L’allégorie amusante ou le délicat équilibre du didactique et de l’humoristique

Allegory and humor have as a common point to constitute a form of displacement. Indeed, the first examples of narrative allegories in French, before the Roman de la Rose, contain quite a few elements of humour. Their authors were close to scholarly culture, and were aware of the oddity of staging personi cations that are always at risk of falling into contradictions or redundancy, or even the grotesque, as Eric Hicks described it. The Roman de la Rose itself, including the section attributed to Guillaume de Lorris, is more generous that one may think when it comes to the use of ironical gures of speech directed towards the system it is illustrating.