Le voyage de Victor Hugo aux Pyrénées, un voyage dans la mémoire

Abstract

1843 can be considered as a turning point in the life of Victor Hugo. Certainly in the middle of his life he had experienced dramatic events specifically the failure of his play Les Burgraves, the wedding of his daughter Leopoldine and more importantly her tragic death by drowning in the Seine at Villequier in September of the same year. These events had important psychological and emotional effects on him. We have tried to identify what affected Victor Hugo's unconscious thought processes by analysing different texts linked to these happenings, primarily the account of the journey referred to as Pyrenees by the executors of his will. This analysis leads us to establish a link with the drawings of Victor Hugo in which unconscious processes are already expressed by « l’homme ocean ». But if the purpose of our study is above all a psychoanalytical understanding of the process leading to involuntary memory, the « proustian memory », we are trying to replace this process in Victor Hugo's existential context, in the moment between the before and the after.