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Is Pierre Michon’s "The Eleven" a political novel?

By: Nenad Ivić

Article in the conference collection What is the Political Novel? Defining the Genre, published in June 2025 at Open Research Europe.

Pierre Michon’s The Eleven (Les Onze, 2009) is narrated by a cicerone who entertains visitors to the Musée du Louvre and describes the painting of eleven members of the Comité de salut public during the French Revolution, which revisits the history of politics at the decisive moment of la Terreur. The novel purports to be a commentary on the painting, the people it depicts, the circumstances of its creation and its author. However, the painting is imaginary, as is the quotation from Jules Michelet’s Histoire de la Révolution française that legitimises it. The complex interplay of literary traditions and techniques used in the novel defies the banality of a running commentary on political figures and circumstances told in a realist mode to evoke instead the spectacle of telling/making the history/story of politics as a surge of terror, thus revealing the abyss implicit in the performative situation of the protagonist and his audience doubling/mimicking the text and the reader: originary fiction of politics as imaginative re-enactment of the politics of fiction that redeems the Revolution.

Related political novels

Pierre Michon

Les Onze

The Eleven

Presented by:Nenad Ivić

French Revolution

Historiography

History

Politics

Image

Related collections

Politics of literature • Political novel

What is the Political Novel? Defining the Genre

This Collection brings together selected contributions to the first annual CAPONEU conference, which took place in Berlin from 27 to 29 September 2023. The participants discussed a variety of understandings of the political novel as a (tentative) genre. They combined approaches to defining the political novel that are characterised by genre theory with those that are shaped by the history of the genre, thus also paradigmatically illustrating this changeable category in relation to specific novels that have emerged in heterogeneous contexts. The Collection was published on the Open Research Europe platform (open access).

Related topics

Revolution

French Revolution

Politics

Terror

Fiction