This year, Antoine Compagnon has chosen to focus on the figure of the ragpicker, whose many appearances in the poetic works of Charles Baudelaire he sees as something that literary critics, with the exception of Walter Benjamin, have not followed exhaustively until now. This figure provides an opportunity to restore a large part of the "Parisian picture" as 19th-century writers experienced it around them. Several successive investigations - urbanistic, iconographic, textual - offer a new interpretation of the presence of such a figure in Baudelaire's work, particularly in terms of what it says about poetic work. It also provides an opportunity for dialogue with Benjamin's proposal that the ragpicker should be seen as a sign of the permanence of a revolutionary identification in Baudelaire.
In addition to the lecture, the seminar welcomed ten guest speakers who gave talks on the world of ragpickers in the 19th century, or on the importance of this theme for certain writers, artists or photographers.