La figure de d’Artagnan : enquête sur un (stéréo)type littéraire

Abstract

If the character of d’Artagnan has known three incarnations, that of history, that of the Apocryphal Memoirs written by Courtilz de Sandras and that of Alexandre Dumas, it is perhaps above all as a stereotype and a literary myth that it has imposed itself in the collective imagination. Based on this hypothesis, this article first attempts to identify the contours of this phantasmagorical figure and the way in which it was constituted. It is then confronted with Dumas’ d’Artagnan, which can be demystified using the categories of the character-effect proposed by Jouve (1992), by disentangling the pretext-effect, the person-effect and the person-effect. It is then possible, on this basis, to ask the question of the value of the character and the work of which he is the emblem, by conducting a double investigation: one on the writing and the sources of Dumas’ novel, the other on the place it occupies in the aesthetic debates of our time.