Arriving in Paris as Theme of Liberation in French Literature

A literary-historical study of one of the most recurrent motifs in French and Francophone literature – the arrival in Paris – focusing on how it has been employed to explore the idea of Paris as a site of liberation.

For centuries, people have attached various dreams to Paris. It is the capital of light, love, intellectualism, fashion, gastronomy, and revolution. Paris is also associated with freedom – whether sexual, social, intellectual, individual, or political. Arriving in Paris as Theme of Liberation in French Literature explores how one of the most recurring motifs in French literature – the arrival in Paris – has been used to depict and question dreams of Paris as a place of liberation.

Using a topological approach and focusing on key historical junctures, such as the transitions to post-revolutionary and post-colonial France, Michael Høxbro Andersen examines this phenomenon from 17th-century French comedies and 18th-century epistolary novels to 19th-century historical prose narratives and contemporary African-French migration stories. Characters in these texts arrive in Paris with dreams of a new life and identity, but their experience of arrival rarely represents pure liberation; it often exposes new forms of unfreedom.

This book argues that the often-negative narratives of arriving in Paris serve to illuminate and make tangible our collective cultural dreams of liberty. In this context, the arrival motif can be used both to critique certain ideals of freedom and to highlight the gap between those ideals and a reality that has yet to deliver on the freedoms Paris is believed to represent.