European Literature and the Ethics of Leadership: Cyrano de Bergerac

This paper is built on an ‘organizational' reading of ‘great' texts, a reading focused on the leader, considering in a implicit way that he/she is a person with specific characters, circumstances being at left the background. This method is similar to the partial criticism made by the queer critic or the colonial critic. It is a reading, which consists in a de-contextualization of the literature from its category (the theater here) and its country to only retain what can be considered as relevant towards an archetype of the leader. This method raises a major epistemological difficulty because of the ‘over' consideration of the tragic and heroic characters of the leader. It is a way of generalizing the leadership, but within the universalism of the literature. The following arguments of this text will be: - an attempt to define the nature of an organizational critic, - a short analysis of the cultural relativism to remind how far an archetypical production of a national culture can be understood (or not) in universal dimensions, - an approach of the three notions of ‘figure', ‘person' and ‘portrait', - an analysis of the characteristics in common between Cyrano and the leader.