The Franco-Prussian War from the inside Laughter, humor, and irony in a naturalist counter-epic, J.-K. Huysmans’ Sac au dos

In Sac au dos, Huysmans uses many comedic techniques, which seem to respond to the difficulty of putting this first modern war into words, a war in which individuals struggled to find a place. The contours of a political and profoundly modern use of humor, on which Huysmans’ counter-epic enterprise is largely based, can be traced by studying the thematic and technical workings of its comedy, its contextualization, and by comparing it with its initial version.