Œuvres complètes, V: Œuvres en prose: 1852–1894 by Leconte de Lisle (review)

This is the fifth and final volume in a new edition of the complete works of Leconte de Lisle. It is a substantially revised and updated version of the Belles Lettres edition of 1976–78, which was also edited by Edgard Pich but is now out of print (reviewed in French Studies, 31 (1977), 469–71). In addition to corrections to detail, this edition includes new introductions, adds extensive commentaries and detailed notes, and re-orders the material in such a way as to underline the coherence of Leconte de Lisle's project. The prose works are now divided between L'Œuvre romantique (vol. I), and this fifth volume, which includes texts from 1852 onwards. The intervening volumes cover Poèmes antiques (vol. II), Poèmes barbares (vol. III), and Poèmes tragiques et derniers poèmes (vol. IV). The short preface to volume V pinpoints 1852 as a turning point and presents the subsequent collection of historical, political, and critical texts as an essential part of Leconte de Lisle's œuvre. It boldly argues that the 1852 preface to the Poèmes antiques is a preface to all his subsequent writing and affirms a modern conception of poetry analogous to that of contemporaries such as Baudelaire, and also that the dry quality of his prose is stylistically original and reflects the wider experimentation with prose by the likes of the Goncourts and Zola. The prose texts that follow, ranging from brief prefaces and journalistic pieces to extremely long histories, may not all seem to live up to this promise. Many of them were already included in the volume Leconte de Lisle: articles, préfaces, discours, also edited by Pich (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1971), or in the Œuvres diverses volume of the Belles Lettres edition (vol. IV, 1978), but Pich has also added some texts not previously reprinted since the nineteenth century. The volume is dominated by two such texts — 'Histoire populaire du christianisme' and 'Histoire du Moyen-Âge' — the latter consisting of nearly three hundred pages and attributed to Leconte de Lisle though not originally published under his name. Pich argues that the ironic use of quotation in the first of these texts is similar to Bouvard et Pécuchet and that the second text is a 'contre-légende des siècles' (p. 698) in which certain passages read like prose versions of important poems. The prose certainly has a striking clipped quality and reveals the extent to which Leconte de Lisle was reworking sources in his own writing. This complete edition will undoubtedly become the standard work of reference and an invaluable tool for anyone seeking deeper understanding of this poet. With its encyclopaedic notes and detailed contextualization of texts, it is much more substantial than the Classiques Garnier edition, of which the first volume appeared in 2011. Pich's decades of work on this author have culminated in a resource that will have lasting value.