April 25^th (1^st Week) 5.15-6.30pm 

Elliot Grogan (Christ Church College) 

'"The past should be altered by the present as much as the present directs the past"; Navigating Alexandre Dumas' revolutionary past' 

This paper evaluates Alexandre Dumas’ depiction of the past in the Mémoires d’un Médecin cycle of historical novels. Also known as the Marie-Antoinette romances, the collection of five novels, penned between 1845-1855, narrates the final days of the Ancien Régime, dramatising and attempting to make sense of the French Revolution and its chief protagonists. I argue that Dumas’ oeuvre follows in the poetic tradition of Sir Walter Scott, blurring the boundary between history and fiction as ‘stories, not facts are what we turn to when we want to make sense of chaos and complexity.’

In re-telling the foundation myth of modern France, Dumas’ series navigates the political and philosophical conflicts of revolution within a thoroughly Romantic context. In doing so, and drawing upon the weight of history, the novelist attempts to re-define French national identity, and to construct what Victor Hugo described in Dumas’ novels as, ‘cette idée Française.’ This paper consequently suggests that Dumas’ oeuvre supports T.S.Eliot’s assertion that the artist’s relationship with the past is not a purely linear one. Rather, whilst the past directs a political, social and artistic present, Dumas also actively shapes the nineteenth-century reader’s collective memory of its revolutionary past.

Matthew Innes (University College) 

‘Pierre de Belloy and legal polemic during the French Wars of Religion’

Pierre de Belloy (c.1550 – 1611) was a French jurist and polemicist during the Wars of Religion whose importance has been unjustly neglected. In this paper, I offer an overview of my research project. This is primarily in the history of political thought: I explain how Belloy contributed to a particular style of French obedience theory which was, in turn, a response to Calvinist and Catholic resistance theories. In his defence of Henri of Navarre, later Henri IV, he also engaged with the disputed tradition of Gallicanism. Secondly, I suggest that Belloy’s life helps to illuminate the political and social history of his day. This is partly through the stories and rumours which he repeats in his political works, but it will also come from the documentary evidence of his later life as a Toulousan magistrate allows us to better understand the process of rebuilding civic institutions after decades of civil war.