La révolution espagnole de 1936 dans Pas pleurer de Lydie Salvayre: entre mémoire et histoire
The Spanish Revolution of 1936 in Lydie Salvayre’s Pas Pleurer: Between Memory and History

Summary/Abstract: Pas Pleurer by Lydie Salvayre (Ed. Seuil, 2014) belongs to one of the most prolific sub-genres of contemporary French literature, the narrative of filiation, which presents itself as an inquiry into an ascendant. These are remembrances of a woman who lived a horrifying event – in the sense of the French historian Pierre Nora – an event that opens an unprecedented and radically new breach in present day thoughts. Through the memories of the Spanish war told to her by her ninety-year-old mother and the simultaneous reading of A Diary of My Times (Les Grands Cimetières Sous La Lune) by novelist Georges Bernanos (1938), Lydie Salvayre offers a complex reflection on one aspect of European history: the Spanish libertarian Revolution of the summer of 1936. The latter is recounted through the fragmentary memories of a forgetful witness: the mother, and by the dialogue established between her and her daughter-writer. Alongside the story of the murdered brother, the Bernanosian inter-text counterbalances, throughout the testimony of the atrocities perpetrated by the Franquists on the island of Majorca, the dazzled and selective memory of a woman who had forgotten all the years that followed 1936. We show that this novel, which inscribes the memory of Spanish history into the national memory of the French, proposes the praise of an emancipatory moment, by which the author seems to take indirect position in the re-evaluation of which the years 1968 are currently the object.

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