L'Animal et moi (face au monde)

Animal tales have nourished our imaginations since time immemorial. Just as often, humans have been tempted to revisit history-and a world now in crisis-through animals. Today, “animal” tragically rhymes with disaster: climate, biodiversity, extinction, or worse, indifference. But a host of francophone writers have taken up the pen in the new century so that animals might come roaring back. Jean Rolin pursued feral dogs to expose the suffering caused by war; inspired by pigs, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo reimagined the violence of the French countryside; and Stéphane Audeguy followed a lion through the French Revolution down to the founding of the Jardin des Plantes natural history museum. Nastasja Martin’s near-fatal encounter with a bear reshaped her anthropological thinking, while Sylvain Tesson sought in Tibet the snow leopard and, with it, mystical redemption. In this critical survey of contemporary encounters with the animal, one thinks above all of Éric Chevillard who, unmatched in wildness and wit, has ridden the Animal throughout his career like a battlehorse.