Association Rayonnement du Festival Mission

Nicolas Perot, professor of literature in hypokhâgne, editor of Chateaubriand and specialist in the relationship between literature, music and religion, presents a lecture focusing on three major figures: Chateaubriand, Baudelaire and Rimbaud. The entire 19th century was digesting and licking the wounds of the French Revolution, and wondering what to do with two legacies of the past: royalty and religion. Everything was new after 1789: was this unstable modernity the advent of Christianity or, on the contrary, its overcoming? The 19th century also had to absorb the shockwave of Chateaubriand's Génie du christianisme, published under the aegis of the First Consul in 1802. Rimbaud closed this period with Une Saison en enfer (1873) and Illuminations, published only in 1886. Poetry and literature in general have the advantage of not being dogmatic discourses, so it's here that we can experience a non-ideological but truly spiritual quest. The lecture will be accompanied by readings.