235 – La violence de l’histoire

Literature feeds on, recounts and sometimes denounces the violence of the world: individual or state violence, violence against women, slaves, peoples, the enemy, believers and unbelievers; there would be no end to listing all the forms of cruelty in the books. Conflict is everywhere, and we could even say that it was the essence of theatre. What about the ancient or medieval epic? Matter is infinite and we quickly understood that we had to make a choice to deal with this vast subject. So we have chosen to focus more often on the notion of war, to reflect, by comparison, on the point of view of authors and artists. Thinking in particular of high school students, we chose to stop on some significant extracts of famous works, that we have commented more, to emphasize the mechanism of implementation of this violence.