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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2014

Memory of natural Disasters: Construction and Representation of Europe

Résumé

We propose to analyse in this article some aspects of the discursive and aesthetic handling of natural disasters between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries by making two hypothesis; the first is that construction of the recollection of disasters, in the form they take form the seventeenth century onwards, is eminently political; the second is that this political dimension exists, notably, in connexion with European conflicts (seventeenth century) with the way on which formative Europe defined its borders (eighteenth century), and, as disasters were transformed (the disapeearence of the plague in Europe and the appearance of technological disasters), withe the representation of Europe in relation to the rest of the world (nineteenth century). While the commemoration of the past disasters becomes an issue in the context of the revolutions and restorations of the nineteenth century, putting ancient and contemporary disasters into historical perspective ( as done by Chavanne de la Giraudière between 1855 and 1911), serve as an educational, religious and political project aimed to young people. We shall endeavor first of all to show some of the political issues found in the representation of the plague in the seventeenth century, by way of two contemporary literary examples of the Milan Plague (1630), as well as the transformation of the plague columns in the context of the war between the Austrian monarchy and Turkey at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries. Next, we will show how the plague, when it disappeared form Europe, was thought as an inferior state of civilization; it serves to accentuate the definition of a modern, Christian, non-Jewish Europe, separated form Turkey and The East by measures that are as effective as symbolic (the "Cordon sanitaire", or quarantine line). Finally, the las part is devoted to and editorial phenomeon of the second half of the nineteenth century, catastrophes Célèbres by Hippolyte de Chavannes de la Giraudière, showing how the summarizes, though the disasters, a certain vision of europe and the World, just before its destruction thought a disaster which eclipse all the others, the First World War.
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Dates et versions

hal-01403746 , version 1 (10-02-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-01403746 , version 1

Citer

Françoise Lavocat. Memory of natural Disasters: Construction and Representation of Europe . John K. Boyer ; Berthold Molden. EUtROPEs: the Paradox of European Empire, 7, pp.131-161, 2014, Parisian Notebooks, 978-2952596268. ⟨hal-01403746⟩
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