Alphonse Daudet and 16 other authors
Alphonse Daudet (1840~1897) was a French novelist.
Daudet was born in Nîmes, France. His family, on both sides, belonged to the bourgeoisie. His father, Vincent Daudet, was a silk manufacturer—a man dogged through life by misfortune and failure. Alphonse, amid much truancy, had a depressing boyhood. In 1856 he left Lyon, where his schooldays had been mainly spent, and began his career as a schoolteacher at Alès, Gard, in the south of France. The position proved to be intolerable and Daudet said later that for months after leaving Alès he would wake with horror, thinking he was still among his unruly pupils. These experiences and others were reflected in his novel Le Petit Chose.
On 1 November 1857, he abandoned teaching and took refuge with his brother Ernest Daudet, three years his senior, who was trying, "and thereto soberly", to make a living as a journalist in Paris. Alphonse took to writing, and his poems were collected into a small volume, Les Amoureuses (1858), which met with a fair reception. He obtained employment on Le Figaro, then under Cartier de Villemessant's energetic editorship, wrote two or three plays, and began to be recognized in literary communities as possessing distinction and promise. Morny, Napoleon III's all-powerful minister, appointed him to be one of his secretaries—a post which he held till Morny's death in 1865.
In 1866, Daudet's Lettres de mon moulin (Letters from My Windmill), written in Clamart, near Paris, and alluding to a windmill in Fontvieille, Provence,(citation needed) won the attention of many readers.
François Edouard Joachim Coppée (1842 ~1908) was a French poet and novelist.
Coppée was born in Paris to a civil servant. After attending the Lycée Saint-Louis he became a clerk in the ministry of war and won public favour as a poet of the Parnassian school. His first printed verses date from 1864. In 1869, his "Poème modernes" (among others La Grève de forgerons) were quite successful. In the same year, Coppée's first play, Le Passant, starring Sarah Bernhardt and Madame Agar, was received with approval at the Odéon theatre, and later Fais ce que dois (1871) and Les Bijoux de la délivrance (1872), short poetic dramas inspired by the Franco-Prussian War, were applauded.
Honoré de Balzac (1799~1850) was a French novelist and playwright. The novel sequence La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is generally viewed as his magnum opus.
An enthusiastic reader and independent thinker as a child, Balzac had trouble adapting to the teaching style of his grammar school. His willful nature caused trouble throughout his life and frustrated his ambitions to succeed in the world of business. When he finished school, Balzac was apprenticed in a law office, but he turned his back on the study of law after wearying of its inhumanity and banal routine. Before and during his career as a writer, he attempted to be a publisher, printer, businessman, critic, and politician; he failed in all of these efforts. La Comédie humaine reflects his real-life difficulties, and includes scenes from his own experience.
Balzac suffered from health problems throughout his life, possibly owing to his intense writing schedule. His relationship with his family was often strained by financial and personal drama, and he lost more than one friend over critical reviews. In 1850, Balzac married Ewelina Hańska (née Contessa Rzewuska), a Polish aristocrat and his longtime love. He died in Paris six months later.
Prosper Mérimée (1803~ 1870) was a French writer in the movement of Romanticism, one of the pioneers of the novella, a short novel or long short story. He was also a noted archaeologist and historian, an important figure in the history of architectural preservation. He is best known for his novella Carmen, which became the basis of Bizet's opera Carmen. He learned Russian, a language for which he had great affection, before translating the work of several notable Russian writers, including Pushkin and Gogol, into French. From 1830 until 1860 he was the inspector of French historical monuments, responsible for the protection of many historic sites, including the medieval citadel of Carcassonne and the restoration of the façade of the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris. Along with the writer George Sand, he discovered the series of tapestries called The Lady and the Unicorn, arranging for their preservation. He was instrumental in the creation of Musée national du Moyen Âge in Paris, where the tapestries now are displayed.
Abraham Catulle Mendès (1841~1909) was a French poet and man of letters. He was associated with the Parnassianist school.
Of Portuguese Jewish extraction, Mendès was born in Bordeaux. After childhood and adolescence in Toulouse, he arrived in Paris in 1859 and quickly became one of the protégés of the poet Théophile Gautier. He promptly attained notoriety with the publication in the La Revue fantaisiste (1861) of his Roman d'une nuit, for which he was condemned to a month's imprisonment and a fine of 500 francs. He was allied with Parnassianism from the beginning of the movement and displayed extraordinary metrical skill in his first volume of poems, Philoméla (1863). His critics have noted that the elegant verse of his later volumes is distinguished rather by dexterous imitation of different writers than by any marked originality.
Erckmann-Chatrian was the name used by French authors Émile Erckmann (1822–1899) and Alexandre Chatrian (1826–1890), nearly all of whose works were jointly written.
Both Erckmann and Chatrian were born in the département of Meurthe (now Moselle), in the Lorraine region in the extreme north-east of France. They specialised in military fiction and ghost stories in a rustic mode Lifelong friends who first met in the spring of 1847, they finally quarreled during the mid-1880s, after which they did not produce any more stories jointly. During 1890 Chatrian died, and Erckmann wrote a few pieces under his own name.
Many of Erckmann-Chatrian's works were translated into English by Adrian Ross.
Tales of supernatural horror by the duo that are well known in English include "The Wild Huntsman" (tr. 1871), "The Man-Wolf" (tr. 1876) and "The Crab Spider." These stories received praise from the renowned English ghost story writer, M. R. James, as well as H. P. Lovecraft.
Erckmann-Chatrian wrote numerous historical novels, some of which attacked the Second Empire in anti-monarchist terms. Partly as a result of their republicanism, they were praised by Victor Hugo and Émile Zola, and fiercely attacked in the pages of Le Figaro. Gaining popularity from 1859 for their nationalistic, anti-militaristic and anti-German sentiments, they were well-selling authors but had trouble with political censorship throughout their careers. Generally the novels were written by Erckmann, and the plays mostly by Chatrian.
A festival in their honour is held every summer in the town of Erckmann's birth, Phalsbourg (German Pfalzburg), which also contains a military museum exhibiting editions of their works.
Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant (1850~1893) was a 19th-century French author, celebrated as a master of the short story, as well as a representative of the naturalist school, depicting human lives, destinies and social forces in disillusioned and often pessimistic terms.
Maupassant was a protégé of Gustave Flaubert and his stories are characterized by economy of style and efficient, seemingly effortless dénouements. Many are set during the Franco-Prussian War of the 1870s, describing the futility of war and the innocent civilians who, caught up in events beyond their control, are permanently changed by their experiences. He wrote 300 short stories, six novels, three travel books, and one volume of verse. His first published story, "Boule de Suif" ("The Dumpling", 1880), is often considered his most famous work.
Eugène-François Vidocq (1775~ 1857) was a French criminal turned criminalist, whose life story inspired several writers, including Victor Hugo, Edgar Allan Poe, and Honoré de Balzac. He was the founder and first director of France's first criminal investigative agency, the Sûreté Nationale, as well as the head of the first known private detective agency. Vidocq is considered to be the father of the French national police force. He is also regarded as the first private detective.
Alexandre Dumas (1802~1870) also known as Alexandre Dumas père, was a French novelist and playwright.
His works have been translated into many languages and he is one of the most widely read French authors. Many of his historical novels of adventure were originally published as serials, including The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After and The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later. Since the early 20th century, his novels have been adapted into nearly 200 films. Prolific in several genres, Dumas began his career by writing plays, which were successfully produced from the first. He wrote numerous magazine articles and travel books; his published works totalled 100,000 pages. In the 1840s, Dumas founded the Théâtre Historique in Paris.
His father, General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie, was born in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) to Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, a French nobleman, and Marie-Cessette Dumas, an African slave. At age 14, Thomas-Alexandre was taken by his father to France, where he was educated in a military academy and entered the military for what became an illustrious career.
Alexandre acquired work with Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orléans, then as a writer, a career that led to his early success. Decades later, after the election of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte in 1851, Dumas fell from favour and left France for Belgium, where he stayed for several years. He moved to Russia for a few years and then to Italy. In 1861, he founded and published the newspaper L'Indépendent, which supported Italian unification. He returned to Paris in 1864.
English playwright Watts Phillips, who knew Dumas in his later life, described him as "the most generous, large-hearted being in the world. He also was the most delightfully amusing and egotistical creature on the face of the earth. His tongue was like a windmill – once set in motion, you would never know when he would stop, especially if the theme was himself."
René François Nicolas Marie Bazin (1853~1932) was a French novelist.
Biography
Born at Angers, he studied law in Paris, and on his return to Angers became Professor of Law in the Catholic university. In 1876, Bazin married Aline Bricard. The couple had two sons and six daughters. He contributed to Parisian journals a series of sketches of provincial life and descriptions of travel, and wrote Stephanette (1884), but he made his reputation with Une Tache d'Encre (A Spot of Ink) (1888), which received a prize from the Academy. He was admitted to the Académie française on 28 April 1904, to replace Ernest Legouvé.
René Bazin was a Knight Commander of the Order of St. Gregory the Great, and was President of the Corporation des Publicistes Chretiens.
Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola (1840~1902) was a French novelist, journalist, playwright, the best-known practitioner of the literary school of naturalism, and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus, which is encapsulated in his renowned newspaper opinion headlined J'Accuse...! Zola was nominated for the first and second Nobel Prizes in Literature in 1901 and 1902.
Antoinette Henriette Clémence Robert (1797~1872) was a French writer of historical fiction, poetry, non-fiction, stage plays, and short stories. From 1855 to 1870, she and Virginie Ancelot were the most popular novelists of the roman populaire genre. She published much of her work as Clémence Robert.
Mlle Robert was born in Mâcon in December 1797. She was a strong student with a penchant for history. Her first published work was Cri de joie d’une Française sur la naissance de SAR Mgr le duc de Bordeaux (Mme Ve Porthmann 1820). Her father was a deputy judge in Mâcon. When he died in 1830, the year of the July Revolution, she moved to Paris for the society of other women writers, and to reunite with her older brother (esteemed clockmaker Henri Robert). In her early days in Paris, she worked in a library. In 1845 she retired to the quiet of Abbaye-aux-Bois, a Catholic convent that also let rooms to women of high social standing; soon, however, she returned to her career. Her stay there coincided with a major literary salon hosted by her friends François-René de Chateaubriand and Juliette Récamier, in Mlle Récamier's quarters at the abbey. Clémence Robert died in Paris in 1872, five days before her 75th birthday.
Louis-Henri Murger (1822~1861), also known as Henri Murger and Henry Murger, was a French novelist and poet.
He is chiefly distinguished as the author of the 1847-1849 book Scènes de la vie de bohème (Scenes of Bohemian Life), which is based on his own experiences as a desperately poor writer living in a Parisian garret (the top floor of buildings, where artists often lived) and as a member of a loose club of friends who called themselves "the water drinkers" (because they were too poor to afford wine). In his writing he combines instinct with pathos, humour, and sadness. The book is the basis for the 1896 opera La bohème by Puccini, Leoncavallo's opera of the same name, and, at greater removes, Amadeu Vives' zarzuela Bohemios, Kálmán's 1930 operetta Das Veilchen vom Montmartre, and the 1996 Broadway musical Rent. He wrote lyrics as well as novels and stories, the chief being La Chanson de Musette – "a tear", says Gautier, "which has become a pearl of poetry".
Marcel Prévost (1862~1941) was a French author and dramatist.
Prévost was born in Paris on 1 May 1862, and educated at Jesuit schools in Bordeaux and Paris, entering the École polytechnique in 1882. He published a story in the Le Clairon as early as 1881, but for some years after the completion of his studies he applied his technical knowledge to the manufacture of tobacco.
He published in succession, Le Scorpion (1887), Chonchette (1888), Mademoiselle Jaufre (1889), Cousine Laura (1890), La Confession d'un amant (1891), Lettres de femmes (1892), L'Automne d'une femme (1893), and in 1894 he made a great sensation by a study of the results of Parisian education and Parisian society on young girls, Les Demi-vierges, which was dramatized and produced with great success at the Gymnase on 21 May 1895. Le Jardin secret appeared in 1897; and in 1900 Les Vierges fortes, and a study of the question of women's education and independence in two novels Frédérique and Léa.
L'Heureux ménage (1901), Les Lettres à Françoise (1902), La Princesse d'Erminge (1904), and L'Accordeur aveugle (1905) are among his later novels. A picture of modern German manners is given in his Monsieur et Madame Moloch (1906). He had a great success in 1904 with a four-act play La Plus faible, produced at the Comédie-Française.
Prévost was elected to the Académie française in 1909.
He died on 8 April 1941, aged 78.
Victor-Marie Hugo, vicomte Hugo (1802~1885) was a French Romantic author, poet, essayist, playwright, journalist, human rights activist and politician.
His most famous works are the novels The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) and Les Misérables (1862). In France, Hugo is renowned for his poetry collections, such as Les Contemplations and La Légende des siècles (The Legend of the Ages). Hugo was at the forefront of the Romantic literary movement with his play Cromwell and drama Hernani. His works have inspired music, both during his lifetime and after his death, including the opera Rigoletto and the musicals Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris. He produced more than 4,000 drawings in his lifetime, and campaigned for social causes such as the abolition of capital punishment and slavery.
Although he was a committed royalist when young, Hugo's views changed as the decades passed, and he became a passionate supporter of republicanism, serving in politics as both deputy and senator. His work touched upon most of the political and social issues and the artistic trends of his time. His opposition to absolutism, and his literary stature, established him as a national hero. Hugo died on 22 May 1885, aged 83.
Alfred Louis Charles de Musset-Pathay (1810~1857) was a French dramatist, poet, and novelist. Along with his poetry, he is known for writing the autobiographical novel La Confession d'un enfant du siècle (The Confession of a Child of the Century).
Jean François Victor Aicard (1848~1921) was a French poet, dramatist, and novelist.
He was born in Toulon. His father, Jean Aicard, was a journalist of some distinction, and the son began his career in 1867 with Les Jeunes Croyances, followed in 1870 by a one-act play produced at the Marseille theatre.
His poems include: Les Rebellions et les apaisements (1871); Poèmes de Provence (1874), and La Chanson de l'enfant (1876), both of which were crowned by the Academy; Miette et Noré (1880), a Provençal idyll; Le Livre d'heures de l'amour (1887); Jésus (1896); a collection of poems for children (1912) and Hollande, Algerie (1913), as well as various volumes of war poetry. Of his plays the most successful was Le Père Lebonnard (1890), which was originally produced at the Théâtre Libre. Among his other works are the novels, Le Roi de Camargue (1890), L'Ame d'un enfant (1898) and Tata (1901), Benjamine (1906), Arlette des Mayans (1917), and two volumes of adventure stories, Un Bandit a la Française and its sequel Le fameux chevalier Gaspard de Besse, both in 1919. La Vénus de Milo (1874) was an account of the discovery of the statue from unpublished documents.
He was elected a member of the Académie française in 1909.
He was elected mayor of Solliès-Ville in 1919, had the ruins of the Forbin castle listed as a historic monument and had the Comédie-Française play his play Forbin de Solliès ou le Testament du roi René there.
He died in Paris, 13 May 1921.
