Sudisme et millénarisme aux Etats-Unis au XIXe siècle

Abstract

There were several millenialist movements in the nineteenth century South, as in the rest of the United States. The most interesting millenialist reactions, though, were the religious and secular manifestations related to what is called Southernism, that is to say the specific ideology which developed in the South in the second third of the nineteenth century and which reached important ethical and mythic dimensions. This study aims at examining the various manifestations of those millenialist reactions, linked first with the literal interpretation of the Bible used to vindicate the Peculiar Institution, but also with a certain vision of Manifest destiny and the Utopian project to create a large Southern Nation expanding to part of Latin America, which reached its climax with the nationalistic proclamation of the secession of the Southern States and the creation of the Southern Confederacy. The final question will be that of the part played by that secular millenialism in the development of the Southern Myth, as compared with other similar societies of the American continent, which have apparently not given birth to an elaborate mythical vision.