“La Grande Tempête” (The Storm), by Daniel Defoe, translated from English and edited by Nathalie Bernard and Emmanuelle Peraldo, Classiques Garnier, “Classiques jaunes. Texts from the world”, 234 p., €11.
“The Castaways of the Wager. A story of shipwreck, mutiny and murders” (The Wager), by David Grann, translation from English (United States) by Johan-Frederik Hel Guedj, Points, 504 p., €10.40.
“Nightmare in Antarctica. The voyage of Belgica in the polar night” (Madhouse at the End of the Earth), by Julian Sancton, translation from English (United States) by Odile Demange, Payot, “Petite biblio voyageur”, 486 p., €12.
At the dawn of the 18th centurye century, the United Kingdom experienced three important events: the birth of journalism, that of meteorological records and, the three go hand in hand, the storm of November 26 and 27, 1703, the breath of which laid down the forests, pruned the roofs and overturned the country like the earth a plowshare. A cataclysm that we could, therefore, quantify and narrate to everyone in detail. What Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) hastened to do in 1704 with The Great Stormwhich combines first-hand London and regional accounts, scientific data, theological meditations and historical reflections.
Defoe the untimely! Religious dissident, by turns bankrupt hosier or brickmaker, political activist, journalist and secret agent. Pamphleteer who was imprisoned for debts and three days in the pillory for anti-Anglicanism (hence his famous Anthem to the Pillory of 1703), Defoe is a writer whose work deals with extreme realities: the state of an involuntary shipwreck (Robinson Crusoe1719), piracy (1724), the reality of specters (1727) and, above all, the Great Plague of 1665 (Diary of the plague year1722). What the editors of this translation of The Great Storm situated as a “poetics of catastrophe” : “What interests him is to note the impact that such phenomena can have on individuals thus confronted with danger, and to gauge the limits of human beings. » An anthropology of cataclysm which places Defoe at the hinge of two visions: the theological gaze attentive to placing the hand of God at the root of all events and rational analysis, where the divine apocalypse gives way to natural accomplishment . Defoe, conduit between decrees of Providence and laboratory data.
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