Abstract EN:

Born in Dijon, Virginie Ancelot (1792-1875) was a woman in letters. Her temperament left its mark on her contemporaries, as well as the activities of her salon and her theatrical or novelistic works. Indeed, for forty years, rising above the political upheavals of her time, she received and came close to the elite : of the literary circles (Chateaubriand, Vigny, Hugo, Balzac, Stendhal. . . ), of the artistic world at large (Delacroix, Gerard. . . ). Between classicism and romanticism, her salon reached its climax under the Monarchie de Juillet. It became a center of influences where the games of patronage helped promote the career of her husband, Jacques Ancelot, as well as that of her close friends, until the supreme achievement of the Académie Française. In cooperation with her husband, she managed the theatre du vaudeville. Throughout this period, her renown gradually spread through the theater world. She wrote extensively, both for the Comédie-Française and for secondary stages. She became the “spoiled child of fortune”. Her oeuvres showed cunning and efficiency. Her style also lay within a strategy that aimed at promoting an original image of women, reflecting the conformity of a century that was often crual towards them end their deepest aspiration for modernity. A kind of “echo sonore” of her century, Virginie Ancelot embodied its traumatisms, doubts and a passionate quest for the absolute.