To write, to live: writing about (in) exile as a metaphor of life in Hermione Quinet’s Memoirs

Abstract

Hermione Quinet’s Mémoires d’exil Bruxelles-Oberland, first published in 1868, is an autobiographical work in which the author retraces her experience of exile, shared with her husband, the historian and philosopher Edgar Quinet, following the coup d’État of 2 December 1851. Hermione Quinet describes life in exile, first in Brussels, then in Switzerland, where the couple settled from 1858 onwards. Her writing mixes personal memories, reflections on the condition of exile, and testimonies of admiration for her husband. The writer explores the pain of separation associated with forgottenness and records the intellectual and political fights led by Edgar Quinet and the other exiles.

Our article aims to analyse Hermione Quinet’s writing in and of exile, as her Mémoires - a text that is both intimate and politically engaged - are more than a simple narrative of events: they reveal a lyrical and militant style of writing, in which nature becomes the setting for a spiritual and artistic renaissance. Hermione Quinet reinvents the experience of exile as an act of literary creation and as a reversed metaphor for life.