Ourika de Claire de Duras (1824), un roman de la conversion à l’aube du xix^e siècle

This novel both appropriates and distorts the procedures found in the eighteenth-century romanesque tradition, offering the exemplary account of a double conversion: that of the heroine Ourika and that, more partially, of the doctor who ends up renouncing the “prejudices” of the Enlightenment. Claire de Duras poses the question of happiness in new terms by giving it a religious dimension, thus introducing a critique of the Enlightenment understood as a global discourse on charity, the world, and happiness.