Abstract EN:

The Story of Madame de Montbrillant, by Mme d'Épinay, written in the eighteenth century, was not published in its entirety until the twentieth. Within the context of its relation to the Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, it is striking in its ideological and formal subversion, but in the absence of an examination of its literary merits, its classification has remained problematic. This thesis proposes a definitive classification of the work of Mme d'Épinay by distinguishing the truncated editions of the nineteenth century from the integral edition of 1951. In order to classify the Story of Madame de Montbrillant, we found it necessary to examine, in detail, and for the first time, the text in its entirety. The author reconstructs the society of her salon, frequented by the Philosophes des lumières, using fictitious names, in order to respect the conventions of the time, but numerous clues reveal the true identity of these characters and authenticate their actions. Consequently, this feminine writing of the self must necessarily be classified under the genre of eighteenth-century autobiography.