The last two lectures have been devoted to a historical perspective on life writing, using a philological approach designed to complement the allegorical approach followed up to that point, which had highlighted three attitudes representative of contemporary debate on the subject: abuse, aporia, and the apology of the life story. We must now approach the question of life writing in terms of the changes it has undergone in the course of history.
The essential differences between ancient Lives and modern biographies have been sketched out. In the first place, the Life is an elevated genre that recounts the deeds of a noble personage, whereas biography is a secularized genre that we attempt to ennoble by giving it the name of Life, as André Maurois did, for example, by entitling his biographies La Vie de... In the second place, the Life genre institutes life as a unit of measurement, as a cycle that is summed up in the riddle posed by the Sphinx to Oedipus.
We conclude this historical survey - destined to be extended next year - with the notion of biography, whose appearance coincides with a movement to secularize the world. The term, a technical one, is defined by Littré as "a kind of history which has as its object the life of a single person", which is opposed to panegyric and designates an auxiliary science of history. It's a word for antiquarians, cuistres and scholars, preferred by Sainte-Beuve to "Portrait" or "Causerie". It was this same Sainte-Beuve, remarking that "women should never have biography, an ugly word used by men and which smacks of study and research", who gave the final word: biography to men, to women Life.
