Abstract
This chapter seeks to amplify Kate Marsh’s work in Narratives of the French Empire: Fiction, Nostalgia, and Imperial Rivalries, 1784 to the Present (2013), arguing that imperial rivalry is a theme that continues to be at play and identifying this tendency in the work of contemporary travel writer Jean-Paul Kauffmann. The chapter focuses mainly on La Chambre noire de Longwood: voyage à Sainte-Hélène (1997), in which Kauffmann retraces the final years of Napoleon’s life on the island and addresses France’s rivalry with the British Empire. I argue elsewhere (2022) that Kauffmann’s travel writing is an exploration of self and memory, understandably in need of the reparative, yet avoids reaching out to the colonized other of Empire’s history. In this chapter, I examine in detail how Kauffmann draws upon the content of France’s imperial pasts and rivalries in a way that allows us to reflect upon Marsh’s work and echoes it in probing the continuing presence and function of empire in contemporary French literature. The socio-political implications of the persistence of this nostalgic template, and the past they resurrect, form a question that draw the chapter to its conclusion.
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