Nous avons enlacé le globe de nos réseaux…’ : spatial structure in Saint-Simonian poetics.

Kerr, Greg (2008) Nous avons enlacé le globe de nos réseaux…’ : spatial structure in Saint-Simonian poetics. In: Histoires de la Terre : Earth Sciences and French Culture 1740-1940. :. Rodopi, Amsterdam, pp. 91-104. ISBN 978-90-420-2477-9

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the nineteenth-century utopianist movement of Saint-Simonianism. It discusses the movement’s project of social regeneration centred on a vast programme of public works which were intended to integrate human activities into the landscape and act as instruments for social unification, through a reconfiguration of the built and natural environments. The chapter argues that the dynamic conception of space that is at the core of these projects simultaneously stimulates the exploration of new poetic potentialities in Saint-Simonian writing by authors such as Chevalier and the playwright Charles Duveyrier.