Les Mémoires d’Ancien Régime au carrefour des disciplines (autour de La Rochefoucauld)

The new impetus given by literary disciplines to the study of Memoirs of the Ancien Régime in the 1970s made it possible to extract a large body of work from an essentially documentary approach, by stimulating a rhetorical and aesthetic grasp of works, frequently associated with the search for a poetics of Memories. At the same time, taking note of the problematic definition, even at a minimum, of a poetics capable of fully inscribing Memoirs in a literary genre, historian reflection has never ceased to question the writing and publication of these texts, in particular from the point of view of their social and political functions. Despite disciplinary compartments that are less watertight than before, these approaches tend to remain mutually exclusive.