Le récit de voyage au Maroc d’Edmond Picard : au carrefour des genres et au service de la haine

Edmond Picard (1836-1924) was a lawyer, a socialist senator, an essayist, a journalist, an art lover, a promoter of cultural life in Brussels – and also an unbridled theoretician of antisemitism and racism. The first text in which the author develops these theories is El Moghreb al Aksa, a travel account published for the first time in 1889, which will prove to be an important matrix for many other of his books, and even a model for other authors. This article examines the discursive forms of hatred in this travel account. The author of the article points out a series of representations of the “other” (Semite), reinforced by some discursive strategies which tend to deny this very hatred. She also suggests that the discursive effectiveness of the narrative owes a lot to the fact that it is at the crossroads of different genres.