Les Déracinés Reading Order

Les Déracinés (The Uprooted, 1897) by Maurice Barrès is the first volume of the Roman de l'énergie nationale trilogy, a novel about seven young men from Lorraine who come to Paris for their higher education, are uprooted from their provincial culture by the Kantian universalism of their teacher Bouteiller, and each takes a different path in the capital — some succeeding through political or journalistic ambition, some failing or being destroyed. The title is Barrès's central metaphor: a tree transplanted from its native soil loses its strength; a man transplanted from his native province into the abstract universalism of Parisian intellectual culture loses his moral rootedness and his creative vitality. The novel is simultaneously a roman à clef about real political figures of the Third Republic (Barrès himself is barely disguised as Sturel), a sociological argument about education and uprooting, and a lyrical meditation on Lorraine and the Franco-Prussian war's legacy. Les Déracinés is the political novel that converts the aesthetic philosophy of the Culte du moi trilogy (Sous l'œil des barbares; Le Jardin de Bérénice) into a nationalist political argument: the rootedness in provincial culture and the dead of the land that Bérénice embodied instinctively becomes the explicit political ideology of nationalisme. The novel was immediately recognized as the founding text of the French nationalist literary tradition that would extend through Charles Maurras, Charles Péguy, and beyond.