Victor Margueritte et sa communauté d’écriture

Abstract

This study explores the literary community formed around Victor Margueritte, encompassing his brother Paul, his niece-daughter Lucie Paul-Margueritte, and his second wife, Madeleine Acézat (writing as Sylvestre Boix). Drawing on a shared corpus – Including Femmes nouvelles, Vanité, Prostituée, La Jeune fille mal élevée, and Toute nue – the analysis highlights a strong thematic coherence centered on questioning social norms governing marriage, female sexuality, prostitution, and gender relations. Often situated within naturalist or psychological narrative frameworks, these texts critique bourgeois hypocrisy and foreground female figures striving for emotional, social, and bodily autonomy. By opposing these women to dominant male figures – bankers, tyrannical husbands, libertines – the authors challenge patriarchal structures and introduce the possibility of alternative masculinities, notably embodied by the enlightened physician. Medicine, conceived as both a moral horizon and a space of emancipation, thus plays a pivotal role in the Marguerittes’ literary poetics. The article also addresses the methodological challenges of genetic criticism when applied to co-authored texts, emphasizing the material opacity of the surviving manuscripts. Ultimately, the Margueritte family’s literary collaboration constitutes a distinctive creative and critical space, where aesthetic, political, and intimate dimensions converge in response to a society undergoing profound transformation.