Introduction

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This year's lecture is a follow-up to the 2014 lecture, which focused on the "literary war" of 1914-1918, i.e., on the inscription of the reality of war in works, and on the various postures, often paradoxically peaceful, that the experience of war prescribed to writers. This year, on the contrary, we'll be looking at literary production as a place of sui generis conflictuality, sometimes in the form of a determination to combat ideas, sometimes in the form of a competition for survival within what Pierre Bourdieu, in Les Règles de l'art, described as the literary "field". It's also a question of putting a spell on a figure encountered in the 2016 lecture: that of the hook of the ragpicker writer, set up by Baudelaire, and which could always be turned into a weapon. Starting with Baudelaire and working backwards through literary modernity, we discover a genealogy of images: the sword-quill in Voltaire's Dialogues et entretiens philosophiques, or the iron quill with which, long before the appearance of the industrial object itself, Ronsard describes his ambition to defend a royal and Catholic France, in the Continuation du Discours des misères de ce temps (1563).

Literary creation is regularly defined by comparison with combat sports, and even more generally with sport, insofar as sport has to do with combat, i.e., competition. Here too, there are championships, prizes and the possibility of doping. Every young writer," warns Fontenelle, "must be prepared to enter the fray; Maurice Barrès himself, who kept a long distance from the accidents of literary camaraderie, feels as if he's joining a "professional match" when he reports on his exploration of Egypt. All the great writers of the 19th^century, with few exceptions, fought duels, as if this moment of duel revealed the latent agonistic value of literature. Doesn't literature, rather than or as much as leisure(otium), have something to do with negotium, the hustle and bustle? Pacification and consolation are among its possible operations, but their opposite appears to be a constitutive tendency of literary creation and existence.

In his Querelles littéraires (1761), Abbé Irail focused on Archiloque, the first lyric poet and the first satirical poet, who wrote poetry out of anger and a desire for revenge. Genius and quarrel are linked: there was no century of great talent, he observes, that was not a century of great agitation and jealousy between writers. As in Bernard Mandeville's economic theory, it seems that, in the arts, private vices serve the general good, and that the flourishing of a culture rests on the permanent quarrel of its representatives.

Our relationship with literature implicitly recognizes such a pugilistic, quintessentially romantic dimension; it's the winner takes all rule. Pierre Bourdieu and Harold Bloom were theorists of this difficulty of surviving in literature, and of the real dynamics of literature, quite different from a natural age shift, which brings together on the one hand acquired literary glories, for whom the urgency is to last, and on the other hand aspirants to glory, who know that they will only acquire the right to last by rejecting their predecessors in the past.

Sportsmen, fencers, prisoners: several figures, in the sense of Roland Barthes, of this agonistic driving force of literary life between the Restoration and the Second Empire, will be considered throughout the lecture.