SOURCE: “Vigny's Post-Structuralist Novel: Writing History or the Story of Writing?” in French Review, Vol. 60, No. 2, December, 1986, pp. 216-21.

In the following essay, Craven probes the post-structuralist implications of Vigny's historical novel Cinq-Mars by discerning the work's concern with history as a form of fictive literature and its demonstration of meaning subverted via the medium of writing.

Although Vigny ranks among the major literary figures of the nineteenth century, his most ambitious prose piece, the historical novel Cinq-Mars remains largely neglected by contemporary criticism. Scholarly disaffection may be due in part to the author's ultra-conservative ideology as well as to his central focus on a marginal episode and an anecdotal figure of French history—the rise and fall of Louis XIII's minion, the bold Marquis de Cinq-Mars, one of the many prominent aristocratic victims of Richelieu's centralizing policies. Sainte-Beuve may well have conditioned future readers' indifferent or negative...