“I'm not a historian: I came to the event of August 4th knowing nothing.”
(Bertrand Guillot)

“The depths of hearts are undoubtedly a stew which irritates historians.”
(Joseph Andras)

 “The initial impetus was Joël Pommerat’s play, in which the night of August 4th was one of the most spectacular moments”: this is how Bertrand Guillot, author of L’Abolition des privilèges (Les Avrils, 2022), described his debt to the play, Ça ira (1), during an interview at the IMAREV 18-21 seminar. Fin de Louis, created in 2015, is now an international success. B. Guillot also emphasized the pleasure of his return to factual sources, which he compared to a “journey” to a distant country where we experience familiarity

 In 2016, the seminar on “the imaginary worlds of the French Revolution” began as a result of the Pommerat effect. The previous decade and its turbulent political and social climate, where revolutionary references became prominent, had also played its part and given the measure of a wider phenomenon of re-use, at once political, medial, aesthetic and commercial. However, Ça ira displayed an unprecedented ability to instruct the subject matter of history in a work of representation in which the historian’s craft and the plunge into archives had found their place thanks to the call for an expert. This use of scholarly history and its instruments was not new in itself: Ariane Mnouchkine called out to historians’ expertise for 1789. But apart from the fact that our relationship with historians has undoubtedly changed in nature, the period opened in 2016 has been marked by an outpouring of fictional representations of the Revolution, from 14 Juillet (Eric Vuillard) to Pour vous combattre, in which Joseph Andras reinterprets the figure of Camille Desmoulins (Actes Sud, 2022), as well as Clément Schneider’s Un violent désir de bonheur (2018), Pierre Schoeller’s Un peuple et son roi (2018) and Arnaud Maïsetti’s Saint-Just & des poussières (L’Arbre vengeur, 2021).

Two years after Ça ira, director Pierre Schoeller told our research group about his obsession with archives in the making of his own film which pays homage to Renoir’s La Marseillaise (1937). At the same time, Florent Groazel and Younn Locard published the first volume of their splendid graphic sum (Révolution I: Liberté, Actes Sud, 2019), based on an impressive array of source material. It is at this junction between the curiosity, and even appetite, often expressed by artists and writers for historical knowledge, and their construction of a vision and point of view on the event, that the colloquium will situate its interrogations. In what way does imagining the Revolution imply a historian’s gesture without being a historian?

 By maintaining the verb rather than the noun in its title, the colloquium intends to emphasize the active, programmatic, instituting dimension of the Revolution’s imaginaries, which need a relationship that is both confrontational and empathetic with historians, their knowledge, their questions, their methods, their historiographical stances and their own relationship to fictions and imaginaries, now claimed as a territory of their discipline : consider the international colloquium La Révolution en 3D : Textes, images, sons, 1787-2440 (Sorbonne Université, March 14-16, 2019) organized by Pierre Serna and Anne Simonin. On the literary side, seminal works, in whose tradition the colloquium in part falls, have instead invested the vast corpus of literary fictions by analyzing their poetic components as efforts to write history: Les Romans de la Révolution, 1792-1912 (Belin, 2014, dir. Jean-Marie Roulin and Aude Déruelle) and Fictions de la Révolution, 1789-1912 (dir. Jean-Marie Roulin and Corinne Saminadayar-Perrin), looked at the ways in which the Revolution figures in “fictional cores” over a long nineteenth century haunted by the question of the meaning of History. The aim of the present symposium is to shift the focus of inquiry to the relationship between history as a discipline and its work. How does the creator constitute and invent his autonomy from a form of dependence on history, which can be very clearly assumed, sometimes even in the name of an artist’s mission? In 1880, Zola rejected the mediocrity of fashionable melodramas, calling for a theater whose genuine civic and educational vocation would require a serious grounding in history. Romain Rolland’s theater, Renoir’s La Marseillaise as it relates to the Front Populaire, and Mnouchkine's 1789, all these works revive this question.

 To measure this relationship between history and historians, the symposium proposes to go back to the “1830 moment”, the starting point of a long series of histories of the Revolution and of historiographical, ideological and political debates inseparable from the scientific foundation of the discipline, which started to break away from the era of positivists and memorialists. It was also a turning point in the construction of fictions of the event. In 1872, a certain Charles Vatel, a lawyer, noted in a pioneering work of theatrical historiography that the “novels of Ducray-Duminil” and the dramas of Pixérécourt, in their portrayal of the Revolution and its figures, were part of a “system still reigning in 1829”, the year of publication of a novel that sought to break new ground: Balzac’s Les Chouans. From the “Trois Glorieuses” to the present day, how have artists and writers negotiated their relationship with historians of the Revolution?

Among the questions we would like to see addressed:

• The relationship between authors and the historical discipline. What knowledge(s) does artistic and literary representation, in the diversity of its mediums, intend to produce, or not? How does it intend to make history? With a view to suggesting what kind of relationship to the past(s), but also to the present? What is the weight of the ideological debates that echo through the historiography of the French Revolution?
• Target audiences, horizons of expectation. For most authors today, the creative gesture is inseparable from a critical one. Can we speak of a pedagogical ambition? How can we contribute to the recomposing of a collective imaginary capable of countering the fixed commonplaces of “imagery”? How can we make ourselves heard? How can we make ourselves understood? - Creative practices. How do you make history (by calling on experts, changing scale and point of view, editing effects, “hijacking” the archive, etc.)?  How do we deal with the sheer volume of documentation, the complexity of events and a global historiography? What resources specific to artistic creation are mobilized?

One-page proposals specifying the focus of the paper and its corpus should be sent by March 1, 2024 at the latest to: olivier.ritz@u-paris.fr, florence.lotterie@u-paris.fr and sphlucet@gmail.com 

Scientific Committee: Antoine De Baecque (ENS-PSL), Quentin Deluermoz (Université Paris Cité), Jean-Clément Martin (Paris I-Panthéon Sorbonne), Paule Petitier (Université Paris Cité), Allan Potofsky (Université Paris Cité), Jean-Marie Roulin (Université Jean Monnet-Saint-Étienne), Pierre Serna (Paris I-Panthéon Sorbonne), Armelle Talbot (Université Paris Cité).

Documents attachés :

APPEL-Imaginer la Révolution