The literary history of France and the Francophone world has, it has been said, a long tradition of censorship. Emphasis on individual genius has not only produced an exaggerated belief in the French cultural heritage, it has fostered an attitude of submissiveness on the part of the student of literature. Literary history has its covert political agenda, and what gets taught in the classroom and in literary manuals tells us much about the authoritarian tradition in which the discipline has evolved.

These were remarks made by Roland Barthes in a 1969 essay entitled 'Reflexions sur un manuel' ['Réflections on a Manual']. The definition of literature itself, he suggested, might in the end be nothing other than 'ce qui s'enseigne' ['what gets taught'], so that the great canonical figures are inevitably invested with all the authority of the state educational apparatus. And Barthes adds: 'II y a . . . toute une autre histoire de notre litterature a ecrire, une contre-histoire, un envers de cette histoire, qui serait l'histoire de ces censures précisément' ['A quite different history of our literature remains to be written: a counter-history, the other side of that history, and that would be, precisely, the history of what has been censored']. He suggests that, in telling the hitherto untold, any literary history worthy of the name must also be a history of the idea of literature, of the way literature has been interpreted, received, distorted or used as a form of political control. It must ask the hard questions, not only of other histories of literature, but also of itself. What is being occluded or foregrounded, and why?