Du récit de la fraternité niée à l’appel de la tendresse de pitié : Ô vous, frères humains d’Albert Cohen

[Machine translation] It is on the autobiographical side of the work of Albert Cohen (1895-1981) that the article focuses, and more specifically on Ô Vous, Frères Humains, published in 1972, the subject of a first version entitled “Day of my ten years” published in La France Libre in 1945, when Cohen was in exile in London. This account of the act of exclusion striking a Jewish child on his birthday, which turns into a plea addressed to human beings, in an invocation similar to that of the poet François Villon, is relayed in the testamentary writing of Les Carnets 1978 by an elderly writer who delivers a final message to “his brothers in death”, adopting the position of a moralist in the face of history that is both personal and universal, in order to claim in his “Jewishness”, to reaffirm his unwavering faith in the “tenderness of pity”. Thus, the approach adopted, on the one hand, follows the Ariadne thread of internal intertextuality and cohesive transgeneric migration, inaugurated by Alain Schaffner in 1999, on the other hand, addresses, from a lexicological perspective, through the consultation of the Trésor of the computerized French language, through the consultation of the Trésor of the computerized French language, several significant occurrences relating to the xenophobic utterance, referring to unifying themes for Cohen. The analysis of the forms capable of expressing hatred of foreigners, linked in particular to the harangue of the Camelot, in the climate of antisemitism that is constantly exacerbated in Marseille as everywhere in France at the beginning of the 20th century, thus makes it possible to lay bare, beyond meaningful language practices, the question, which is a hot topic, of the role of language in all forms of discrimination.