Up close with the archives: “La Fortune d'Adèle”
To celebrate the release of the novel La Fortune d’Adèle, the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme and the Presses Universitaires de Franche-Comte (PUFC) will welcome its author, Olivier Borgeaud, a historian specializing in the rural bourgeoisie in the 19th century, who will answer questions from journalist Valérie Abrial.
Why choose an unknown woman in the Jura countryside in the 19th century? What sources enabled the author to craft such a precise and contrasting narrative, in which the character is the focus of an entire village for more than fifty years? Is this a historical study? A work of documented fiction? An anthropological history of a rural community? Finally, how can the novelist and the historian harmoniously reconcile their perspectives in the face of the constraints imposed by the archives?
Why was Adèle vilified for thirty years by her peers, rural bourgeois in the 19th century, and then suddenly became a subject of fascination? An imaginary conversation in the summer of 1899 reveals her biography, documented through in-depth research based on extensive archives and nearly ten thousand letters, most of them written in Arlay, a village in the Jura wine region, which form the basis of a history thesis published by PUFC in 2023.
The epistolary chatter, in which the prominent role of bourgeois women in the countryside, ignored and silenced by the French administration of the 19th century, emerges, forms the basis of this historical novel.
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After studying at ESSEC (France) and Bocconi (Italy), Olivier Borgeaud devoted himself to a career in European culture in 1991. He was administrator of an early music ensemble, then became cultural attaché for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, first in Berlin and then in London. He left diplomacy to work with a contemporary art foundation in Turin, before returning to Paris to set up a creative space combining art and science. Interested in the archives of the rural micro-society of the Jura region, where his maternal family originated, he resumed his university studies at the Université Lumière Lyon 2 and completed a master's degree in history in 2017, followed by a thesis defended in 2021 and published by PUFC in 2023 under the title: La bourgeoisie rurale dans le vignoble du Jura au XIXe siècle (The rural bourgeoisie in the Jura vineyards in the 19th century).
A journalist for over 20 years with extensive experience at La Tribune, where she held the positions of editor-in-chief and director of editorial diversification, Valérie Abrial has also worked extensively in the cultural sector. From her training as a historian at the Sorbonne, where she focused her research on the Parisian bourgeoisie during the French Revolution and then on the upholsterers of the Manufacture des Gobelins, she has retained a taste and passion for societal transformations and the analysis of the spirit of the times. Now freelance, she hosts and creates editorial concepts for third-party accounts.
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