Search

This article takes a new look at the temporal configuration imagined by reformers and revolutionaries of the nineteenth century in France, as Eugène Pottier’s poetry makes particularly clear (When will it happen ?, Internationalism…). Such temporalities seem to be caught between remembering political experiences and waiting for the return of the social Republic. Inseparable from historical times and rhythms, they are specific to the nineteenth century. But their social meaning can be approached from three different angles: religious (the millennial belief in salvation), political (waiting for the event to take place), and sentimental (waiting for one’s next love). It is permissible to state that the temporalities of the project of social emancipation contained in Pottier’s writings must not be reduced to a substitute millennialism, for we discern in them a more secular temporality of expectation that renounces the desire for eternity, while still preserving a sense of the infinite.