Lumières et gratuité. Le thème de la retraite dans les Odes et Ballades de Hugo

The special issue of the Review for which this article was written deals with the continuity between Enlightment and Romanticism. The article begins by noticing the coexistence, in Hugo, of two apparently incompatible elements: on one side, a sense of mission for the truth within history which Hugo attributes to poetry, sense of participation to the world stemming from the militant literature of the Enlightenment; on the other, the romantic way of setting the lyrical against the analytical drought of the century of the Reason. To better explore these tensions, I chose to focus the study on the theme of retraite. What is striking at first is that after the very first legitimist militant odes still molded by neo-classic style, Hugo begins his renewal of the poetic language by depoliticizing it and by making it «useless», out of step with the imperative of militancy. We observe then the creation of a compromise which will cross all the work of the poet, between utility and autonomy, engagement and art for art's sake: between the demand of a fundamental autonomy of poetry and the conviction that the dignity of the poetry is bound to its mission in history. Yet, the image of a Pantheonised Bard led to forget the impact of this compromise, in the light of which I suggest to rethink the too simplistic opposition between on one hand, the oratorical and useful poetry of the first half of the century and, on the other the more autonomous and thus more modern poetry than Baudelaire would have introduced.