FIGURES DU MESSIE ET QUÊTE DE SALUT CHEZ BERNANOS ET TOURNIER: ÉTUDE COMPARATIVE

Abstract

This article offers a comparative study of the figures of the Messiah and the modalities of the quest for salvation in the novels of Georges Bernanos and Michel Tournier with a view to examining the messianic representation, constructed by these authors in the contemporary era. Drawing on a focused corpus Sous le soleil de Satan, Journal d'un curé de campagne, and Monsieur Ouine for Bernanos; Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique, Le Roi des aulnes, and Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar for Tournier, the analysis shows that both novelists share a common conviction: salvation can only come through an effective traversal of evil, never through its avoidance. In Bernanos, this conviction takes the form of a theology of kenosis, in which the saint, often disgraced or suffering, becomes the instrument of a transcendent, sacrificial grace. In Tournier, the same conviction is reworked in a mythological register, where the Messiah shifts, is profaned, and multiplies, bearing an immanent and ambivalent salvation. Beyond this fundamental theological divergence, the article identifies notable structural convergences: the centrality of the suffering body, the slow temporality of redemption, and the social marginality of salvific figures. The study closes with avenues for further research, including a possible extension of the corpus to Julien Green and J.M.G. Le Clézio, and a historicization of the shift from a sacrificial to a mythic messianism in the twentieth-century French novel.