La célébrité au futur antérieur: comment Delille fut occulté des mémoires

Shared admirations belong to the "weak links" that, according to Gabriel Tarde, enhance the cohesion of a given community, what induces that their disappearance may reveal a new sociocultural configuration. The fate of Jacques Delille, whose poems were highly praised at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but widely despised a few decades later and eventually almost forgotten, is a striking instance of un- celebrity that invites to question the dynamics of the collective devaluation of a once canonical writer, as well as the tools and documents that may help to historicize and understand this process. Combining a close reading of the literary critics and a distant reading of the textbooks who took part in the downfall of his fame over the nineteenth century, this paper retraces an implacable mechanism of mediatic erasure, and considers the possibility of proposing a general model for "active forgetting," based on the case of Delille. (In French)