About Frenchness and its effects
In the course of 1941, in the aftermath of the French defeat, Emil Cioran writes a short essay, titled De la France. This text, written in Romanian, was translated in French and published by L’Herne in 2009. In its pages, Cioran investigates the reasons accounting for France’s fall. Furthermore, the text shows a transformation in Cioran’s writing. Both the French culture’s influence and the historical predicament inform this rhetorical transfiguration. Thus, De la France appears as a new turning point in Cioran’s body of work.
Keywords: Cioran ; De la France ; French culture ; decadence ; exemplariness
