Olivier Bétourné, Michel Lussault, Maël Renouard, Michel Winock…

Three novels, one philosophy essay, one geography, four history… Here are brief reviews of nine notable works in this fortieth week of the year.

History. “The Death of the King”, by Olivier Bétourné

It is not certain that the execution of Louis XVI, on January 21, 1793, continues to haunt France. We can regret it, Olivier Bétourné seems to say throughout the book he devotes to this “founding act of violence”. Not out of a desire to reopen old quarrels over the moral nature of regicide, but because, precisely, we still have to understand what and how it was so founding. The editor and historian, to carry out the investigation into the “transfer of sacredness” of which the guillotine was then the instrument, takes the side of recounting the events step by step, from the trial to death, searching at each stage for the signs of the shift from one world to another, the sacred body of the sovereign of one side, dreams of creating a “Republic of Equals” on the other. The spilled blood of the king – with which citizens sprinkled themselves while shouting “Long live the Republic! » – acquires, under the documented and stimulating gaze of the author, a baptismal virtue. A France was born from it, in the form of an enigma which still remains to be solved two hundred and thirty years later. Fl. Go

Geography. “Let’s live together! For a new terrestrial urbanity”, by Michel Lussault

Many specialists date from the 1950s “great acceleration” of the transformation of the Earth under the effect of human activity, this “forcing” resources and natural balances which, under the name of the Anthropocene, defines the era into which we have entered, and which could lead to a catastrophic erosion of the habitability of our planet. However, this period is also the one where the urbanization of the world accelerated, so much so that “the Anthropocene would above all be an “urbanocene” », writes Michel Lussault.

The geographer has long placed this intuition at the center of his work. Years of research that his new book recapitulates and extends, bringing together surveys on the history of urbanization, analyzes on the “vulnerability of human habitats” and sketch of an outcome, around the “dwelling virtues” what are “consideration, attention, care, maintenance”. That is, not the illusory withdrawal of a return to nature, but a way of seeking to repair the impact of cities within themselves, from renewed relationships with the human and the non-human, without which the world risks being swallowed up, and us with it. Fl. Go

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