Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, poets and lovers, could enter the Pantheon, the secular temple of the Republic, where the "great men" of the nation rest, and a handful of women.
The initiative to transfer her remains to the monument stirs up a debate in France between literary and political.
Is it time, at last, to honor two of the greatest glories of her literature, persecuted in their time, and to enthrone her damned on her highest pedestal?
Or is canonizing Rimbaud and Verlaine in this way a posthumous insult to those who would have been horrified by the official tributes?
The president, Emmanuel Macron, will have the last word.
It all started last March, just before the confinement, when a group of friends - including Barré and the essayist Frédéric Martel -, on an excursion through the north of France, visited the cemetery in Charleville-Mézières, Rimbaud's hometown.
The poet is buried there with his family.
"We were a bit scared to see poor Rimbaud surrounded by his family, from whom he did not stop fleeing during his life, and who, after his death, distorted the meaning of his work," explained the editor Jean-Luc Barré a few days ago , at the presentation of the new edition of the poet's reference biography, the work of the late Jean-Jacques Lefrère, prefaced by Martel.
“We said to ourselves: 'We have to do something!
We have to get him out of there! "
Thus began one of those controversies that could only occur in France, with irreconcilable sides, tribunes in the media, exchange of disqualifications, and all about two 19th century poets and their significance for the history of literature and for the France of today.
More than five thousand people signed the petition, presented on September 9, to incorporate the author of
A Season in Hell
and the
author
of the
Saturnian Poems
in the Pantheon.
"Both at the same time, but not as a couple," says Martel, author of
Sodoma
(Roca Editorial, 2019) and other essays on global gay history and culture.
Current incumbent Roselyne Bachelot is enthusiastic about him.
In some circles of Rimbaud scholars and readers, alarms soon went off.
And a civil war broke out between
Rimbaldians
who, as Martel recalls in the prologue to Lefrère's biography, comes from afar, when the Catholic reading of the poet Paul Claudel was opposed by the surrealist Louis Aragon and André Breton.
If we make them only rebels, bohemians, anti-France, anti-school, anti-system, then neither should we baptize lyceums and colleges with the names of Rimbaud or Verlaine
Frédéric Martel
"Mr. President, you who pay attention to symbols, do not make this mistake, or worse: this blunder," implore the signers of a rostrum published on September 17 in
Le Monde
and signed by Alain Borer, author of several books about Rimbaud, and poets, writers and critics like Adonis, Tahar Ben Jelloun or Antoine Compagnon.
The signatories, dissatisfied with the identification of Rimbaud and Verlaine as a couple, maintain that “it is impossible to affirm that Rimbaud was homosexual all his life;
everything leads us to believe that his love affair with Verlaine (…) was part of the anti-bourgeois provocation ”.
And they see in the attempt to
pantheonize them
a sign of "Americanization [that] invades French culture."
A great-great-niece-granddaughter of the poet, who signs this rostrum, has complained: "Everyone will think [that they are] homosexual, but it is not true."
The original petition describes Rimbaud and Verlaine as "major poets" who "by their genius" enriched the French heritage.
Above all - and this is what has irritated some
Rimbaldians
- he presents them as "symbols of diversity" who "had to suffer the relentless homophobia of their time."
Verlaine spent 555 days in prison for shooting Rimbaud, who survived with minor injuries and did not report his attacker.
The conviction, the petitioners explain, was linked to his homosexuality and his role in the Paris Commune.
They were gay - when the word "gay" did not exist, nor did the word homosexual - and they were what today we would call antisystem.
Bad business in late nineteenth century Europe.
Rimbaud, beyond his legend
"There is a slightly iconoclastic idea behind all this, a bit provocative," Barré acknowledges.
But, beyond this, there is the idea of bringing poetry and youth into the Pantheon.
And to dust off this place a bit ”.
One argument of those who oppose the initiative is that both poets, precisely, would not have wanted to enter the temple of a country of which they plagued.
"Let the poets free, as they lived," they defend in
Le Monde
.
The argument seems an echo of Luis Cernuda's poem
Birds in the night
, from 1962, whose title is taken from Verlaine, and which evokes the tombstone that the authorities placed in a London house “where in a room Rimbaud and Verlaine, a rare couple , they lived, drank, worked, fornicated ”.
Cernuda regrets that the country that in life vilified them now "[use] both names and both works for the greater glory of France and its logical art."
“Do the dead hear what the living say after them?
I hope they hear nothing ”, he concluded.
Martel recalls in an email that Rimbaud the rebel later changed his mind and sought honors at the World's Fair, and that Verlaine wanted to enter the French Academy.
"If we make them only rebels, bohemians, anti-France, anti-school, anti-system, then neither should we baptize lyceums and colleges with the names of Rimbaud or Verlaine, and we should not put them in the Pléiade" , he argues, alluding to the prestigious collection of classics.
“If we propose their pantheonization, it is not because of them — they are dead and quite dead — but because of us.
The Pantheon means the following: can France salute Bohemia, poetry and two great homosexuals? ”He wonders.
"The answer is three times yes."
A difficult decision in the hands of Macron
"To great men, the recognition of the homeland", reads the frontispiece of the Pantheon, a church converted by the French Revolution into a secular and civil temple.
There are writers in the Pantheon, from Voltaire and Rousseau to Victor Hugo.
And there are couples.
Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1881) and Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) would not officially enter the Pantheon as a couple, but the gesture of protest does not escape anyone.
They are unequal poets: Verlaine, an important poet of his time;
Rimbaud, much more: a revolutionary of poetry, a decades-long forerunner of Surrealism, Dadaism, Cubism, and a man who made a work of his life.
He wrote everything between the ages of 16 and 20, and then he left everything and went to Africa and Arabia to work as a merchant.
Its radiation reaches all areas and times: the beat generation, hippies, rock and roll, May 68 ... The decision to pantheonize it with Verlaine is in the hands of Emmanuel Macron, “a very 'Rimbaldian' president”, he observes Jean-Luc Barré, one of the promoters of Rimbaud's pantheonization.
In what sense?
"In every way" he responds.
“He is a singular, original president, outside the norms.
In his personal life he leaves the rules and in his political life as well.
In this he is Rimbaldian. "