A legendary cannibal giant ruled by his impulses, the ogre of popular literature is a symbol of the threats facing humanity. Literature subsequent to the illustrious Alcofribas Nasier (an anagram of François Rabelais) features monstrous giants, bloodthirsty giants who « eat little children », traditional avatars of the ogre. These ogres reappear in Charles Perrault’s Le Petit Poucet (1697) in the guise of a pair of giants who devour the children, and also in Jack and the Beanstalk, an English folk tale from the early 18th century. While these two novels relate to the tradition of man-eating giants, Jonathan Swift, in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and then Voltaire, in Micromégas (1738-52), drew from Rabelais the idea that greatness is synonymous with wisdom and that smallness is associated with meanness.
These giant figures continue to raise questions in the Age of Enlightenment, when new questions are being asked about the proportions of the Man and the Universe.
Anthropophagous ogre or protective being, the giant seems to remain in turn the one who can kill or uplift Mankind.
Children’s literature, in particular, still conjures up the world of giants to imagine stories that often deal with questions of relationships with the Other and with the World.
