Recommendations
Books Like Les Déracinés
Best books to read after Les Déracinés by Barrès
Readers who respond to Les Déracinés's portrait of uprooted young men in Paris, Barrès's nationalist philosophy of rootedness, and the Roman de l'énergie nationale will find the wider tradition of French nationalist and political fiction.
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L'Appel au soldat
by Maurice Barrès
The second volume of the Roman de l'énergie nationale (1900) follows the seven Lorrainers through the Boulangist crisis, the great political mobilization of the nationalist energy that Les Déracinés identified — reading both novels together shows how Barrès translates the cultural diagnosis of uprooting into a political prescription.
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Leurs figures
by Maurice Barrès
The third and final volume of the Roman de l'énergie nationale (1902) takes the seven Lorrainers through the Panama scandal and the darkest corruption of the parliamentary republic — the culmination of the trilogy's argument that the Third Republic is the political expression of the cultural uprooting that Les Déracinés diagnosed.
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Le Jardin de Bérénice
by Maurice Barrès
The third volume of the Culte du moi trilogy (1891) is the aesthetic predecessor of Les Déracinés: where Le Jardin de Bérénice develops the philosophy of rootedness-in-earth as an aesthetic experience (Bérénice's instinctive connection to the Camargue), Les Déracinés converts it into a political argument (the Lorrainers' severing from their provincial culture as a social and political catastrophe).
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Bel-Ami
by Guy de Maupassant
Maupassant's 1885 portrait of a young provincial's conquest of Paris through journalism and women is the most powerful contemporary alternative to Les Déracinés's portrait of the same subject: where Barrès's uprooted Lorrainers are morally compromised by their departure from provincial culture, Maupassant's Georges Duroy is morally compromised from the start — the comparison shows two different diagnoses of the same social movement from province to capital.
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The Red and the Black
by Stendhal
Stendhal's 1830 portrait of a provincial young man who comes to Paris and is destroyed by the gap between his ambition and the constraints of his social position is the essential literary predecessor of Les Déracinés: Julien Sorel's uprooting from his provincial world is the Romantic version of what Barrès's Lorrainers experience in the Third Republic.
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Lost Illusions
by Honoré de Balzac
Balzac's great novel of a provincial poet who comes to Paris and is destroyed by the literary marketplace is the Balzacian predecessor of Les Déracinés: the same uprooting from a coherent provincial culture into the anonymous competitive world of Paris, the same corruption of authentic talent by the market and by social ambition.
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Notre jeunesse
by Charles Péguy
Péguy's 1910 essay, a response to Jaurès's 'Notre jeunesse,' is the important internal critique of the tradition Barrès represents: written from within the same nationalist and regionalist Catholic tradition as Les Déracinés but criticizing Barrès's political evolution, it shows the living debate that Barrès's nationalism generated within French intellectual life.
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Le Culte du moi (trilogy)
by Maurice Barrès
The Culte du moi trilogy (Sous l'œil des barbares, 1888; Un homme libre, 1889; Le Jardin de Bérénice, 1891) is the essential predecessor of Les Déracinés: the aesthetic philosophy of self-cultivation and rootedness developed in the trilogy becomes the political philosophy of nationalism and le culte de la terre et des morts in the Roman de l'énergie nationale.
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