Roman et Révolution: un couple mal assorti

International audienceWhen 1789 comes, the older generation of French novelists let themselves be involved in the reformatory movement, abandoning their ‘literary duties’. Their younger colleagues are still too inexperienced to reach for a pen and describe the fast-changing reality they live in; for this they will need some temporal and/or spatial distance. Meanwhile, it turns out that what was once considered to be just a signifi cant evolution has now become a real, ultimate and all-changing Revolution. In such a ‘regenerated’ state there is no longer room for any remains of the hateful Ancien Régime. This is how the novel, as it developed during the eighteenth century, becomes one of the first victims of the new revolutionary taste and is now stigmatised as an emblem of the ci-devant depraved aristocratic society. A reformed theatre, political speeches and journalistic genres successfully supplant the novel, considered no longer capable of providing all citizens with the up-to-date information they need. Moreover, when in revolutionary France heads start to fall, at which point a promising reality begins to turn into a sanguinary nightmare, novelists seem intellectually paralysed and fi nd themselves suffering from a kind of ‘creative impotence’ that will not pass until the revolution has finished