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Reviewed by:
  • Racine à l’école républicaine, ou, Les enjeux socio-politiques de la tragédie classique (1800–1950) by Ralph Albanese
  • Richard Parish
Racine à l’école républicaine, ou, Les enjeux socio-politiques de la tragédie classique (1800–1950). Par Ralph Albanese. (Espaces littéraires.) Paris: L’Harmattan, 2013. 285 pp.

This is the latest in a series of studies by the same author devoted to the reception of writers of the seventeenth century — Molière (see French Studies, 46 (1992), 205–07), La [End Page 544] Fontaine (59 (2005), 268–69), and Corneille (63 (2009), 456–57) — in France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It recounts the fluctuating views of Racine held by the French establishment over a century and a half of, first, critical and, then, pedagogical material. The format of the central chapters consists essentially of summaries, with illustrative and frequently enlightening quotations, of a wide diversity of authorities, the majority of whose names will probably be unfamiliar to most readers — with salient exceptions, such as Hippolyte Taine (‘[qui] inaugure […] la critique scientifique de Racine’, p. 77), Sainte-Beuve, Gustave Lanson, or, more recently, Thierry Maulnier. Three recurrent features are striking to a reader more familiar with later criticism of Racine: first, and almost ubiquitous, the intensely didactic interpretation of the dramatist, widely brought into service in order to instil in his nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury readers a respect for Christian [sic] values as incarnated above all by such unlikely figures as Andromaque or Iphigénie (‘un modèle de la générosité chrétienne et française’, p. 71), with concomitant warnings to be gleaned as to the dangers of the passions, above all, and predictably enough, in Phèdre; secondly, the facility with which Racine was accorded an evolving political identity as monarchies and republics came and went; and, finally, the adoption of Racine (with Corneille) as the supreme exemplifications of artistic perfection within the corpus of writing associated with the apogee of the Ancien Régime, and so central to the self-attributed civilizing role assumed by France on an international scale. Ralph Albanese resumes these two dimensions, writing in fact of the Third Republic, but in a more generally applicable axiom: ‘[La France] avait pour mission civilisatrice d’opérer une magistrature morale dans le monde’ (p. 34). If the need to account for a substantial quantity of unfamiliar and inaccessible material results in a certain amount of (probably inevitable) repetition, above all in the second part, the more synthetic aspects of the text carry a good deal of conviction. The whole survey ends, however, on a brief and (arguably) unduly pessimistic reflection on the post-1968 status of Racine, concluding bleakly as it does that ‘[étant] devenue un univers étranger qui fait appel de moins en moins à l’imagination des jeunes, la tragédie racinienne a fini par se détacher de la culture française’ (p. 252). The bibliography is extensive and affords other scholars an indispensable guide in a similar vein to critical and pedagogical tendencies in the periods covered. On the other hand, there is no mention of the tenets of reception theory at any stage, which seems surprising in a book about reception; there is no index; and the practice of indicating titles by underlining looks both dated and rather cumbersome on the page to readers more familiar with the use of italicization for that purpose.

Richard Parish
St Catherine’s College, Oxford
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