Maurice Barrès and the Recovery of National Identity, II
In his novel Les déracinés (1897), Barrès chronicled the adventures of a group of boys at his own lycée in Nancy. Their philosophy teacher, brilliant and ruthless, instills in them vast, almost Napoleonic ambitions to put their talents into the service of the ongoing revolutionary liberal tradition. This is a late reflection of the tradition of Romantic heroism that usually ends disastrously in fiction. Remember Julien Sorel? Raskolnikov? What happens to the boys in Paris is the subject of the novel. Some become dissolute; others are reduced to poverty; but all begin to collaborate on a journal of the...



