Abstract EN:

The monastery theme is omnipresent in the XVIIIe century. First, it provides a setting for the satire of "monastic vices" and theological quarrels about the consequences of Adam’s fall. Whereas the morality novels expose forced vocations, it becomes, for the libertines, the place of emancipatory transgressions. Following them, the "philosophers" criticize the monks' asceticism. And, along with the physiocrats, their celibacy their new anthropological options lead them to condemn perpetual vows as being an anti-natural form of subjection. Around 1770, the heroids magnify, in an ambiguous way, a heroism of the renunciation, to which the parody of monastic romanesque is the answer. At the same time, the theme goes on stage, where it suggests the creation of gloomy atmospheres. During, the French Revolution, the playwrights use it to ideological, pathetic and spectacular ends. Influenced by the English gothic novel, it then becomes a priviedged theme of the dawning melodrama. The literary convent always seems to echo something different from itself. Yet, where these dark images merge, it is possible to find the persistant obsession of the between nature and grace, inherited from an augustinian XVIIe century from which the englightened emancipated themselves by promoting the "natural". Awakening the suspiscion of the enlightened, who valorize in the individuals a self-determination enabling them to operate (within the century), the shadow of the cloister still keeps fascinating them. But Chateaubriand alone will manage to turn it into poetic matter, thus carrying out the heroids' scheme.