Is Pierre Michon's The Eleven a political novel?

Abstract

Pierre Michon's The Eleven ( Les Onze, 2009) is narrated by a cicerone who entertains visitors to the Musée du Louvre and describes the painting of eleven members of the Comité de salut public during the French Revolution, which revisits the history of politics at the decisive moment of la Terreur. The novel purports to be a commentary on the painting, the people it depicts, the circumstances of its creation and its author. However, the painting is imaginary, as is the quotation from Jules Michelet's Histoire de la Révolution française that legitimises it. The complex interplay of literary traditions and techniques used in the novel defies the banality of a running commentary on political figures and circumstances told in a realist mode to evoke instead the spectacle of telling/making the history/story of politics as a surge of terror, thus revealing the abyss implicit in the performative situation of the protagonist and his audience doubling/mimicking the text and the reader: originary fiction of politics as imaginative re-enactment of the politics of fiction that redeems the Revolution.

Keywords: Pierre Michon; fiction; politics; revolution; terror.