Le balcon de Charles IX, une scène légendaire entre histoire et littérature

Abstract

As a stereotyped image, the legend of King Charles IX shooting his people from the Louvre during St Bartholomew’s night spread through historical and literary sources, which accounted for the event right from the end of the sixteenth century, for instance in Agrippa d’Aubigné’s and Brantôme’s works. If Mézeray or Bossuet echoed this topic, its broadest dissemination was reached during the 18th and 19th centuries, through Voltaire and other essays or dramatic plays satirizing despotism and/or fanaticism, especially by the French Revolution. All the while becoming a widespread and iconic representation in the post-revolutionary French public sphere, from Mérimée to Zola, from Balzac or Michelet to Dumas and Flaubert, the sifted through legend became less effective as the Monarchy’s memory was fading away.Focusing on historical sources along with literary representations (through poetry, novel & theatre) in the French canon, this paper sketches the archeology of this polemical and romantic legend until the end of the 19th century, a time when the Third Republic was grounded and History as science split away from Literature. I intend to analyze the stakes of this “balcony scene” and Charles IX’s many-facetted portrait, as an “unwilling foe” or a wicked killer, which attacks the monarchical power stained with the People’s blood.

Keywords

• literature
• drama
• history
• Charles IX
• Voltaire
• legend