Since the passing of its founders, the Nerval Center has fulfilled a dual mission: documentary and scientific. Researchers are welcomed in Namur, where they can conduct research in the archives compiled by Father Guillaume and Michel Brix.

In addition, the Center supports, sponsors, and publishes works devoted to Nerval, Sainte-Beuve, Romanticism, and modern French literature. In particular, it oversees the series *Études nervaliennes et romantiques* (Presses universitaires de Namur) and *Bibliothèque nervalienne* (Honoré Champion, Paris). 

Théophile Gautier, *Complete Poetic Works*, ed. M. Brix, 3rd revised and corrected ed., Paris, Bartillat, 2021.

Editor: Michel Brix 

Théophile Gautier is still celebrated for his novels, short stories, and travelogues. This overlooks the fact that he was one of the most important poets of the 19th century and that Baudelaire dedicated *Les Fleurs du Mal* to him in 1857, calling him an “impeccable poet” and a “perfect magician of French letters.” In his youth, Théophile Gautier took part in the Romantic movement. This was the era of his early works: *Albertus*, *La Comédie de la mort*, and *España*. Then, at the turn of the 1850s, Gautier’s poetic mastery reached its zenith in his most famous work, *Emaux et Camées*, the result of a subtle alchemy of classicism and modernity. This volume brings together for the first time the complete works of Gautier’s poetry, including the poems omitted from the 1845 collection and his libertine poems. Extensive appendices—featuring, notably, an article by Henry James previously unpublished in French—round out the collection by tracing the history of how Gautier was received as a poet.

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Théophile Gautier, *Tableaux de siège*, ed. M. Brix, Paris, Bartillat, 2021.

Editor: Michel Brix 

In this unjustly overlooked book, Théophile Gautier evokes the feelings inspired in him by a particularly dark and turbulent period in French history—the period spanning from the summer of 1870 to the spring of 1871—marked successively by the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, the rout of Napoleon III’s armies, the fall of the Second Empire, the proclamation of the Republic, the siege of Paris, the French capitulation, the insurrection of the Commune, the second siege of the capital, and the crushing of “Red” Paris, during the “Bloody Week.” Gautier makes no secret of his outrage at the atrocities committed during what Victor Hugo would call The Terrible Year. However, this book cannot be reduced solely to a condemnation of the events that took place during the Commune. Throughout *Tableaux de siège*, the author reveals what daily life was like for Parisians during those long months of adversity, moral despair, and privations of every kind. He even shows concern for the fate of animals during the first siege—both domestic pets and the residents of the Jardin des Plantes. Above all, however, Gautier has produced an essential work on Paris that ranks him among the capital’s most ardent defenders, alongside Hugo and Baudelaire. It is also his final book. Perhaps these pages should be seen as a kind of testament. At the dawn of a new era, the man who played a full part in the Romantic struggle of 1830 quietly takes his leave here.

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New Documents on Gérard de Nerval, Presses universitaires de Namur, 2020.

Author: Michel Brix 

This volume presents a series of entirely unpublished studies on the life and work of Gérard de Nerval, supplemented by several articles that were previously published and have now been expanded with additional insights, particularly in light of the recent discovery of new material. Furthermore, the final section of these *New Documents* brings together clarifications, additions, and supplements to the *Chronology of the Life and Works of Gérard de Nerval*, published in 2017 (Éditions du Lérot). Bio-bibliographical questions are thus at the heart of this collection, but the study does not shy away from the occasional foray into the realm of interpretation, as evidenced by the pages devoted to *Sylvie*, *Pandora*, and *Nuits d’octobre*.

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Enlightenment Libertinism and the Battle of the Sexes, Paris, Kime, 2018.

Author: Michel Brix 

In *Les Sacrifices de l’amour* (1771), the novelist Claude-Joseph Dorat defines the 18th century as an era in which men sought to seduce women “to obtain the right to despise them.” Such a statement may come as a surprise: today, we are more accustomed to hearing glowing praise for Enlightenment libertinism, which is said to have shattered the moral and religious straitjacket that repressed sexual desires. But should we really equate “libertinism” with “freedom”? This book aims to give the floor, on this point, to 18th-century writers. Their writings suggest that, to understand the stakes of libertinism, we must situate it within the long history of a conflict between the sexes that has persisted since the dawn of humanity. The Eros of the Enlightenment corresponds to a strategy implemented by men to exercise unchallenged domination over women. Under the pretext of inviting women to share in the pleasures of love, seducers set a trap for the female sex: libertine sophistry seeks to turn every woman into a happy slave, subservient to male omnipotence, rendered completely at their mercy, and forced to recognize the phallus as her one and only master.

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Hippolyte Taine, *Voyage en Italie*, ed. M. Brix, Paris, Bartillat, 2018.

Publisher: Michel Brix 

For more than half a century, Taine’s *Voyage en Italie* was considered the handbook for French travelers. Written between 1864 and 1866 in a precise and vigorous style, this book takes the reader on a journey through Italy’s great cities—Naples, Rome, Perugia, Assisi, Siena, Pisa, Florence, Bologna, Padua, Venice—before making a final detour through Lombardy. Taine knew everything about the opinions, passions, and prejudices that—both during the Enlightenment and the Romantic era—shaped the image of the peninsula. Drawing on his own experience as a traveler, he captured all of Italy in a single book and created the definitive work that most of Europe’s intellectuals had dreamed of before him. By presenting his travelogue in the form of a journal, Taine shares with us—as if captured in the moment—his artistic emotions, in enthusiastic pages written as the author made his discoveries and imbued with a profound sensuality. This new edition, featuring a preface by Michel Brix, includes, for the first time, a set of notes and an index. This classic deserves to once again become the bedside book of all lovers of Italy.

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Pétrus Borel, Poetic and Novelistic Works, ed. M. Brix, Paris, Éditions du Sandre, 2017.

Editor: Michel Brix 

Literary history has recognized Borel’s unifying role in the early 1830s but seems to have paid far less attention to the content of his works. Yet, even though these works remained in the shadows at the time of their publication (the failure of *Madame Putiphar* in fact led to the ruin of the writer’s ambitions, prompting him a few years later to become a colonial civil servant in Algeria, where he died), they nonetheless stand out for their formal qualities, their dark power, and the profound humanity of their subject matter. Baudelaire himself—whose opinions carry the greatest weight—urged posterity not to forget Borel, alias the “lycanthrope”: without him, the author of *Les Fleurs du Mal* observed, there would be a “gap” in French Romanticism. Another endorsement, no less prestigious: that of the Surrealists. André Breton hailed Borel’s genius, reserved a place for him in his *Anthology of Black Humor*, and presented him as the “scapegoat” of Romanticism— “because he proved himself more unyielding in his [Romantic] faith than any other.” But what the Surrealists appreciated even more about Borel was his embrace of the Gothic novel tradition, in which M. G. Lewis, the author of *The Monk*, had established himself before him. Tzara, for his part, saw in Borel one of the emblematic figures of what the Dada Master called poetry as “activity of the mind”—that is, poetry which, as in Rimbaud’s case, manifests itself as much in the writer’s life as in his work. Anyone who reads this collection will agree that Baudelaire, Breton, and Tzara were not mistaken. Clearly, the voice of the “lycanthrope,” the “wolf-man,” is powerful and still resonates with us today; as for his works, they have lost nothing today—neither their relevance nor—better yet—their irreverence.

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Chronology of the Life and Works of Gérard de Nerval, Tusson, Du Lérot, 2017.

Author: Michel Brix 

This previously unpublished work traces Nerval’s life and work date by date, sometimes day by day. A wealth of information conceived and written by Michel Brix, who co-authored the *Dictionnaire Nerval* with Claude Pichois.

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