Les Lumières catholiques et le roman français

Au siècle des Lumières, le roman de nature édifiante emprunte de nouvelles avenues, embrassant la forme didactique et le parti antiphilosophique. Au contact des idées et des valeurs que défendent Encyclopédistes et philosophes, les romanciers et les romancières sont amenés à s’interroger sur la religion dans ses rapports sociaux et moraux avec la société et à assortir les acquis philosophiques aux dogmes chrétiens à l’aide d’un discours alliant foi et raison.

En mobilisant la sensibilité, ils proposent un expédient pieux selon lequel la religion serait mise au service de l’ordre établi et de la cohésion sociale. Le discours optimiste que donnent à lire les romans des Lumières catholiques renoue avec l’idée de perfectibilité humaine et de progrès social, dévoilant un espace de chevauchement qui brouille les frontières entre philosophie et antiphilosophie et qui témoigne de leur porosité.

Cet ouvrage collectif a pour objectifs d’explorer les entreprises de mise en roman des Lumières catholiques dans leurs dimensions narrative, rhétorique, topique et philosophique afin d’en souligner l’originalité et la complexité, d’exposer leur apport aux débats qui marquent le XVIIIe siècle et de les réhabiliter dans la constellation littéraire des Lumières.
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In the eighteenth century, edifying novels explored new strategies, embracing the didactic form and the antiphilosophic party. Confronted with the ideas and values that the Encyclopaedists and philosophers defended, Catholic novelists were led to consider religion in its moral and social relationships to society and to reconcile philosophical findings and Christian doctrines by producing discourses on the union of faith and reason.

By mobilizing sensibility, they propose a pious expedient whereby religion would serve the established order and maintain social cohesion. The optimistic discourse found in the novels of the Catholic Enlightenment is characterised by its belief in human perfectibility and social progress, which reveals an in-between space where the line separating philosophy from anti-philosophy is blurred and shown to be quite porous.

This edited collection aims to study the novelistic experiments of the Catholic Enlightenment in their narrative, rhetorical, topical, and philosophical dimensions in order to show their originality and complexity, to reveal their contributions in the great debates of the eighteenth century, and to give them back their due place in the literary constellation of the Enlightenment.

Contributor: Isabelle Tremblay (Edited by)

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