Le triomphe du pathétique. Lessing, Miß Sara Sampson (1755) et le Journal étranger (décembre 1761)

Abstract

The French reception of Lessing’s theatre began in 1761. In December of that same year, the editors of the Journal etranger published commented excerpts from Mis Sara Sampson (1755). They pleaded for a new form of tragedy combining the legacy of the English prototypes of domestic tragedy (Lillo, Moore) and the aesthetics of “bourgeois and domestic tragedy”. The reviewer (who cannot be Diderot) does not, however, aim to break with Aristotle’s Poetics, unlike the author of Le Pere de famille. He takes sides with the emotional component, while referring to the figures of Oedipus and Orestes.Such a position made it possible for modern tragedy to return to the pathetic which, in Aristotle’s eyes, was to be elevated to the rank of essential constitutive element of the “great genre”, alongside peripeteia and anagnorisis.The article analyses this neglected and even forgotten category which is the polar opposite of the heroic mode. It relies on Ines de Castro (1723), a tragedy by the French dramatist and poet Antoine Houdar de La Motte, whom Lessing knew from the 1754 edition of his Works.