De l' utopie à la contre-utopie aux XVIe-XIXe siècles

From Utopia to Counter-Utopia between the Sixteenth and the Nineteenth Centuries

• Auteur / Autrice : Corin Braga
• Direction : Jean-Jacques Wunenburger
• Type : Thèse de doctorat
• Discipline(s) : Philosophie
• Date : Soutenance en 2008
• Etablissement(s) : Lyon 3

Mots clés

Mots clés contrôlés

Christianisme

Empirisme

Influence

Rationalisme

Paradis

Dans la littérature

Voyages imaginaires

Résumé

Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Johann Valentin Andreae, Tommaso Campa¬nella, et bien d'autres utopistes encore ont, sans hésiter, placé le jardin d'Eden, naguère seul apanage de Dieu, sous le patronage exclusif des hommes, permettant ainsi la primauté de la cité terrestre sur la cité céleste. L'Utopie est l'un des visages de ce paradis réapproprié, paradis qui ne survécut cependant pas plus d'un siècle à la vague d'optimisme qui l'avait porté. La théologie chrétienne post-tridentine, le rationalisme cartésien et l'empirisme anglais allaient porter le coup final aux utopies de la Renaissance, et donner libre cours aux anti¬utopies qui, de Joseph Hall (Mundus alter et idem, 1605) à Artus Thomas (L'Isle des Hermaphrodites, 1605), ont donné le ton d'une vision dominante peuplée d'enfers sur terre, et de sociétés de cauchemar, en somme de contre-utopies.

Counter-utopias appeared as a literary genre long before the dystopias of the twentieth century. Our aim is to document the emergence of classical dystopias between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. We start from the idea that Renaissance utopias were conceived as humanist alternatives to the Terrestrial Paradise of the Christian tradition. Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Johann Valentin Andreae, Tommaso Campanella and many other thinkers and writers sought to recover the Garden of Eden for humankind, to replace the city of God with a city of Man. Nevertheless, utopian optimism was soon challenged by several theoretical critiques and institutional attacks, formulated under three important doctrines: Counter-Reformation theology, Cartesian rationalism and English empiricism. Throughout the pre-modern age, these ideologies raised a series of decisive arguments against the hope that mankind could by itself establish a perfect society and a paradise on earth. Starting with Joseph Hall (Mundus alter et idem, 1605) and Artus Thomas (L'Isle des Hermaphrodites, 1605), an important number of authors took on official and public censorship and reshaped their fiction into critiques of utopian visions. Instead of imagining ideal places, they began to conceive counter-utopian societies and terrestrial infernos.