French From 1900 to 1940
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
The legacy of the 19th century
French writing of the first quarter of the 20th century reveals a dissatisfaction with the
pessimism, skepticism, and narrow rationalism of the preceding age and displays a new
confidence in human possibilities, although this is undercut by World War I. There is continuity
with the poetry of the late 19th century but a rejection of its prose. Mallarmé and Rimbaud were
models for Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, but members of the new generation, such as Charles-
Louis Philippe, whose Bubu de Montparnasse (1901; Bubu of Montparnasse) followed Zola into
the Paris slums, thought the Naturalist novel unduly deterministic and rejected its claims to
objectivity.
In philosophy, the positivism of Taine and Renan, and its confidence in practical reason,
gave ground to a resurgence of interest in the spiritual and the mystical, led by the work of Henri
Bergson on intuition and the creative imagination. Among foreign thinkers, Arthur
Schopenhauer, so important to the preceding generation, gave way to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
books were read less for the superman theme than as a protest against the limitations of the
mechanistic world.
Literature continued to follow the political and social struggles of the Third Republic. To
the continuing reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair must be added other tensions exacerbating
the conflict of the Republic and the Roman Catholic church: the separation of church and state
and the struggle for the education system, with Jules Ferry’s law of 1882 making primary
education free, compulsory, and secular. This is the context in which the Catholic revival that
emerged in the 1880s reaches its literary high point in the work of Paul Claudel and Charles
Péguy and then, in a second generation, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. Meanwhile,
anti-German sentiment stemming from the 1870 defeat, revived in the years immediately
preceding World War I, helped create the protofascist Action Française, led by Charles Maurras.
Seeking to steer French culture toward integral nationalism and to restore the monarchy, the
group was in constant conflict with the expanding socialist movement.
The governments of the Third Republic were weak centrist coalitions that writers, with
middle-class privileges to protect, found it difficult either to admire or to attack. The uneasy
truce they procured in French society was the basis of a literature that exalted individual
experience. Some of the leading writers of the years before 1914 gathered around the Nouvelle
Revue Française, founded by André Gide in 1908. Jacques Rivière took over as its director in
1919. The review, which became France’s leading literary magazine while also spawning the
Gallimard publishing house, sought a balance between modernity and tradition. Its articles
represented a network of dialogues rather than one fixed position and initially tended to
emphasize the authenticity of the inner life.
Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth: son journal intime (1913; A.O. Barnabooth: His
Diary) depicts the slow discovery of the self after an initial liberation. An enormously successful
exercise in nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; Le Grand Meaulnes: The Land of Lost Content)
by Alain-Fournier (pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier) explored the new theme of
adolescence; in poetry, Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger) depicted the triumphant
recovery of childhood in Éloges (1911; Éloges, and Other Poems); and Rivière’s essays on
painting, the Russian ballet, and contemporary writers showed an excellent critical mind seeking
to hold together the aspirations and values of a society about to face one of its most serious
challenges.
Gide
The house of Gallimard published the four greatest writers of this period: André Gide,
Marcel Proust, Claudel, and Valéry, who in their different ways were to carry the tradition of
high French culture over the watershed of World War I. Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (1897;
Fruits of the Earth) and L’Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist) encouraged a generation of
French youth to question the values of family and tradition and to be guided by that part of
themselves, turned toward the future, that was ignored or repressed by a society with its own
gaze fixed on the past. These texts helped open the door to the political radicalism of postwar
generations, though Gide’s own immediate focus was much less on colonial oppression in Africa
than on the space the continent offered for his own sexual liberation. His Les Caves du Vatican
(1914; The Vatican Cellars) caught the fancy of intellectuals with an anarchist bent, partly
because of its celebration of the acte gratuit, undertaken not for gain or self-interest but as a
gesture of authentic self-expression, but also because of its outrageously funny satire on
humanity’s submission to authoritarian systems of belief.
His most influential book (both in form and in content) was Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926;
The Counterfeiters). It dealt with questions of self-knowledge, sincerity, and self-interest,
discussing (among other themes) the value of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was becoming,
thanks partly to Gide, familiar currency among the intelligentsia. The novel addressed
homosexuality, child sexuality, and the repressive role of the family, at the same time as it
challenged all the conventional devices of novel writing, portraying the problematic nature of the
relation between the fictional and the real. Children are the centre of the work, which examines
the extent to which any new life is already marked out for corruption by the past—the family and
the society—in which it begins.
Proust and Claudel
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past)
had no time for fresh beginnings. Evoking the vanishing world of fashionable Parisian society of
the Third Republic, the novel sequence explored the ways in which memory, imagination, and,
most of all, artistic form could be put to work together to counter the corrosive effects of time. If
time for Gide is future prospect, for Proust it is past and gone, the mediator of loss and death,
history slipping from the grasp of the class that made it. Only art offers the possibility of
retaining the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. The novel reenacts the operations of
imagination and memory, conscious and unconscious, as they join the stimulus of sense
impressions to metaphor and image and to the rhythms and associations of syntax.
The work of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel also evokes a dream of the past. Claudel
sought to revivify the symbols of traditionalist Catholicism. His poetry proper (Cinq grands odes
[1910; Five Great Odes]) is not without its influence, but the real importance of Claudel’s poetic
gift lies in the lyrical, epic qualities it infuses into his drama, which will be discussed below.
Valéry
The life and work of Paul Valéry, the philosopher-poet, extended from the fall of the
Second Empire to the end of World War II, and for European intellectuals he became, even more
than Anatole France, the archetypal exponent and proponent of the French mind. His poetry is an
exploration and celebration of the operations of consciousness, the skills of the trained poet, and
the drama of the creative intellect, overseeing the interplay of sensations, memory, imagination,
and, most of all, the ordering and analytic faculty of reason. The principles of a creative process
that is not only a work of abstraction but also a coproduction of body, landscape, and mind are
theorized in “La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” (1896; “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,”
appearing in English translation in Monsieur Teste) and in the dialogues of the early 1920s on
architecture and dance. They are turned into poetry in such admirable and well-known works as
“La Jeune Parque” (1917; “The Young Fate,” published in French-English edition as La Jeune
Parque) and Le Cimetière marin (1920; published in French-English edition as Le Cimetière
marin / The Graveyard by the Sea), which looks out for inspiration to the blue horizon of the
Mediterranean. The Graveyard by the Sea first appeared in book form in the important collection
Charmes (1922; “Charms”). Throughout his career, Valéry also wrote and worked tirelessly to
argue for a wider public the importance of the European inheritance, cradled in the
Mediterranean and flowering in the Enlightenment. Poetry, philosophy, and the politics of the
global market came together in his thinking to produce such essays as “La Crise de l’esprit”
(1919; “The Crisis of the Spirit”), bringing together ideas he promulgated not only in his writing
but also in active involvement in the cultural committees of the League of Nations.
