Pleurer le paradis perdu : Barbey d’Aurevilly ou la hantise d’un siècle d’or

Barbey d’Aurevilly didn’t like his century, judging it as a distress time. This period personifies for him all possible vices, opposed to the happy time before the Revolution and the XVIIIth century. His novels express his enormous nostalgia for the past. This nostalgia is visible on all the levels of his literary technique, as character construction, configurations of time and space, the plot. All these elements are inevitably leading to the conclusion that everything is over, history is irrevocable, future is hopeless and the Christ hasn’t come yet on the Earth to give us the chance of the resurrection.