« La trace d’une époque finie dans les moeurs d’une époque nouvelle » : la crise de mémoire dans Le Chevalier des Touches de Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly

Abstract

« La trace d’une époque finie dans les moeurs d’une époque nouvelle » : The Memory Crisis in Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Le Chevalier des Touches In his historical novel Le Chevalier des Touches (1864), Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly paints a sombre picture of the former counterrevolutionary Chouan heroes of Normandy : over the first decades following the French Revolution, the aristocrats lose their ancestral castle and end up living in an anachronistic salon while slowly falling into collective oblivion. Therefore, this article argues that Barbey d’Aurevilly’s novel is concerned with a pressing memory crisis (in the sense of the term coined by Richard Terdiman) which manifests itself in the material sphere. For this purpose, the gradual decay of the nobles’ abodes will be analyzed, from the transformation of their castle to the asylum where the protagonist spends his last days. The examination of these intérieurs allows us to gain extensive insight into Barbey d’Aurevilly’s attachment to the Ancien Régime and his fundamental repudiation of the social changes occasioned by the political developments in 19th-century France.