L'Identité du Héros dans les Utopies du Règne de Louis XIV

摘要

In this article, I reinterpret the status of the narrator in utopian literature in France at the end of Louis XIV reign. I discovered that two types of utopias exist depending on the status given to their narrator. The first type uses a fragmentary narrator, generally a man that is just a witness without real depth. The second type uses a complete representation of the narrator who becomes a true character in the novel. For the first type, the goal of the utopia is to present a program with pragmatic political implication. The second type offers a mix of genres: memoirs, novel, travel journal in which the narrator is the hero of his own adventures. The utopian episode loses its value and power to become a simple adventure among many. This second type will become increasingly popular in the eighteenth century while the first one will vanish to reappear in the nineteenth century as a political treatise, stripped of its romantic aspects.