French Literature Reviews - 2026
Yannick Le Marec, Le Grand Pillage
History, Politics and Society
Looted objects first serve as trophies before attaining the status of artworks. The trail of colonial violence forms the bedrock of our private and public collections. War, art, and literature are at times deeply intertwined, and Yannick Le Marec chooses to follow two military writers: Pierre Loti and Victor Segalen. In Le Grand Pillage, Yannick Le Marec continues his reflection on the colonial narrative (following La Constellation du tigre, which chronicles our relationship with wild animals); this time, he questions our connection to distant lands.
To do so, he follows two military writers who accompanied the imperial march through their accounts and correspondence: Pierre Loti and Victor Segalen. It is through Pierre Loti that our understanding of nineteenth-century looting is refined, whether on Easter Island, in Tonkin, or in Beijing in 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion. The looted object is first a trophy before taking on the status of a work of art.
Through Segalen's near-daily letters to his wife, Yvonne, or his photographs, we find ourselves transported to the South Seas or China—amidst horseback rides and encounters, vast landscapes, and the imagination. Yet Segalen, a humanist physician, attempts to escape the mundane and the local, pretending not to notice that he is walking in the footsteps of his compatriots, often irritated at having to pay allegiance to the authorities—while remaining attentive to everything.
He is at once a poet and the representative of an imperial, haughty West, capable, despite everything and against all odds, of a sacrilegious gesture that he will excuse through literary creation. This legacy of violence underpins the wealth of our private and public collections.
—
An Easter Island statue sings to us of more than its life by the sea, on an island in the Pacific Ocean—the Great Ocean, as it is written on the map in my old 1891 atlas; it cries out against this compulsion of the Western world to always want to appropriate everything, even at the cost of destruction.
Where do certain works in our museums come from? What do the scars on the Buddha heads tell us? Why does China want to recover the porcelains, jades, and folding screens from the Fontainebleau Museum?
By summoning the figures of Loti and Segalen—two military writers who accompanied the imperial march—Yannick Le Marec continues his reflection on the colonial narrative and questions our relationship with distant lands where war, art, and literature are at times intimately intertwined. He addresses the history of ill-gotten gains and exposes the shared flaws of a past of which we are today the legatees.
—
An article on this work can be read on nonfiction.fr:
"Yannick Le Marec: The Narrative of China's Colonial Plunder", by Maryse Emel (online November 10, 2022).
—
The intersection of military expansion and artistic appropriation has long been a subject of critical inquiry within postcolonial studies. By focusing on the accounts and correspondence of Pierre Loti and Victor Segalen, this work situates itself within a broader tradition of examining how imperial movements shaped Western perceptions of distant territories. These authors, both military figures, provide a lens through which to observe the transition of plundered items from war trophies into museum objects. Readers interested in the historical entanglement of colonial violence and the formation of public and private collections may find this analysis relevant to their research.
The text investigates the removal of cultural artifacts from their origins in regions such as Tonkin, Beijing, and the South Seas. It highlights the tension between the humanist aspirations of writers like Segalen and their participation in the imperial project. By questioning the provenance of items like Buddha heads, jades, and porcelains, the author addresses the legacy of colonial plunder. This reflection on the history of ill-gotten gains invites consideration of the origins of museum holdings and the relationship between Western artistic appreciation and the destruction of local cultures.
Read also Maurice Mourier's article on en-attendant-nadeau.fr…