Résurrection, sibyllisme et parthénogénèse: La Sorcière de Jules Michelet et la nouvelle historiographie

Abstract

For 1862’s La Sorciere, Jules Michelet’s seminal study of the history of witchcraft and witch-trials in France, the author adopts a controversial mode of writing situated somewhere between the style of folktales and that of traditional historiographic scholarship. Michelet describes three powers of the witch (resurrection, prophecy, and parthenogenesis) which, when considered in relation to the author’s theory of the imaginary, are also the powers of the historiographer. Of the three, it is the idea of parthenogenesis that proves most useful to understanding the stylistic hybridity of the text. The term is borrowed by Michelet from nineteenth-century naturalist science, but is transformed in La Sorciere into a symbol of the creative imagination: the poiesis of the writer and the autopoiesis of French society