Sébastien Roch

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Sébastien Roch is a novel by the French writer Octave Mirbeau , which was published by Charpentier on April 26, 1890, after it had already been published as a feature novel in L'Écho de Paris .

The last edition, with a foreword and commentary by Pierre Michel , was published by L'Âge d'Homme ( Lausanne ) in February 2011 .

the novel

theme

In his third novel, Mirbeau thematizes a great taboo : the rape of young people by priests. A subject that has only begun to be talked about a century after the novel was published. As outstanding as this beautiful and moving novel is, it has fallen victim to a true "conspiracy of silence".

Henri-Gabriel Ibels , 1906

It is the account of the sacrifice of a child, whose personality is completely broken during the years in college, and of the rapes that he has to endure.

After arriving in good physical and mental health at the Collège des Jésuites de Vannes - where Mirbeau himself studied and was expelled from the institution in more than suspicious circumstances in 1863 - the name of the young Sébastien Roch, who is highly significant, becomes forever in pulled the dirt. He, too, was eventually expelled from the facility unjustifiably and under serious allegations.

The Jesuit education is a violation of his mind is that comes with the rape of his body, after the intentional seduction emanating cynically by a Machiavellian priest, his teacher, the Pere de core. This shamefully leads to the fact that he is referred to the college under the pretext of alleged "special affection" to his only friend and confidante, the taciturn and rebellious Bolorec.

The personality of Sébastia is forever broken and his hopeless life has lost all meaning, value, and purpose; instead of the educational novel one would expect, Mirbeau shows us the prototype of the anti-educational novel.

meaning

Beyond the substance of sexual violence, these two rapes symbolize - in addition there is the subject of incest (because the Jesuit "father" also stands for the biological father and an intellectual model) - the "murders of the child's soul", which is the religious one Make colleges guilty of total impunity.

The army , accomplice of the “Aspergill”, completes the work of the Jesuits , whom Octave Mirbeau calls “soul rotters” and “soul crushers”. In the course of an episode of the Franco-Prussian War, Sébastien is killed in a particularly absurd way because, following the example of the writer, he fights in the Loire Army.

The last lines of the novel show us Bolorec, carrying the body of his friend and sinking in the haze, "under bullets and grenades".

In contrast to Mirbeau's other novels, most of the report is written in the third person, from the point of view of an anonymous witness who is also an omniscient narrator, because the description of the rape emphasizes its inexpressibility. The report of the rape stricto sensu is also replaced by a line of exclusions, as in the case of another rape in an 1882 “Negro” novel, L'Écuyère . The second part of the book, however, consists mostly of long passages from Sébastien's diary, which leaves room for subjectivity.

Translations into German

  • Sebastian Roch, Sittenroman , Wiener Verlag, 1902, 378 pages, translation by Franz Hofen.

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