Perspectives about French Justice of the Ancien Régime in Hoffmann’s and Alexis’ rewritings of the case La Pivardière

Abstract

Both Ernst Th. A. Hoffmann and Willibald Alexis rewrite the La Pivardière case in the Berlin of the Restoration, case which took place at the end of the 17th century in France (Hoffmann in 1821 under the title Die Marquise de la Pivardiere, Alexis in 1843 as Der Herr von Pivardiere). Although both rewritings are based on the same source, the cause célèbre of François Richer of 1773 (probably read in a German translation by Hoffmann and certainly consulted among other versions by Alexis), these reworkings differ remarkably: in this work we shall compare these two versions focusing on the depiction of the characters and the construction of the narrator, in order to examine the implications this has on the vision of crime and of the world that underlies each one. Then we shall consider the way in which the context where the action takes place is reconstructed: whereas in Alexis' version that past is seen as an absolute alterity that reinforces by contrast the advantages and progress of the here and now of Alexis' (re)write, in Hoffmann's, the projection of the action to that past time propitiates a recognition of certain alarming tendencies of the present