Les Lumières sous le prisme d’un mot : l’emploi du mot citoyen dans quelques ouvrages français du XVIIIe siècle

"This study explores the use and the utilisation of the word citoyen in Eighteenth-century French literature before the revolution of 1789, of which the word is considered one of the symbols. We have gathered a corpus of works of reflection and fiction, published especially around 1750-1770, which we consider representative of the phenomenon and contrastive at the same time. Thanks to the methodological basis of the discourse analysis and the semantics that have a wide range of descriptive and methodological categories we are able to outline the practices associated with the word citoyen in the literary discourse in the course of the eighteenth century and we raise the question of the intertextuality between works of reflection and fiction."