admired by later writers as diverse as Sthendal, Baudelaire, Gerard de Nerval and Paul Valéry, and censured by his nemesis today, which was none other than the Marquis de Sade, de la Bretonne can Rétif today regarded as a precedent of author SUV, journalist on site and, ultimately, exemplary of the more confusing bizarre sort.
practiced the erotic novel "outbursts spurred by the author of" The philosophy of the toilet "- and was among other things an involuntary ancient belt in the art of recording, in the most unexpected and varied surfaces, also often the closest. The history of graffiti or the epigrams of the most varied coat, from the Egyptians and Romans to the present in any city, large or small, has a link Rétif negligible. Scattered by his beloved island of San Luis, in Paris, many thoughts dates, judgments, or suspicions.
But what has had the honor of being very vindicated in recent times has been in the voluminous series of raids that generically titled "Paris Nights" (where the two works are included in this entry ), where he is symptomatic of the evolution path of a city first dominated by the Old Regime, already exhausted, and the increasing intensity of a French Revolution that achieved turn over to a society hungry for change and voices hitherto unpublished .
The process is simple, tough and enthusiastic literally check our author the street and pick up the heartbeat of a people who spend a closure immemorial the feast of abuse and insubordination more pressing, mixing the personal with a mutation events from the political standpoint, which moves from a liberalism that still inherits the strong defense of values \u200b\u200bhitherto immovable-monarchy, nobility, into the embrace of an insurrection estates not exempt from the understandable uncertainty, a changing yet always sustained by the love of country French and unfading identity. Thus, we are assaulted with reading small stories within the Great Story folding each corner, each event that makes blowing up their commitment with Louis XVI and his accession to the Jacobin wing growing, albeit with reservations.
In The Night spectator "Rétif still be moving as a gentleman, wearing his cape and his inseparable eternal talisman and more concerned with unique aesthetic concerns, literary, he and his pulse with Sade-antagonist, scoring at the end of these suspicions ultimately take shape in "Nights revolutionary", where the assault will be institutionalized and where the heads begin to roll, inevitably, with our man as a correspondent for others always attentive and willing to steal hours sleep in exchange for "photograph" moments expeditious. In the dark, and superstitious of the first volume to the dawn of the second explosive and brutal.
Rétif is a volatile spirit, often contradictory, always marked by the irresistible need to express themselves, wherever and with the little ashamed of what they say, turned into a perfect representative of the troubled and confused society of his time. The privileged paparazzi of a new order.
