From the CLAssic age to REStaurationS
Since its creation, and still today, two principles have guided the team’s work: multidisciplinarity and complementarity between individual and collective work. The multidisciplinarity considered here is based on joint questioning of objects, and not on a petition of a priori principles. This approach led to work on the Anecdote, then on the Secret, which, following study days and colloquia, gave rise to collective publications, both published (Presses universitaires de Rennes) and forthcoming (Classiques Garnier). This joint reflection, the concern to define vocabulary, the cross-fertilization of analytical grids, all contribute to questioning the relationship between History and Literature, enabling mutual enrichment and the establishment of common frames of reference. This is one of the major contributions of the CLARESS project. The latter is conceived as a deepening of the laboratory's transversal themes, adapted and specified according to the chronological relevance of the chosen period (second 16th century-first 19th century) and the specialties of each CLARESS member. Thus, over and above political scansions, the succession of regimes and academic caesuras, the team asserts a genuine coherence. Its aim is to consider the long term, which enables it to take a close look at the changes and reconfigurations of the public/private divide over the decades. This is reflected in our investment in the work of the laboratory (seminars and colloquia), with the aim of enriching POLEN's trans-period, multidisciplinary approach. Nevertheless, the CLARESS team also wishes to propose its own investigations, so as to welcome individual work and stimulate internal collective dynamics. The central axis of CLARESS' work is thus a reflection on the dialectical articulation between private and public, analyzed through writing practices. This distinction does not refer to a separation of literary spaces or genres, but to practices (in the sense developed by the History of Private Life), an approach that sums up the team's approach. Correspondence, for example, originally private, can be publicized through collective reading or printing. Court briefs bring private facts into the public sphere, recomposing them according to models stabilized by public usage (religious, legal, literary). Notions of use, appropriation and circulation are central to this approach, which focuses on the ongoing construction of relations between these two dimensions. Writing and the practices of writing are as much witnesses as they are supports, modes of defining as of transgressing the relationship between public and private. The CLARESS therefore questions the notion of norms, both as social rules and as political frameworks or social constraints. Three dimensions have been identified:
- The first level is that of public discourse on the private, often prescriptive, whether in religious pastoral care, political, legal or judicial discourse, or in the writing of history. Seen as authorities or institutions, the powers at play (whether ecclesiastical, political, scholarly or purely cultural) offer models that are then adopted, internalized, discussed, amended, corrected or even hijacked. Professional writings may be subject to the control of academic, administrative or hierarchical powers. Accounts of pious lives are confronted with a model of sanctity, which they reinterpret to a greater or lesser extent.
- The second level is that of the internalization of these prescriptions and limits. While non-fiction and first-person writing enable us to analyze the roles, issues and conditions of everyday writing in its many forms, covering professional, religious, scholarly or personal domains, they are also often governed by norms that limit and condition them. Fictional texts seize upon norms of behavior, represent them, question them or challenge them, including through alternatives proposed in the experimental space that fiction constitutes.
- The last level is that of working on the relationship to power through the written word, and this at the level of reception, another of the team's axes, which opens it up to politics in the broadest sense, in which power is seen as one of the partners in relations and interactions between a variety of actors, from the highest spheres of government to the general public.
To do this, the written word is reinserted into individual and collective trajectories, grasped in terms of its conditions of production, materiality, reception and reuse. In short, it is placed within the social, cultural and political practices that give rise to and motivate it. This implies a diversity of writing genres. While private writings, such as memoirs and correspondence, formed the initial core of the team's work, and continue to be an essential support, both in terms of publishing and analysis, individual and collective works also include political and administrative writings, poetry, novels, theater and the press, in various registers (professional, religious, literary, scholarly, personal). For CLARESS, the laboratory's “Powers, Letters, Norms” triptych can be broken down into “public/written/private” and a dialogue between the two extremes through the written word, a dynamic to which the team's journal, Épistolaire, makes a major contribution. This central, cross-disciplinary theme is articulated around three major issues, two of which continue from the previous contract.
1) Private writing
The object of study is first and foremost writings or self-narratives in the first or third person: correspondence, life stories, autobiography, wills, professional writings, account books. Their analysis enables us to question the influence of writing models, to refine a typology, to develop a thematic analysis (conception of religion, politics, literary circulation, scientific and artistic knowledge...) and to demonstrate circulations. However, in order to integrate a reflection on the private that is not limited to that of apparently dedicated genres, fictional writing on the private is also taken into account, such as that of memoir novels, theater and the account given of it by judicial memoirs or the writing of history. The “private” category is thus delimited not only by the type of writing or genre associated with it by literary history, but by the actual content of texts and documents, or the posture of their writers. The question of usage and circulation is essential here, in that it enables us to reinterrogate typologies, understand the processes involved in the transition to writing and the choice of modes of expression. This investigation also provides food for thought on the biographical, seen not as a predetermined genre but as a writing practice.
2) Writing about events and news
More than an inventory of facts, which is essential for a first approach, the aim here is to examine the work of informing and sometimes authenticating, within the framework of varied and non-exclusive sources. Highlighting and analyzing commentaries enables us to grasp personal positions and the development of critical thinking. In the team's approach, the choice of medium and format is an integral part, opening up the notion of writing strategy and questioning its effectiveness, between taking note of a memory, distanced narration, and staging; in an approach that aims to be global in the shaping of the circumstance. This research area has already been worked on informally in the previous contract, but takes on a new scope here.
3) Powers and the written word
This research area aims to highlight a dialectic by focusing on the fields of professional control (academic or corporate), religious pastoral care or political authority (formal or informal). On the one hand, the study aims to highlight the prescriptive dimensions, either through the production of textual models, or through control over writing practices and the indication of forbidden uses, or through the solicitation of legitimating writings. On the other hand, the questioning focuses on resistance, reinterpretation and satire, which take the form of a whole range of attitudes. The aim is to examine the relationship between institutions and norms, and to measure their effects and limits. Writing in the name of power is not limited to simple reproduction, but also allows for creative and expressive effects.
The theme of the public/private relationship and the three issues outlined above inform the individual work of CLARESS members. These themes correspond to the avenues of work proposed by certain members, and systematically bring together several team members. Under the new contract, CLARESS also intends to develop a new joint theme that crosses the various issues mentioned above, and takes a fresh look at the relationship between the public and private sectors. Entitled “Revers et désordres de la réputation du XVIe au XIXe siècle”, it will be the subject of study days and a colloquium leading to a collective publication, as was the case for the themes of Secret and Anecdote, of which it is a natural extension. It is structured around three themes:
- The reputation factory. The first step is to identify the formal and informal bodies and places involved in building, validating or revising the reputations of individuals and groups. This will lead to an understanding of the strategies put in place and triggered by the importance of reputation in Ancien Régime society. Particular attention will be paid to failures, and thus to the role of critical bodies and the effectiveness of denigration; all phenomena which, in turn, allow us to grasp the “logics” of reputation specific to the period. Particular attention will also be paid to variations in reputation, on two levels: over time, between the 16th and 19th centuries, and on the scale of individual social trajectories.
- Reparation and paradoxical reputation. The analysis here will focus on reactions to defamation, downgrading or simply failure in the quest for reputation. This approach involves, on the one hand, an examination of repair and rehabilitation strategies (analysis of the criteria, bodies and supports put in place and reflection on the reasons for failure, social and political strategies), which will make it possible to measure the effectiveness of the strategies implemented, in particular writing and publication practices. On the other hand, the question of the reversal of certain criteria (academic recognition, royal proximity, social success, etc.) will constitute a central element in grasping these dynamics of social representations, participating in the construction of what can be described as a “paradoxical reputation”. This may concern the question of human respect and its critique, the play on social codes such as academic discredit or political exile, or minores.
- Social effectiveness and self-esteem. Finally, the consequences of these reputational “ups and downs” on the individual, from social position to self-image, must not be overlooked. Among the avenues considered, emphasis will be placed on the feeling of discredit and its manifestation in writing. This approach raises the question of the function of writing in terms of compensation, correction and justification. Beyond this lies the fundamental question of the relationship between the public and interiority, another level of the private, and a means of posing the question of the place of reputation in the individual's relationship to the world and his or her self-construction. Of course, such questions are bound up with contemporary issues of reputation and how it is called into question, particularly in the digital context, and the team will be keen to establish well-constructed, reasoned bridges between the realities of the past and current phenomena.