Le Grand Inquisiteur: naissance d'une figure mythique au XIXe siècle (review)

This engaging and imaginative book, which embraces French, Russian, and English-language literature as well as historiography and visual art, identifies and explores the archetypal figure of the Grand Inquisitor, tracing his presence and varying significance in cultural artefacts dating from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth century. The author's central proposition is that, having figured during the Enlightenment as the contemptible bogeyman of anticlerical discourse, the Inquisitor re-emerged in the nineteenth century as 'l'une des incarnations privilégiées de l'alliance des contraires, de l'entremeˆlement troublant du bien et du mal en l'homme, de la réversibilité des valeurs' (p. 71). The determining factor in this shift, Julliot argues, was the Revolution, or, more accurately, the Terror: to writers of the post-Revolutionary period (especially the Romantics), the Inquisitor seemed an ideal symbol of the process whereby the passionate pursuit of some noble ideal of 'salvation' — of the soul or of the nation — might lead inexorably to the most brutal excesses, the most bloodthirsty violence, the most inhuman contempt for the life of believer and unbeliever alike. Subsequent chapters pursue the figure of the Inquisitor in works by authors as diverse as Balzac, Stendhal, Hugo, Michelet, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, and (of course) Dostoevsky, associating him with nineteenth-century thinking about the nature of state power, the influence of ideological conviction on human behaviour, and the involvement of religion with political action. The closing chapter considers the decline of the book's central figure in the twentieth-century literary imagination, or, rather, his transformation into a symbolic 'lieu vide' (p. 321) so capacious as to lack any precise meaning. The book's claims are, we might say, historical rather than historicized: that is, while they allude constantly to the Revolution and profess to offer a meditation on the cultural imagination of the following century, they also reveal a tendency towards historical generalization within that politically and culturally variegated period. Similarly, the book's comparative sensibility places Poe, Hugo, Michelet, Vigny, Taine, Thiers, Renan, Louis Blanc, and Paul Morand together in the same chapter in a way that some readers may find slights the likely specificity of each of these authors' relation (not to mention that of each of the genres, discourses, cultural moments, and aesthetic movements they represent) to the inquisitorial theme. Other readers, however, will doubtless see that exemplary list as a strength, indicating both the intellectual ambition of the study and the exhaustive primary corpus of Inquisition-related works its author has assembled. (Indeed, the book includes a curious nineteen-page index of real or fictional personages who might be considered 'inquisitorial', although the inclusion of some of these involves a bit of a stretch, while others — step forward J. K. Rowling's Dolores Umbridge — seem, frankly, naff.) Yet even if the book's arguments are broadly analogical, they are also well evidenced and ultimately persuasive; quotations are analysed with care, juxtapositions work to illuminating effect, and a wide-ranging theoretical and critical framework is deployed with aplomb. In short, this is a well-argued and well-written monograph, which will be read with interest by dix-neuviémistes, and especially by those with an interest in the symbolic portrayal of the Revolution and the Terror.