Émile Baumann, 20th century French writer and pilgrim of Saint James: Middle Ages, intertext and… faith?
Abstract
Émile Baumann, a Catholic French writer, visited Santiago in 1911. He published the account of this journey in the book Trois villes saintes: Ars-en-Dombes. Saint-Jacques-de-Compostelle. Le Mont-Saint-Michel (1912). The objective of this article is to analyze in this text Baumann's vision of the Middle Ages, in relation to his own faith. There are in the story three main spaces of presence of this time and of the author's belief: Compostela, the intertext, and Baumann's consciousness.
The beginning of the 20th century was a period of decline of cult to Santiago, appreciable in Compostela. For Baumann, Catholicism was also in decline then. His own faith wavered. He thought it necessary to return to medieval splendor, in defense of religion. The medieval intertext thus appears as an argumentative weapon against modernism. The hope of a better future could also be the hope of strengthening the devotion of the author.
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