How Yesterday’s Fiction Foretells Tomorrow’s Politics

But that’s not entirely accurate. Boucheron does not wish to examine the rhetorical skills of statesmen past and present, as this description might suggest. His goal is much more ambitious: to explore how works of fiction, from Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy to HBO’s Game of Thrones, create new ways of thinking about power and subsequently reshape political reality in their own image. A synthesis of the author’s previous scholarship, Political Fictions is not an original text, but a transcription and translation of a series of lectures delivered in French at the Collège de France in early 2017. The occasion at the time was the first inauguration of Donald Trump as U.S. president, a moment which demonstrated—not for the first time in history—that the “exercise of power no longer had to concern itself with truth.”

When tackling a work of critical theory, much of one’s mental energy goes towards figuring out what the text is actually about. Political Fictions: From the Middle Ages to the “Post-Truth” Present is no exception. The book by Patrick Boucheron, a French medieval historian, “illuminates today’s political situation by examining the relationship between government and storytelling,” according to the publisher’s website.

When tackling a work of critical theory, much of one’s mental energy goes towards figuring out what the text is actually about. Political Fictions: From the Middle Ages to the “Post-Truth” Present is no exception. The book by Patrick Boucheron, a French medieval historian, “illuminates today’s political situation by examining the relationship between government and storytelling,” according to the publisher’s website. Political Fictions: From the Middle Ages to the “Post-Truth” Present by Patrick Boucheron, Other Press, 400 pp., .99, November 2025

But that’s not entirely accurate. Boucheron does not wish to examine the rhetorical skills of statesmen past and present, as this description might suggest. His goal is much more ambitious: to explore how works of fiction, from Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy to HBO’s Game of Throne