The Princip principle
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The Princip principle Emmanuel Bouju1
© Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary 2020
Abstract Quite surprisingly, some novels in contemporary France still deal with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria by Gavrilo Princip on June the 28th 1914. This is the case in Sarajevo omnibus by Velibor Čolić: a six-part novel focused on the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, as a way to tell the story of Sarajevo—the city the author had to leave to seek refuge in France during the separatist war in the 1990s. The story of the Sarajevo’s attack is told as if History would have preferred, both ironically and literally, to surrender itself to a Princip Principle (“un Principe Princip”)—which is like a phantom pain of the past, and an uncertainty principle for writing and interpreting History. Keywords History and novel · Phantom pain · Sarajevo · Velibor Čolić His head was full of Europe—all those obscure languages in tenebrous places where took place all those killings—in the streets, in the woods. He stuck to the residues of tyranny, of tragedy, of confusion. Cynthia Ozick, The Messiah of Stockholm.
Quite surprisingly, some novels in contemporary France still deal with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria by Gavrilo Princip on June the 28th 1914. This is the case in Sarajevo omnibus by Čolić (2012): a six-part novel focused on the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, as a way to tell the story of Sarajevo—the city the author had to leave to seek refuge in France during the separatist war in the 1990s. One of the characters in this novel, Nikola Barbarić, is the grand-father of the author, and he supposedly would have witnessed the attack, as well as the death of rabbi Abramovicz, killed by a lost bullet of Princip. I will mainly stick to this novel, but many others, published quite recently, mentioned, described or related with more or less accuracy the Princip’s attack. Such as Zone by Énard (2013)—whose paradoxical protagonist, Francis Servain Mirković, fighting in Croatia and Bosnia before Iraq, appears to be a kind of alternative or * Emmanuel Bouju [email protected] 1
Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, 17 Rue de la Sorbonne, 75005 Paris, France
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anti-Princip. Or, La Bataille d’Occident by Vuillard (2014, late Prix Goncourt), a story of the First World War, whose “Summer” initial part is dedicated to the depiction of Gavrilo Princip’s attempt, and focuses on Sophie Chotek, the beautiful archduchess sentenced to death like her husband by a series of fatal circumstances— including a weak security due to her noble-but-not-royal origins. “The Empire,” says Vuillard, “paid a big price for this lack of savoir-vivre.” And, a very recently published novel: À son image by Ferrari (2018), the central chapter of which, dedicated to a biographical portrait of a Serbian photograph, tells the story of the attack in these words: In spite of the incredible amateurism of the preparations, Gavrilo P. miraculously succeeds in shooting
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