Les Mystères du peuple d’Eugène Sue, une guerre des Gaules du XIXe siècle : de la minorité culturelle à l’hégémonie identitaire

Abstract

In the light of the heavy, long-term consequences of the French revolution in the 19th c., one can read Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères du peuple as a tentative rehabilitation of the Gauls – who were soon to impose themselves as emblems of France in Henri Martin and Lavisse’s canonical history – in the wake of Sieyès’ handling of the Third Estate on the eve of the French revolution. Having been marginalized for a long time by the Franks, what have they been until now? Almost nothing, at least not much in the hands of certain scholars concerned with using indigenous people – perceived as a cultural minority de spite their numerical majority, to consolidate a national myth. What do they wish to be? Everything. As representatives of the people and of the popular masses they have then come to embody, they claim outpost access to the “nation”.