“I wanted to understand how we arrived at such a badly damaged seduction”

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INTERVIEW. Historian Robert Muchembled dismantles the fundamentally unequal French relationship to the other sex, the origins of which are to be found in the royal court system.

By Francois-Guillaume Lorrain

NOT’is there not some provocation to publish a history of French seduction at the time of #MeToo? Funeral oration ? Requiem de profundis ? Do we not write history books once these phenomena have become obsolete, put away in the rays of the past and outdatedness? University professor, Robert Muchembled tells us, in the course of the conversation, that he is the son of a miner from the North and that he was born in a deeply macho universe. “On Saturday nights, the miners were drinking before hitting their wives, they were hitting them in the street. They didn’t let them work. »

Is that why he has devoted several books to forms of female resistance, to witches too, an ostracized male fantasy? Without a doubt. History of the devil, of orgasm: Muchemble…