Contenu du sommaire : Le roman parlementaire

We study how three republican novelists of the 19th century (Erckmann-Chatrian, Dumas, Hugo) mention the eloquence in revolutionary assemblies. How to integrate long rhetorical discourses without weakening the novelistic prose? How to make the blunted classical eloquence sharp again?

Several novels of the Rougon-Macquart cycle and above all Son Excellence Eugène Rougon tackle political and parliamentary issues which mattered a great deal for Emile Zola but which have drawn little attention so far. Their analysis must be conducted in the view of naturalism. Indeed in this field as in others, Zola mingles reality and fiction so closely as to convey a precise idea in a particular context in which he writes. He intends to show the necessity to amend the political system of the newly born Third Republic which already seems to take a turn which he disapproves of. By tackling this issue, in particular in Son Excellence Eugene Rougon, which is both a paragon of parliamentary anti-novel and antiparliamentary novel, we can fully understand the great mission that Zola confers to the novelist.

Elected to the French Parliament in 1893, Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé thought being useful. But he soon became disillusioned, as can be seen in his novel Les morts qui parlent [the Speaking Dead]. Published in 1899, the novel can be read as a report on the Parliament, but it is first of all a satire and an accusation. It depicts the atmosphere of hate in the hemicycle, the inefficiency of parliamentary work and the way the representatives only repeated old discourses disconnected with the present.

Au Pays des parlementeurs is not a novel on Parliamentarism. This book written in 1901, old fashioned in style and composition, present a series of static portrays and deals with usual topics of the author: anti-parliamentarism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Masonry. According to its nationalist views, the real power within French democracy would belong to a Jewish family – Warmeschwein / Rothschild – who would manipulate of its sole interest the established bodies and the Republicain system itself.

Marie-Thérèse de Marnyhac (1875-1962), known under the pen-name of T. Trilby, is the author of sentimental novels and of children's literature. The Bouboule novels, published between 1927 and 1937 is read in this paper as an attempt for a woman married with a politician to find a positive role to play in political life. Her antiparliamentarian attitudes are shown as a mean to seek for a feminine discursive way to express her social and political concerns in the margins of official discourses.

During Belle Époque, the Parliament makes up the centre of political activity. In his work Les Hommes de bonne volonté, Jules Romains proposes a dramatized reconfiguration of parliamentary universes and his intrigues. Theatre, like policy, are some words of representations, words in representation – and the novel is a means of representation. However, the writer suggests a partial image, the other side of the picture and the wings of parliamentary space.

A quite democratic voting method allowed the election of many Ukrainian members to the two first Legislative Diets of the Second Republic. Coming from various areas and political parties, they did not succeed to promote a common policy, neither to play a genuine role in the parliamentarian life, where they were a minority. A territorial, political and strategic gap prevented any durable collaboration between them.

In the first two narratives of his Monde Réel cycle, Aragon turns Jaurès into someone that is both an historical figure and a character in a novel. He thus allows the militant reader to question a complex socialist leader that the French communist party did not always view positively, before he came out as the very incarnation of the struggles of the working classes from the past and for the future. As for Aragon as a novelist, he acknowledges Jaurès was a voice, that of the people, for he was an unequalled orator whose mastery of the art of speaking penetrates Aragon's own words in an uncanny mimetic effect.