Pierre Loti's Response to Maurice Barrès and France's Growing Nationalist Movement

Maurice Barrès published Les Déracinés, his most famous novel, in the Revue de Paris in 1897 in part to give literary form to the nationalism that he had been developing in newspaper articles for the last several years. The work is one of the early examples in French literature of the ideological novel, in which plot is of secondary importance and the characters function largely to enounce or illustrate the author's political views. In that same year in that same journal Pierre Loti, known for exotic narratives not concerned with politics, published a tale of young Basques, Ramuntcho, which seems to be another work in the same vein. This essay demonstrates how Loti's novel actually reexamines and refutes several of the central points of the nationalism that Barrès had been propounding both in Les Déracinés and some of the pieces that led up to it, arguing that what Barrès was proposing would actually weaken rather than strengthen France and the French

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