The historiography of Belgian literature, the part written in French, reflects the period of time during which it is written. From a unitary Belgium, soaked in the ambiance of the “Nordic myth”, we pass to the period of France as a standard point of cultural reference and to the emergence of francophone “literatures”, subsequently exploring the sociology of “Belgitude” and “literatures of the periphery”.

“History is always the daughter of the present,” wrote the historian Fernand Braudel. One might certainly say as much of the historiography of any literary grouping, that is, any discourse that intends to construct historical knowledge about creatively written texts. This is particularly true as concerns Belgian literature written in French.
 
Or at least, this is the impression one gets from reading the imposing collection (1) gathered together by Björn-Olav Dozo (research fellow of the FNRS – Centre for the study of the francophone literature of Belgium at the University of Liège) and François Provenzano (instructor in the sciences of language and rhetoric unit in the department of Romance languages and literature at the ULg). This compilation of 12 metadiscourses on the productions of writers who express themselves in the language of Molière follows an order that is both diachronic and synchronic. The first deals with a period during which Belgium was at all times a single entity, up to the point where it becomes – after many vicissitudes – Federal, a state of affairs that extends from the second half of the 19^th century to the early years of the 21^st. The second order is constructed around four angles of attack that are called “constructing history”, “writing the language”, “living the society” and “thinking the concepts”. This arrangement allows us to get an approximate idea about various theoretical experiments that have differentiated periods of discourse on Belgian literary production over the long run.

Elements of a theoretical laboratory

The historical approach comes to grips with Charles Potvin who in 1870 saw the nation, which he considered as having existed for a very long time, as the secular ferment of the march of progress, something to which writers had made a decisive contribution. “Yes, our writers have always stood as beacons of progress,” Potvin gushed. Francis Nautet, discerned in the “Belgian soul” which was so highly prized by Edmond Picard a profound justification of the original literary expression of Belgian authors. The birth was a slow one, he admitted, but thanks to the Romanticism that brought about “the fusion of a Latin thought and a Germanic one, we were at length affected. Because of an ethnographic duality, we find ourselves at the confluence of two intellectual currents; from this point on, we have a literary raison d'être.” Finally in 1921, breaking away from this idealized conception at a moment when Flemish linguistic claims were becoming ever more insistent, Paul Hamelius discovered in the territory, the land of the nation and its history a source of inspiration that would give priority “to accidents instead of trying to raise itself to the level of a pure idea.” To his mind, Belgian authors “make themselves the voice of the people [...] and are not well understood, except through a study of their milieu.”

(1) Björn-Olav Dozo et François Provenzano, Historiographie de la littérature belge. Une anthologie. ENS éditions, 2014.