Thélème. Revista Complutense de Estudios Franceses
Thélème. Revista Complutense de Estudios Franceses (ISSN 1139-9368, ISSN-e 1989-8193) is a journal published every six months that took its current name in 1998 when it broke away from the former Revista de Filología Francesa, published by the Universidad Complutense Madrid’s French Studies Department, founded in 1992. It compiles research studies in French, English and Spanish, on the French language and literature and in relation to other artistic-cultural and literary fields. It also publishes studies on civilisation, linguistics, translation and didactics of the French language. It aims to cover the whole French and French-speaking field and includes book reviews.
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New Sources for Philippe Desportes in the Series of Rime di diversi (1545-1560)
For several decades, Philippe Desportes' list of Italian sources has been considered more or less complete. However, we have spotted, in the famous series of Rime di diversi, some undiscovered sources of Desportes, which confirm his incomparable knowledge of the Italian poetry of his time. In this article we will only discuss cases where the relationship between the poems seems indisputable. Among these ten pieces, almost all sonnets, half appear in the Sesto libro delle rime di diversi eccellenti autori (1553); the others are in the Libro primo (1546), Libro quarto (1551), Libro quinto (1552) and Libro settimo (1556). All their authors are relatively little known, and very varied: the only one from whom Desportes takes two poems is Giacomo Mauro. We will briefly comment on each of these discoveries, to try to understand what Desportes owes to the Italian original and what aspects of the model he believes necessary to modify.
Copyright (c) 2026 Thélème. Revista Complutense de Estudios Franceses
In-betweenness Through Esther Nirina’s Works: Portrait of a Franco-Malagasy Poet
Little-known in Spain, Esther Nirina was one of the best-known Francophone writers in Madagascar, her work forming part of a major corpus known as Indian Ocean literature. A model of hybridization between French and Malagasy cultures, Nirina represents a mise en abyme of a considerable segment of Malagasy society. Her in-between identity leads her to write poetry, which allows her to soothe the nostalgia she feels once she has settled in France. Drawing on literary anthropology and ecofeminism, I will examine how Nirina addresses themes such as the natural environment and its impact; the family and societal roles of women; and the global/local nexus in her quest for selfhood, as expressed in her three French-language poetry collections: Silencieuse respiration, Simple voyelle, and Lente spirale. The analysis makes it possible to group the ideas voiced by Nirina’s poetic voice into three categories: nature, women’s condition, and cosmopolitanism.
Body, Memory and Systemic Violence: Perspectives on Annie Ernaux’s L’Événement
Annie Ernaux's writing has introduced the voice and reality of women into a literary universe long dominated by a male perspective. In L'Événement, Ernaux paints a portrait of a French medical system that reveals a society profoundly violent towards women. It was through the determination of Ernaux and many anonymous women that abortion was finally legalized. This article analyzes the multiple forms of violence suffered by the protagonist, highlighting the inseparable links between social class and gender, illustrating an intersectional approach and an intellectual activism that unites her female readers within a feminist sisterhood supported by her literary work.
Analysis of an Epistolary Delirium: Charlotte of Belgium’s “Letters of Madness”
At the end of July 1867, Charlotte of Belgium, wife of Maximilian of Habsburg, was repatriated to Belgium after spending almost nine months in Miramar, where she had taken refuge following the failure of her mission to Napoleon III and Pius IX, whom she had been unable to convince to continue supporting their empire in Mexico. It was probably in the City of Light and the Eternal City that the first signs of her mental deterioration appeared. Until her death in January 1927, she stayed in Laeken and Tervuren, and then for some fifty years at the castle of Bouchout. On 10 December 1868, she had a strange dream that triggered a leap in her paranoia and led her to write four hundred ‘mad letters’ and ninety notes between February and June 1869, revealing the depths of her thought and the obsessions that tormented her.
Automobile Trip: Towards a new Hospitality? The Countess de la Morinière’s Journey through Spain (1909)
This study revisits the account of Countess de la Morinière’s journey through Spain, published in 1909 under the title Du 30 à l’heure. D’Irun à Algésiras. Although it constitutes the first recorded automobile journey across Spain undertaken by a French woman, this narrative remains largely overlooked. The analysis first examines the formal characteristics of the text and its reception. It then situates the work within its broader context by exploring the rise of sport, outdoor life, and the increasing independence of women—phenomena closely tied to the hedonistic society of the Belle Époque. Finally, the notion of hospitality serves as a guiding thread, as this study seeks to determine whether the use of a modern means of transport—the automobile—contributed to shaping new forms of hospitality and hostility between foreigners and local populations.
Despite the limited material resources available to women in the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century, many actively participated in the major journeys of the time and gradually developed their own individual conception of travel. This article focuses on a publishing phenomenon that developed between 1870 and 1930: the publication of travelogues written by French women who explored the world, considered to be testimonies of intrinsic quality. More specifically, we will study the travelogues of five Parisian women who travelled to Asia: Marie de Ujfalvy-Bourdon, Isabelle Massieu, Laure Durand-Fardel, Louise Bourbonnaud and Alexandra David-Neel. Asia fascinated travellers because of its marked differences from the West, yet it remained largely unknown at the time, as most people's attention was still focused on other parts of the world. A wide range of contrasting impressions emerge as the travellers journey through these regions; however, their initial perceptions quickly give way to a sense of wonder. This study examines the ways in which they perceive Asian societies and cultures, seeking to highlight both the convergences and divergences in their representations of otherness, in order to explore how the journey to Asia becomes, for them, a genuine quest for inner meaning.
Jean Lorrain: From Caricature to Ekphrasis, Between Social Critique and Fascination with Decadence
This study explores Jean Lorrain’s aesthetics through the dual lens of caricature and ekphrasis, two complementary forms shaping his relationship to reality. As a fin-de-siècle chronicler and novelist, Lorrain transforms caricature into a critical and poetic language, revealing the duplicity of the bourgeois world he depicts. His collaborations with illustrators such as Bottini and Orazi demonstrate a constant dialogue between text and image, where visual satire is mirrored by pictorial writing. In La Maison Philibert (1904), distortion becomes both an aesthetic and moral device, denouncing bourgeois hypocrisy while celebrating the artificial beauty of decadence. Through a prose infused with irony and hallucination, reminiscent of Goya or Redon, Lorrain develops a true poetics of deformation, where self-representation and modernity converge in an ambiguous quest for truth and style.
Writing to (Re)construct Oneself: Childhood and Youth in Maryse Condé’s Work
In her autobiographical narratives, Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer (1999) and La Vie sans fards (2012), Maryse Condé retraces her identity journey from her childhood in Guadeloupe to her youth in Paris. This article offers an analysis of this vital transition through a psychological and decolonial approach. It aims to understand how time, family heritage, her conflicted relationship with her mother, motherhood, and the diasporic experience shape a complex identity in constant reconstruction. Through an unvarnished introspection, Condé deconstructs the colonial injunctions that marked her existence and ultimately asserts a hybrid identity. This process of self-decolonization is analysed here as a strategy of survival, emancipation, and self-reclamation.
Català Lorente, Laura, (éd.), (2025) Sexe et démocratie. De l’enjeu du consentement. Paris, Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 204 pp., ISBN num. : 978-2-7351-3113-6
“Si j’avais un salon”/ “If I had a salon”… With Others or on One’s Own ? The Ambivalences of George Sand
George Sand is in literature a “recognised exception”, to use Balzac’s expression, in that she is the only woman to rank among men in the mythology of Romanticism. This formula suggests a tension between the individual and the group that has been successfully overcome: however, it deserves to be questioned. She readily extols the group in her writings, as it reflects her aspiration for fraternity among the arts and the artists, but shows ambivalence toward the groups she might associate with, torn between affiliation and detachment, anxious to preserve her independence. This article proposes to study this ambivalence by establishing a typology of the groups in which Sand participates, before examining the chronology of her relationship with groups throughout her writing career. This journey, which will consider how she represents them in her work, will allow us to follow the evolution of Sand’s conception of the group.
For an Aesthetic and Non-teleological Reinterpretation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, or The New Heloise (1761)
This article examines Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, or The New Heloise (1761) through the framework of rococo aesthetics, considered here as an operative critical category within literary studies. It aims to challenge teleological interpretations that label the novel as “pre-Romantic”. The central hypothesis is that Julie fully belongs to eighteenth-century rococo sensibility, marked by grace, intimacy, the regulated theatricality of affection, and the moral integration of feeling. Methodologically, the study combines an aesthetic analysis of the text with its cultural and historiographical contextualization. This rereading aims to restore the novel’s aesthetic coherence and to assert the existence of a genuinely literary rococo, thereby contributing to its recognition as an autonomous interpretive framework.
Group, Generation, Network? Naming the Connections Between Women Poets (1900–1914)
This contribution focuses on women's poetic production between 1900 and 1914 and questions whether it is possible to consider the existence of a feminine poetic group in 1900. It first analyses the reception of women poets and the paradox that characterises it : stubborn refusal to recognize them as having any significant role in the formation of literary groups on the one hand, regular grouping of their works on the other hand. Then, from a contemporary historiographical perspective, it questions the possibility – and the temptation – of reconsidering today certain women poets from 1900 as forming a group, drawing on several related concepts: network first, and above generation, which the article seeks to re-examine more extensively in the light of gender issues.
The Media Fabrication of Georges de Peyrebrune's Networks, a “Little” Naturalist in Blue Stockings
At a decisive moment in Georges de Peyrebrune's career (1883-1887), this article examines the media strategies by which the author, along with some of her colleagues (Thilda, Delaville, Torrezão), made visible forms of feminine literary sociability. Focusing on the networks Peyrebrune invested in, but also on those she failed to fully integrate, this study examines her exclusion from the Médan circle, her involvement in the “dîner des bas-bleus” and the organization of literary matinees on the Quai d'Orléans, all of which testify to the need for women writers to create alternative spaces of legitimization.
Revelation Structures and the Search for Identity in Marc Levy’s Novels: Morphological Analysis of L’Étrange voyage de Monsieur Daldry and Une autre idée du bonheur
This article presents a formalist and structural analysis of Marc Levy’s L’Étrange voyage de Monsieur Daldry and Une autre idée du bonheur. The study examines the narrative mechanics underlying these successful stories, which are often marginalised by academic critics because they belong to popular literature. Using a framework that combines Propp’s formalist approach and Bremond’s structuralist approach, the article highlights the existence of a stable underlying structure organised around three fundamental narrative elements: identity provocation, the initiatory quest and the final revelation. The analysis shows that the novels studied are based on a pattern of identity transformation founded on the revelation of a hidden lineage. The journey functions as a device for gradual unveiling, leading to a restorative anagnorisis that restores the unity of the subject.
Creation of the Femina Jury (1904): Coalition of Women Authors for the Right of Entry into the Republic of Letters
This study examines the origins of the Femina jury and its conflict with the Académie Goncourt over the dominance of women writers in the French literary scene at the beginning of the 20th century. This female uprising was not strictly speaking a feminist gesture, but it did raise the issue of women being excluded from the inner circles of literary recognition and deprived of authority in the field of literature. Above all, it will be shown that the media age and the publishing revolution were powerful allies in making female authors more visible at the beginning of the century.
Memory of Literary Groups: the Revenge of Women
This article analyzes the sociological marginalization of women in 19th-century literary circles, where they were relegated to subordinate roles such as “husband-hunters” or “tea servers.” Paradoxically, this position as invisible observers allowed them to achieve literary “revenge” by becoming excellent memoirists. By writing their memoirs, they turned their exclusion into an advantage, offering a lucid and off-center view of the behind-the-scenes of creative work, far removed from the delusions of grandeur of their male counterparts.
From noir fiction to philosophical allegory: is Philippe Claudel a whistleblower?
This article seeks to highlight the paradigm shift in Philippe Claudel's writing style, which is evident in his two most recent novels –Crépuscule in particular and L'Archipel du Chien– as the beginning of a new cycle. First, we will examine the importance of the detective-fiction structure, whose plot allows the author to engage his readers and focus their attention on current social issues underlying these mysteries. To do this, we will draw on the theories of Alain Pagès, who had already identified this process in the work of Émile Zola, a writer who, under the guise of detective novels, denounced the underlying social violence of the time. In Claudel's case, we will identify his short-story collection Inhumaines, published in 2017, as a turning point in which dystopia is seen as a catalyst for critical awareness. We will finally argue that, in his most recent work, the themes he chooses lead him to reshape his writing style, lending it a more pronounced philosophical dimension within narratives that are notably more allegorical in nature.
Tracing the Path of Literary Support. Investigating the Connections Between Élisa Mercœur and her Literary Predecessors
This article explores the reality of female literary solidarity in the 19th century through the case of Élisa Mercœur, a poet who died young at 26 and is often seen as isolated and sacrificed. While some sources highlight her connections with well-known poets like Marceline Desbordes-Valmore and Amable Tastu, analysis of letters, salons, and tributes shows only occasional recognition and little concrete support during her life. Mercœur was mainly embraced posthumously within a community of women poets, often through narratives shaped by male voices. This reveals a paradox: literary sorority is less an active network than a retrospective construction that helps build the romantic myth of the sacrificed female genius. Mercœur thus serves as a key figure to question the true nature of female solidarity in literary history.
Anti-feminism and Decadent Individualism: The Case of Rachilde (Pourquoi je ne suis pas féministe, 1928)
This article offers a reading of a particular essay by Rachilde (Pourquoi je ne suis pas féministe, 1928), understood as a late testimony to the motives underlying the author’s explicit refusal to join the feminist movements and the collective forms of female sociability of her time. The analysis conducted here sheds light in particular on a form of anti-feminism still deeply informed by decadent individualism. Rather than reducing Rachilde to a univocal ideological position, the article examines the tensions between authorial posture, polemical ethos, decadent imagination, and the history of first-wave feminisms.
Michel Butor (2023). Petite histoire de la littérature française. Entretiens avec Lucien Giraudo. París, Gallimard, 352 p., ISBN 978-2072978272
Avant-Propos. Femmes, groupes et littérature en France au XIXe siècle
Blanchard Rubio, Laetitia & Irene Atalaya Fernández. (2025). Por Don Carlos. Textos literarios, imágenes y sonidos de la I Guerra Carlista en Francia. Estudio crítico y corpus textual bilingüe, iconográfico y musical anotado. Editorial Universidad de Oviedo, Oviedo, 371 p. ISBN: 978-84-10135-76-5
D'alembert, Jean Le Rond (2025). Obras. Juan Manuel Ibeas-Altamira y Lydia Vázquez (eds.). Madrid: Cátedra, 486 pp. ISBN: 978-84-376-4916-0
The myth of Theseus and Jean Cocteau’s Le discours du grand sommeil: Towards a mythocritical approach to this book of poems
Cocteau’s interest in myths is well known. In addition to Orpheus and Oedipus, which have haunted his writing throughout his career, in all artistic fields - poetry, theatre, film, drawing - the myth of Theseus often appears in his work to represent the ordeal of the creative act that takes place halfway between the ordinary world and a mysterious beyond (the labyrinth), where the poet may meet death, or between consciousness and the inner dedalic abysses. But in Le discours du grand sommeil, a collection of poems inspired by the Great War and his time on the Belgian front, myth emerges more or less implicitly to express not only the poet’s bitterness and his denunciation of the conflict, but also his compassionate view of the unjust and cruel sacrifice of so many dead soldiers.
Copyright (c) 2025 Thélème. Revista Complutense de Estudios Franceses
Fostering Metalinguistic Reflection of 1st-year Compulsory Secondary Education Students in a Plurilingual Context
This article presents the results of the implementation of a grammar teaching sequence designed according to the Egramint prototype (SDGE) in a public school of the Valencian Community; in particular, it analyses the role of oral interaction in French and Spanish to bring out the students’ cross-linguistic metalinguistic reflection. The SDGE was implemented in the 1st-year Compulsory Secondary Education French as a Second Foreign Language classroom and dealt with audiodescription and the linguistic forms required by this discursive genre (present indicative, adjectives). Classroom recordings of interactions between pupils and with the teacher, their productions and an interview with the teacher show that oral interaction does indeed promote metalinguistic reflection on the functioning of all the languages the pupils know. Through exploratory speaking, and thanks to the scaffolding provided by the teacher throughout the sessions, the pupils construct meanings on the basis of joint reflection.
Written Composition and Interlinguistic Reflection in 1st Year Bilingual Primary Education (French-Spanish): Intervention by a Novice Teacher
This paper presents a study on the design and implementation of the EGRAMINT (SDGE) grammar teaching sequence “L'alimentation: À la recherche du menu parfait,” intended for first-year primary education students. The sequence focuses on the discursive genre “menu” and aims to develop metalinguistic and interlinguistic reflection among students in a French-Spanish bilingual school. The SDGE was implemented by a student teacher during her initial training. The specific objectives of the study are to explore the potential of this intervention device to promote reflective learning among students, examine achievements in children’s writing, and assess the successes and challenges of the teacher’s intervention. The conclusion highlights the need to strengthen initial and ongoing training of teachers in the field of grammar teaching.
Teaching grammatical revision strategies with the “Writer's Profile” device: description of teaching practices deemed effective by secondary school teachers in Quebec
For Quebec students, learning grammar revision strategies is key to academic success in writing. The “Profil de scripteur” (Writer’s Profile) tool combines four synergistic features that allow teachers to differentiate their instruction of these strategies to meet their students’ needs. This article describes the implementation practices reported by secondary school teachers (students age: 12-16). Results, collected via questionnaire and group interview, show that most of the teachers use three of the four tools. Teachers report that the “Profil de scripteur” helps them to better plan and teach revision strategies. However, they offer students a one-size-fits-all approach to self-correction rather than tailoring it to the needs observed with the “Profil de scripteur” tools. Six winning practices have been identified to help implement this system and shed light on classroom practices.
A Proposal for the Analysis of the Pronoun “en” to Improve its Acquisition by Spanish-speaking FFE Learners
The acquisition of the pronoun en is a challenge for EFL learners at all levels of linguistic competence. Although these difficulties are not exclusive to Spanish speakers, we will focus on explaining two of the most important difficulties in this area: the absence of translatological correspondence in Spanish and its syntactic heterogeneity and terminology. After a morphosyntactic analysis of the pronoun en and a bibliographical review of its acquisition, we describe two proposals aimed at optimising its acquisition in the Spanish-speaking environment: a syntactic and terminological simplification and an example of contextualisation of the pronoun en through literary extracts.