Robert Bresson’s bedeviled environmentalism

This article contextualizes Robert Bresson’s 1977 film Le diable probablement within environmental discourses circulating at the time of its release. Historians of this period have shown how the French state and adjacent actors “invented” the environment in the late 1960s and early 1970s by constituting social conflicts related to nature’s destruction as objects of technocratic power. Environmentalism, in this historiographical paradigm, names a set of generally held beliefs that legitimated such an invention. Bresson’s characters feel a bedeviled environmentalism, this article’s name for an affective situation deriving from the inarticulation or derealization of environmentalism’s convictions. Bedeviled environmentalism arises precisely at the moment of the environment’s invention: while emerging from an experience of authoritative speech about the environment, bedeviled environmentalism seeps into everyday life, inflecting the meaning of words and sounds. Proceeding through a close analysis of three key scenes in Bresson’s film, this article delineates the progression of this bedeviling. In the process, it reveals Le diable probablement to be the site of a complex and historically situated reflection on the environment that has echoes in contemporaneous writings of Georges Perec and Guy Debord. Via the concept of bedeviled environmentalism, this article thus opens new connections between Bressonian criticism, ecocriticism, sound studies, and French environmental history.