Sebastien Roch (Romance)

Sebastien Roch is a Romance French of Octave Mirbeau, published at Charpentier the April 26th 1890, after a pre-publication in Feuilleton in the columns of the Echo of Paris .

The novel

The subject

In this third signed novel of its name, Mirbeau transgresses a major taboo: that of the Rape of teenagers by priests, subject about which one started to speak only one century after his publication. As well this beautiful and moving Romance it was victim of a true conspiracy of silence.

It is the account of the sacrifice of a child, of which all qualities are destroyed by its years of college and the rapes that it undergoes there. Arrived healthy with body and spirit at the college of the Jesuits of Valves where Mirbeau made its studies and of which it was driven out under conditions more than suspect in 1863, the young person Sebastien Roch, with the first name and the patronym highly significant, is soiled forever and he also wrongfully driven out under a defamatory charge. Jesuitic education constitutes a rape of its spirit, follow-up of the rape of its body, at the end of a company of seduction led cynically by a priest machiavelic, his own Master of studies, the father of Kern. The personality of Sebastien is deformed by it forever, and its life irremediably lost any direction, any value and any finality. Instead of the Romance of formation which one expects, Mirbeau delivers to us the prototype of the novel of the deformation.

The range

Beyond the materiality of sexual violences, these two rapes, complicated of inceste (because the “father” Jesuit is also the substitute of the biological father and a intellectual father), symbolize the “murder of the hearts of child” of which make guilty, in all impunity, the religious colleges. Accomplice of the aspergillum, the army completes the work of the Jesuits, that Mirbeau qualifies “pourrisseurs of hearts” and “pétrisseurs of hearts”: Sebastien is killed in a manner particularly absurd during an episode of the war of 1870 that, following the example novelist, it underwent in the army of the Loire.

With the difference of the other novels of Mirbeau, most of the account is written with the third nobody, by an anonymous witness, who is the equivalent of the omniscient novelist, because the rape concerns the inexpressible one: the account of the rape strictly speaking is replaced besides by a line of points, like that of another rape, in a “negro” novel of 1882, the Rider . However the second part of the novel comprises broad fragments of the newspaper of Sebastien, which gives again all its place with subjectivity.

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