Jules Andrieu, the situation of a “frère d’esprit”

In 1872, Rimbaud meets Jules Andrieu – a friend of Verlaine and former communard leader to whom, in 1874, Rimbaud would also address a previously unpublished missive. According to Ernest Delahaye, there was between the two men something like an “intellectual brotherhood”. The present paper seeks to explore and shed light on how we might understand the implications of such an assertion by taking into account historical situation, the micro-political and cultural network in which Rimbaud and Andrieu found themselves in London, as well as the issues at stake in – and the practices of – what we might call a « poetic-historical » form of writing.