French Literature Reviews - 2026

The People: Myth and Reality
History, Politics and Society

Book awaiting a reviewer for the journal Acta-Fabula.

The People: Myth and Reality edited by Jean-Marie Paul
Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007.
Contents

• Jean-Marie Paul: What has become of the people?
• Christine Mondon: The myth of the people, from Herder to the Heidelberg Romantics
• Anne-Marie Baranowski: Images of the people, images of the self in K. Ph. Moritz, Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde, and Anton Reiser
• Jacques Lardoux: Friedrich Hölderlin's “Voice of the People” (Stimme des Volks, 1801)
• Nicolas Class: The poet and the people, or the constitution of the body politic and its relation to poetry in Hölderlin
• Jean-Marie Paul: The people and France in Michelet
• Anne-Marie Callet Bianco: Alexandre Dumas and the demythologized people
• Claude Herzfeld: The people and the sea
• Lucrèce Friess: The image of a modern working-class world in two contemporary novels: Elfriede Jelinek’s Wonderful, Wonderful Times (Die Ausgesperrten) and Peter Stamm’s Unlikely Heroes (Paysages aléatoires)
• Françoise Daviet Taylor: The concept of the people: a figure of the circle

In the collective imagination, the people are distinct from the crowd, and even more so from the rabble. The use of these concepts implies a scale of values dependent on political and ideological sensitivities. Over the centuries, the people have been identified with the nation as a whole or have coincided solely with materially disadvantaged social classes. From the French Revolution—where they appear as a victim yet a bearer of hope—to the contemporary era, where they are simultaneously put on display and ignored, their image has evolved in step with social and ideological shifts. Literature accompanies these paradigm shifts. The heroic and suffering people depicted in Michelet’s frescoes or in Péguy’s national epic give way to the marginalized outcasts without personal or collective horizons in Elfriede Jelinek’s novels. When the utopian power of the myth is sacrificed, the notion of the people is drained of its substance. Strangely enough, while the value of democracy is reaffirmed, the people themselves are treated as a burden.

Jean-Marie Paul, Professor Emeritus, has taught German literature and the history of ideas at the Universities of Dijon, Nancy, and Angers. He is notably the author of
Dieu est mort en Allemagne, Des Lumières à Nietzsche (Payot, 1994) and L'homme face à Dieu. Mystique, Réforme, Piétisme (Artois Presses Université, 2004). He has edited around twenty books, including La Foule, Mythes et Figures, published by Presses Universitaires de Rennes in 2004.

With the support of the University of Angers

The concept of the people has long occupied a central place in European intellectual history, often functioning as a shifting signifier within political and social discourse. Over the centuries, the people have been identified with the nation as a whole or have coincided solely with materially disadvantaged social classes. From the French Revolution to the contemporary era, the image of the people has evolved in step with social and ideological shifts, as the term is used to distinguish collective identity from the crowd or the rabble.

The volume The People: Myth and Reality, edited by Jean-Marie Paul, includes contributions by Christine Mondon, Anne-Marie Baranowski, Jacques Lardoux, Nicolas Class, Jean-Marie Paul, Anne-Marie Callet Bianco, Claude Herzfeld, Lucrèce Friess, and Françoise Daviet Taylor. These essays examine how literature accompanies paradigm shifts, moving from the heroic and suffering people depicted in 19th-century works to the marginalized outcasts found in contemporary novels. Readers interested in the history of ideas and German literature may find it relevant.