Genèses et destinées amoureuses dans les romans d'émigration de plume féminine

The aim of this article is to show that female authors of emigration novels between 1789 and 1825, such as Stéphanie de Genlis, Adélaïde de Souza, Isabelle de Charrière, Jeanne-Françoise de Polier de Bottens, or Anne-Jeanne-Félicité Mérard de Saint-Just, integrate the awakening of love, its paths, and its results into the narrative framework, making it one of the themes linked to the emigration experience. Unlike the emigration novelists, who do not use love as a simple discursive strategy to evoke the emotional empathy of the reader and to maintain the narrative tension of a plot primarily focused on the retranscription of historical events, the women novelists integrate love into the analysis of the crises experienced by their paper emigrants. Without claiming to be exhaustive, the presentation of some emigration novels written by men, followed by novels written by women, will reveal the impact of identity conflicts and tensions on the emotional and sentimental lives of the characters in the latter's works. The study shows that both male and female characters seek the stability and continuity of relationships that allow them to find their bearings in a climate of uncertainty and precariousness; an evolution in the representation of love that highlights the originality of women's writing on exile, even if it remains tied to the tradition.