At the Sorbonne, Jules Michelet one day began his course with this joke:
"The Grand Siècle, gentlemen, I mean the 18th century..."
We could have fun in this way about a "
belle époque"
that we would shift by a good half-century... The Belle Époque, hear the end of the 1950s in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, when Juliette Gréco was the muse of Henri Michaux, Raymond Queneau and Jacques Prévert, that Pierre Seghers wrote songs for Léo Ferré, that Boris Vian played the trumpet, that François Truffaut shot the
Four Hundred Blows
, that lyrical abstraction revolutionized painting and that
"the return of the General"
opened up new paths to our country.
Historians have often demonstrated that the notions of
"golden age"
,
"happy days
" and "
glorious years"
, these crazy and haunting reveries of European cultures since antiquity, were both subjective and retrospective. .
Benoît Duteurtre assumes this double qualification in the volume he publishes today…
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