Abstract: Although India does not occupy a quantitatively important place in Nerval’s work, this geographical and symbolic space nonetheless has a precise function. Cradle of humanity, India seems to be the bearer of an underlying critique of bourgeois and Christian Europe, on a geopolitical as well as religious and aesthetic level. The disquieting strangeness of the imaginary of India serves to remind 19th-century France of its pagan vocation.
