Chateaubriand, ou les espaces de la sculpture

Although Chateaubriand's taste in sculpture is clearly neoclassical, Roulin argues that his thinking and writing on sculptural objects are post-revolutionary and pre-modern. For Chateaubriand the site of the statue, not its formal properties, is crucial for its full "discursive" force as a "lieu de mémoire" or "une parole d'outre-tombe." He sees sculpture as a form of writing that says "here something happened." When that something is forgotten, which is often the case, it becomes, as it will for Baudelaire, an allegory for time, for all that has been forgotten, like the imprint of a woman's bust in a lava mold at Pompeii. Chateaubriand's commentaries on sculpture are thus seen by Roulin to raise the question of the place of the writer and of enunciation in a "revolutionized" France. (In French)