Les moments politiques dans la correspondance André Gide-Eugène Rouart

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“Les moments politiques dans la correspondance André Gide-Eugène Rouart” [“The Political Moments in the Correspondence of André Gide and Eugène Rouart”], Régine Battiston, Nikol Dziub and Augustin Voegele (Eds.), Amitiés épistolaires entre littérature et politique [Epistolary Friendships between Literature and Politics], to be published in 2024. (Symposium. University of Haute-Alsace, 08-09/06/2023.)The Gide-Rouart correspondence can be divided into three political phases: firstly, youth, when each of the two letter-writers behaved above all as men of literature, even if Rouart was already more concerned than Gide with politics, the Dreyfus Affair being a turning point when the opposition in temperament between the two men became clearer; a second phase corresponding to the ascending years of Rouart’s political career, culminating in his becoming chief of staff to the minister Cruppi, and his finally having the power to help the friends that, together with Gide, he had been trying to place here and there for years; finally, maturity, which corresponds to those years when, having become an established political figure, Rouart changed his view of Gide’s works, which he read according to his concerns as a public man – this is particularly the case for Corydon, but also for the feminist trilogy of Gide, for which his marriage to Yvonne Lerolle provided, unbeknownst to him, the sad model.