De la politique à la littérature ? La Petite République et la critique littéraire

Abstract

From 1893 to 1903, La Petite République, a socialist daily newspaper directed successively by Millerand, Guesde, Gerault-Richard and Jaures, presented a multitude of different attitudes towards literary criticism. Georges Renard, a scholar and theoretician, gave prominence to controversy and gradually left Louise Renard, his wife, took over literary criticism properly speaking. Their choice to have class struggle prevail led the guesdistes not to invest this field. Camille de Sainte-Croix and Louis Lumet, journalists and writers themselves, were more interested in literature and the arts. Without being specifically socialist, their chronicles belonged to the Republican renewal of the years following the Dreyfus case with the longing for «art for all» that characterised it.