Politique et matrimoine local : le cas du Brutus de Catherine Bernard au Festival national Corneille de Barentin en 1972

In 1972, Brutus by Catherine Bernard was played on stage during the Corneille National Festival in Barentin. Interestingly, despite the initial success at the Comédie-Française (18 December 1690), as well as during the next years, this five-act tragedy in verse was never staged afterwards. Based on the epitextual corpus composed with documents form the festival, press articles and magazine reviews, the present study queries on the cultural and political goals of that representation, orchestrated as a truly dramatic ʻresurrection’. It shows that the play was staged to satisfy the converging interests of both the municipality and the festival, and in a way that the rehabilitation and the instrumentalisation of Catherine Bernard were unavoidable. Hence, far from being entirely prejudicial, the operation tended to legitimise the cultural and feminine heritage at the national scale.