The concept of Latinite in the works of Louis Marie Emile Bertrand
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Abstract
Since World War II, the crisis in Algeria has intensified interest in
French literature concerning North Africa. Attention has been refocused
on Louis Bertrand (1866-1941), creator of the colon novel. Bertrand,
born in Lorraine, graduated from the Ecole Normale. After teaching in
Algiers (1891-1900), he abandoned pedagogy for writing and settled on
the Riviera. He achieved membership in the Acad~mie FranQaise in 1926.
Bertrand's extensive work includes twelve novels and over sixty nonfiction
volumes. He contributed extensively to French journals. Critics
early favored but later disparaged his contribution on personal as well
as literar.y grounds. They have failed to interpret satisfactorily the
unifying element in his work: latinite.
By latinit-4 Bertrand referred ostensibly to the Latin peoples, to
a core of their social and aesthetic ideals, and to the lands of lumiere
in the western Mediterranean basin. He bade Latins rise to new preeminence
by espousfug an authoritarian ideology based on class inequality of Roman
Empire vintage. Bertrand determined that the latent unanimity of latinte
might be animated by heightening the awareness of continuite from early
Christian Rome to the present, with the Roman Catholic Church as proof
extant of that link, and by appealing to the racial ego. [TRUNCATED]
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Thesis (Pd.D.)—Boston University
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