in ways that reveal the historian's concealed indebtedness to Prosper Enfantin and Saint-Simonian feminism. This excellent volume helps us achieve a fuller understanding of a fascinating but still enigmatic late-Romantic text.
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