Abstract EN:

After having been vilified from the renaissance up until the eighteenth century, the middle ages became a choice topic for the romantics. Popular literature took over medieval subjects and, influenced by Walter Scott, by the gothic novel or by texts taken from the "bibliothèque bleue de Troyes" (pedlary literature), offered to its readers a picture of the middle ages quite different from the affected one proposed by the "genre troubadour". Giving form to this rediscovered national past is rendered by redundant form sense elements, true icons that are clues to a codified spatiality and temporaneousness. A reflection on history or a political discourse can occur. Moreover, the craving of the popular novel for manichaeism and hyperbole promotes the creation of a true myth, which responds to a social desire of reappropriation of the origins : the later denunciation of the stereotypes will not affect this myth which still today sends us back to some of our frustrations in a society where the "acceleration of history" makes us suffer a feeling of loss and induces within us the nostalgia of a coherent and stable civilization, ritualized and reassuring.